(Forewarned is forearmed)

Through narratives portraying people’s ways either through story-tellers or chroniclers, we learn that territories ruled by kings and their sundry counterparts (paalegars) in days gone-by used to be guarded zealously against marauders, hungry for acquiring wealth by resorting to forced occupation of land, looting, vandalising and, of course, causing loss of life and limbs of citizens. The fail-safe system of alerting people about the impending assault from outside was to post guards 24×7 at strategic spots with the responsibility of blowing the trumpet (kahale), keeping heightened vigil from dusk-to-dawn through night, with orders for the citizens and warriors to be on their toes and stall the entry of aliens into their territory. Thus was born the idiom Forewarned is Forearmed. Even as the global scenario of armed forces of various countries including India are engaged in hi-tech wars, and ironically enough various States of the country are warring with their eye on more land, the idiom serves every citizen on a different plane. We are talking of the relentless calls for vigil against many threats to life itself. To make it clear, we are talking of components of food as well as the hardware of the kitchen, many of these components being toxic and invisible.

In the wake of governments promulgating orders ostensibly to achieve a makeover in conventional practices of people at large, such as banning cow slaughter by the incumbent government, certain sections in the land’s population are up in arms by defiance of the law, resulting in vigilantism involving certain degrees of violence, as reported in the media. But, keeping vigil over toxic foods and kitchenware is a different kettle of fish.

The set of desires being chased by people of different generations should make an interesting subject of study. For the present generation that set opens out as a) Comfort of various push-button facilities at home, b) Mitigation of drudgery in the kitchen, c) Lapping up novel fashions in attiring, d) Acquiring newer models of you-name-it-they-must-have-it cars, mobile phones, electronic gadgets, packaged foods as well as any and every consumer durables, unfazed by their soaring price tags. One cannot exactly infer whether technology is driving the above mentioned set of desires or the other way about. In either case, the pace of technology advancing by the day and the mad rush of the gullible consumer to lay hands on everything figuring in daily life being offered by technology, the importance of keeping vigil on the lurking danger of the products-of-luxury-yesterday-and-necessity-today has been lost sight of by the present generation.

The foregoing rather longish preamble to the debate on issues of safety and threats to health of people bears relevance to a four-column headline for a report early this week in a widely read daily reading: “Watch out: Your delicate crockery could contain high amounts of lead.“  The discovery originates to the National Referral Centre for Lead Projects, Bengaluru. The idiom in the caption says it all.