🥔 vs 🎃 A Grid of Culinary Sovereignty
A World Pumpkin Day Story
“Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater,
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her…”
Poor Peter. He put his wife in a pumpkin shell — not because he was cruel, but because it was probably the only storage solution available before Tupperware. In India, we would have called it sustainable housing. The kaddu, after all, has always been multipurpose — food, container, protection from evil eye, and seasonal décor before Pinterest made it fashionable.
This World Pumpkin Day, it feels only right to pay tribute to the vegetable that has seen empires rise, kitchens crumble, and diets change faster than WhatsApp forwards. The pumpkin has survived it all — forgotten in grocery aisles yet always resurrected during temple festivals, weddings, and monsoon nostalgia.
But no hero’s journey is complete without a villain, or in this case, a root crop with colonial baggage — the potato. The aloo arrived like all conquerors do: disguised as a friend, polite at first, and then slowly taking over every curry, every snack, every heart.
Once upon a time, Indian kitchens belonged to local loyalties. Gourds, yams, and pumpkins ruled like benevolent monarchs. They were slow, deliberate, sun-dried and storied. Then the aloo sneaked in via Portuguese traders, hitched a ride on British trains, and soon, every sabzi became a hostage situation. The kaddu watched helplessly as the aloo slipped into samosas, hijacked biryanis, and even found its way into fasting menus — a culinary coup wrapped in cumin.
Aunt Selvi still remembers the first time she saw rebellion brewing in her daughter Xena’s kitchen. Xena, the MBA-returned modernist, had just moved her old-school Iyer in-laws into her Chennai apartment. To maintain domestic peace, she decided to hire a cook. The job description was clear and slightly terrifying:
“No onion, no garlic, no potato.”
Enter Usha, a girl from Lucknow, bright-eyed and unfiltered. She heard the rules, raised an eyebrow, and shot back:
“Then aap khate kya ho — kaddu?”
The silence that followed could have curdled milk. Aunt Selvi swears even the idli batter stopped fermenting that day.
Thus began what historians might one day call The Great Curry Cold War. Mondays were for pumpkin — sacred, orange, and compliant. Tuesdays saw the quiet rebellion of aloo sneaking into the sambar under the guise of innovation. By Thursday, even the in-laws were divided into factions. The elders defended ritual purity, while Xena’s husband argued that “potato is technically a vegetable, not a sin.”
Somewhere between bhajans and dinner, the kitchen became a parliament — motions passed, amendments debated, sabzis vetoed. Usha, pragmatic as ever, played both sides. “Today kaddu, tomorrow aloo,” she said with the weary wisdom of someone who’d seen too many families fall over dietary doctrine.
The irony was delicious. The same potato banned from temple offerings became the star of fasting dishes. The same pumpkin worshipped in rituals was quietly mocked for being bland. The kaddu, once the matriarch of monsoon meals, was now an endangered species — occasionally spotted in sambars, otherwise exiled to baby food jars and health blogs.
And yet, the pumpkin endured. It waited in silence, the way grandmothers do when they know the children will come home eventually. It watched as avocados rose and fell, quinoa came and went, and air-fryers tried to redefine salvation. Through it all, the kaddu hung by the doorway — a bulbous guardian with ash on its skin and patience in its pulp.
The aloo, on the other hand, could never sit still. It wanted to be mashed, fried, curried, baked — loved by everyone, owned by no one. It was the restless global citizen of starch, fluent in every cuisine but loyal to none. Its triumph was its tragedy: the more it adapted, the less it belonged anywhere.
On World Pumpkin Day, Aunt Selvi decided to mark the occasion. She sent Xena a message on the family group:
“Make kaddu today. For prosperity.”
Xena replied with a photo: a glossy pumpkin curry beside a suspiciously golden aloo tikki.
“Multicultural prosperity, Amma.”
Aunt Selvi sighed. The kaddu might have lost the kitchen, but it still held the altar. The aloo might win the table, but it could never win the gods. Balance, it seems, was restored — not through conquest, but coexistence.
Some revolutions end in slogans. This one ended in sambhar.
So here’s to the pumpkin — the quiet custodian of the sacred kitchen, the slow simmer in a world addicted to instant gratification. The vegetable that doesn’t trend, doesn’t pose, and doesn’t colonize. It just waits, orange and wise, for us to remember that not every dish needs reinvention. Some just need reverence.
🧾 Footnote Grid: Aloo vs Kaddu — Nutrition and Emotion
| Aspect | Kaddu (Pumpkin) | Aloo (Potato) |
|---|---|---|
| Calories | Low | Moderate |
| Fiber | High | Moderate |
| Ritual Use | Satvik, sacred, used in temple kitchens | Often excluded from offerings |
| Emotional Texture | Soft, yielding, sweet | Comforting, grounding, but not transcendent |
| Archetype | The Ritual Matriarch | The Colonial Chameleon |
🟠 Written for World Pumpkin Day — October 26
🟢 Part of the Blogchatter Half Marathon
Postscript:
Every kitchen has its borders.
Every sabzi has its sovereignty.
And sometimes, resistance is just a potato in a pumpkin’s pot.
Parwatisingari's Weblog 
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