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Rice in my school dabba

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Growing up in Chennai, I was always a little ashamed to have rice in my school dabba. Some of my classmates at the posh school I went to turned up their noses at the humble sambar -rice and rasam -rice my mother packed for me. I would go back home and tell my mother this and she would tell me that I shouldn’t care about what others thought of what I ate. But peer pressure is a strong force, stronger than a mother’s advice when you’re six. I like to think I didn’t complain too much, but perhaps my mother picked up on my insecurities. To make me happy, she made me food other than rice. My mother, working as a teacher in a school, found the time to make rotis in the morning when she could’ve simply made rice. The rotis and sabji were packed in a steel dabba that had two tiers. That was another thing that made me different from all the kids who got food in shiny plastic dabbas, symbols of liberalization and modernity that my parents disavowed because they believe