An Indian Needs his Fire.

If you are an Indian, you need your food to be hot. Hot not in the sense of being 100F or 120F, but in the sense of being spicy. We need it as hot as it can be. If you are new to US of A the closest fast food that would satisfy an Indian’s appetite for spicy food is Taco Bell. I have no doubt when I say, that the best way to curtail Indian Immigration is shut down all Taco Bells in USA.

An Indian can survive any inclement weather, any harsh working conditions as long as can get his spicy food. You take it away, his world crumbles. The other thing that Indians are fond of is Traveling. Have you seen any tourist destination? It is filled with Indians. No matter how remote the destination, you will always find Indians sightseeing the place, and there will always be an Indian restaurant there.

Indians crave spicy food and always are on the look out for Indian restaurant wherever they go. They must have Indian food. Have you been to an Indian Temple or any function, there is always a huge line at the food and crazy confusion to be the first one to get the food. They don’t want to miss out on the food. They have come this long and will not go without the food. They would rather miss the event they came for, but not the spicy Indian food at the event.

Having said that, Taco Bell is our savior. Since Indian restaurant’s are not everywhere and they are highly expensive, we go to Taco Bell as our cheap fast food option. But what makes a Taco Bell so attractive to Indians. First the food is spicy and has rice on their menu. We hate the concept of salads and meat loaf stuffed between a bun(burger). Salad is what we call gaddi in telugu(grass) or gaas poos in Hindi(grass with rhyming word appended to it to make it a good phrase). Meaning they are meant to be eaten by animals and not by humans. Burger are sometimes okay as long as they are spicy burgers. They are also highly dry. Burger King, McDonald's and Wendy's have all played with Spicy Burgers on their menu and discontinued them.

If you had looked at these fast food chains Ethnic statistics(if there was any), there would have been a huge spike in Indian customers at these places when these spicy burgers were on their burger menu and a even higher phenomenal drop when they were dropped from their menu. While I was in school at Morgantown, my friends and myself would visit Burger King quite often as long as they had Jalapeno Poppers. We would get Baja Chalupa and Spicy Burrito from Taco Bell and go to Burger King right across the street for the poppers and have our food there for about an hour. We were students, we were in no hurry to finish the food fast. We went to fast food not because we were short on time, but because we were short on dime (meaning cash).

I will get back to my story of why we like Taco Bell. The food being offered is spicy and has rice on half of their menu. But that is not good enough. It is only quarter of the whole pie. The remaining part of the pie is in the magical quotient that God has sent us to all Indians in North America called ‘Taco Bell Fire Sauce’. This Taco Bell Fire Sauce is next to Ambrosia. Taco Bell Fire Sauce is to humans as Ambrosia was for Angels. We do not need a mild sauce or a hot sauce. We need only the Fire Sauce and lots of it.

I also have designated numbers for each item on the Menu just like there are octane grades in Gasoline. Like a Chalupa is 4, Chicken Wrap supreme is 6, soft taco 3 etc. These numbers vary very slightly among Indians. The numbering is based on a highly complex algorithm. The number is defined as the number of Taco Bell Fire Sauce we need for these items on the menu. The other factor determining the number is the hotness factor of the food. If the food is hot it’s number is less and vice versa which is quite obvious. Also the dryness quotient is an important factor. A chalupa and a crunch wrap requires more. But a burrito would need less.

But every story has a villain. Authority, as in every place, has it’s way of poking it’s ugly hand in the people’s business. They like to dictate what we like and what we do not like. In this case the authority is the delivery person at a Taco Bell drive through. Whenever an Indian goes through a Taco Bell drive through, he does not fail to let the person know how many fire sauce he needs. Well he can only request, but he will not get what he asked. Like a pay check is deducted almost 30% of your hard earned income, the taco bell authority will cut the number of taco bell fire sauce you requested. The number you get depends on how cranky the authority is that day, or what he believes is required by you, or what he believes your tolerance quotient is based on his own intuition which will be biased, based on his own tolerance for this precious commodity. If the authority is Indian, the number might be close to what you asked. If the number is white or black or yellow then the number is definitely going to be low. You might only get 50% what you asked for. If the authority is brown(Hispanic or South American) then your number might be close to 80%.

But an Indian does not deter from fighting the authority back on his right to get the required number of fire sauce. The Indian will count the number given to him at the delivery window. If the number is less, he will ask for more though he is well aware of the impending condescending, frustrated expression on the authority’s face. He will count his number one more time. The number is still going to be less. Some will get satisfied with this. But there are some mavericks like me, who would park the car in the parking lot, go in and get some more until he is satisfied that the fire sauce would be sufficient. Some more hot headed guys would start a fight. This fight between the Indian and Authority, that I have noticed and participated since 9 years, still goes on. As a continuation of this fight for fire sauce I started a slogan which one day, I hope will spread like Fire. The slogan is

“An Indian needs his Fire”

An Indian needs his fire sauce. There is no second option. It is his birth right.