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Dear All,
Eid ul Azha Mubarak
On the auspicious day of Eid ul Azha, it is a personal blog, not professional. And I shall keep it short.
I recall my childhood days. Sacrifice was a simple but permanent feature in our home. My late father would buy a goat few days earlier. When I and my elder brother became a little older, he would take us to buy the goat. I remember it cost two digits for many years; less than a hundred rupees for the kind we now buy in 30,000 or more. On one Eid, the goat cost 90 rupees; 10 rupees being significant difference to negotiate.
It is not surprising because I remember buying mutton for 2.50 rupees a ‘saer’. This measure was about 0.9 kg of today. We learnt the non-metric system in school as it was the running system everywhere. When the system went metric, miles became kilometers, yards became meters, gallons became liters and saer became kg. It caused a lot of confusion in the beginning in the general public, particularly the illiterate ones. It is interesting that the metric system was forced onto countries like us while the USA and UK kept following the traditional system and do it till today. They did not disturb their own people but disturbed the rest of the world. Might does matter.
When kg came in vogue initially, the quantities looked visibly bigger than before. Then they started shrinking and a kg became small.
About mutton. At 2.50 rupees a saer, the butcher would first weigh, then clean, then weigh again and added the quantity lost during cleaning. We got what we paid for. Now we pay 400 times more and get 25-30% less for every kg on the pretext of cleaning.
The butchers became more and more powerful with every passing year. We live in the butchers’ era anyway.
We (have to) Pay Respect to Butchers.
