Vatsayana on the Dining Table

The other day, I found myself watching Pretty Woman once again. Like many others, I keep returning to that seemingly simple story. Every viewing leaves me with something new.

This time, however, it wasn’t Julia Roberts who caught my attention, but Richard Gere’s quiet humanity beneath the polished exterior of a cold corporate raider.

So, I rewound a particular dinner-table scene.

Most people remember it for the escargot flying across the room. But what fascinated me was something deeper: the complicated choreography of dining etiquette.

As a part-time grooming consultant, I’m often asked why people must learn to eat “like the Englishman.” Personally, I think the world could just as easily embrace chopsticks or return happily to eating hot parathas with fingers. Yet, formal etiquette continues to dominate professional spaces.

And as I travel across cities conducting workshops, I encounter endless shades of dining behaviour. Somewhere, there is always that faint suggestion that dinner is not meant to be enjoyed freely, but survived correctly.

Ironically, I’ve often found delicious food made intimidating simply because of the expected manner of eating it.

Yet I remain fascinated by the rituals surrounding this most basic human act: eating. Across civilizations, food has never been merely nourishment. It has always carried codes, discipline, and identity.

We Indians, of course, add our own flavour to this conversation. We constantly mock the way other communities eat, while fiercely defending our own habits.

For years, I unsuccessfully tried mastering the elegant South Indian art of rolling rice into neat morsels. My experiments ended so disastrously that my wife now watches me suspiciously whenever rice is served.

Eventually, I asked my mother-in-law, a proud South Kannadiga, about the logic behind the practice.

Her answer stayed with me. “This plate,” she said softly, “is a patra.” There was reverence in the word. “It gives you food. How can fingers that have entered your mouth return to the same patra?”

Suddenly, what seemed like mere dining style transformed into something deeper: respect, mindfulness, and culture quietly hidden within habit.

Perhaps that is the beauty of human behaviour. Even ordinary acts like eating can carry extraordinary philosophy.

Sometimes I wonder had Vatsayana observed dining tables with the same seriousness with which he observed human intimacy, perhaps humanity would have inherited yet another fascinating social science.

But then, perhaps every culture already writes its philosophy silently at the dining table.

Bon Appétit!

Author : Vishwas Vaishampayan