Bitter Boon

A majestic cacao tree towers in the garden outside our bedroom. It arrived as a sapling from Kerala, God's Own Country, many years ago. The tree, too, has been named after the gods in Latin ( Theobroma), because of the divine drink, chocolate, produced from its seeds.

Production of chocolate is, of course, beyond our fondest cottage dreams: it seems to require almost industrial sort of processing. Nevertheless, your columnist has sampled the meagre pulp of the cacao pods and crunched and eaten its seeds from time to time.

Now that scientists are postulating a possible connection between the amount of chocolate consumed by a country and the number of its Nobel laureates, one wonders what effect, if any, this chewing of Theobroma seeds may have had on one's grey cells!

Jokes apart, anthropologists say the Mayans and Aztecs believed that cacao beans had magical, even divine, properties that made them suitable for use in the most sacred rituals of birth, marriage and death.

Their Spanish Conquistadors were not as savvy: one denounced chocolate as a "bitter drink for pigs". Without sugar-coating, it might never have got past western prejudices.

Some spiritual masters used the same strategy for lay audiences in India: the vast corpus of Katha, or story literature, which is written with a conspicuous religious bent in Prakrit, even by Jain saints,is full of erotic elements.

The author of the Vasudevahindi likens this approach to sugar-coating of medicine - bitter chocolate indeed; but cloaked in sugar and milk!