A
rchana Puran Singh is no stranger to me. When
I was working with PETA she was one of the
myriad of celebrities we had roped in to help
us throw light on animal cruelty. After all, it’s a proven
fact that when a celebrity speaks, the world listens.
I remember Archana had been kind enough to agree
to compere a fund-raising initiative by PETA India,
where the fabulously gifted Anoushka Shankar played
the sitar. The event went as planned except suddenly,
totally unplanned, Archana took it upon herself to help
us raise funds for raising awareness on animal cruelty.
She made all our volunteers go from person to person
with donation boxes and Archana kept making appeal
upon appeal for donations from the audience. Bottom
line.... We collected so much more than we had
counted upon. And all because of Archana.
When I was asked to write the cover story for this
issue of VegPlanet, I naturally thought of Archana
Puran Singh. This is a lady who makes the nation
laugh, is a judge on TV shows and acts in movies. But
what people don’t know is that Archana is vegetarian.
And she is a fiercely proud vegetarian, not a passive
quiet one! I caught up with Archana just before
she went to the US for a break. And thus ensued
a very enlightening conversation on her likes, her
vegetarianism and even her rescues!
Archana comes from a vegetarian family. As she says,
she has never eaten an animal. Her mother, father,
brothers, sister, even her extended family consisting
of numerous aunts and uncles are all vegetarians. One
or two of her ‘shikaari’ type uncles took to eating meat
but they were not looked upon too kindly by the family!
This vegetarian is a very ferocious
one! I’m well capable of defending my
beliefs! Nobody dare mock me!When she was growing up, she was always under
peer pressure to start to eat meat. This pressure was
particularly intense during her college days. Her friends
would try very hard to get Archana to start eating
meat but she stuck to her guns vehemently and never
succumbed. Archana reminisced that sometimes when
the friends would bother her too much, she would go
into graphic details of how the animals her friends
were eating had been killed and how the animal would
have also been tortured before being killed. Her friends
stopped asking her to eat meat! In fact, she very
proudly says one of her friends even turned vegetarian
because of the graphic details that Archana provided!Archana told me that nowadays nobody dares to mock
her for her vegetarian ways. In fact, it’s them who must
defend their unwise choices when she chooses to take
off on them! (And I can vouch for this as I have heard
Archana in action once when someone offered her a
non-vegetarian food item! I enjoyed listening to her and
then more so I enjoyed watching that person slink off!)As the years have passed, she has stopped haranguing
people that much for their food choices. It’s not
because she has lost her zeal and passion for getting
people to stop eating meat, but she has become
disheartened by the world where people who want to
continue eating meat refuse to get to know the source
of this meat. This applies to her own husband who is a
non-vegetarian. According to Archana he will eat any
kind of meat. Though she told me she has influenced
him to a degree, but sadly not enough to make him a
vegetarian. In a resigned tone, she told me that she
has accepted that some people are beyond change
however much they may realise the merit of another
way of life. Her husband refuses to see the cruelty
videos she keeps trying to show him because he is soft
hearted and would rather remain blind to the cruelty
rather than face it and be forced to give up meat. The
adage ignorance is bliss comes to mind, especially
when Archana told me that this attitude of sticking your
neck in the sand to avoid knowing about the cruelty in
the meat industry is so common amongst many people.
They don’t WANT to know how their meat comes on
the table. They don’t WANT to know how much cruelty
has gone into the food on their plate and how the taste
on their lips has been paid for very heavily by the poor
animal who is being served!!She said that many people give such asinine reasons
for eating meat. Such as, this world would be over
populated by animals if we stopped eating meat. So
in actuality we are doing the world a favour by eating
animals. Archana sighs. And says she can’t even waste
her breath arguing with such uninformed or ill-informed
self-righteous people. And then she ends her sentence
with 2 words... such morons.So, what about your sons I asked her with some
trepidation? Are they also meat eaters like their father
or are they vegetarians like their mom? Guess was her
answer! And then she told me that both her boys are