We’re Cool Potatoes

Potatoes by themselves are mostly a bland vegetable.

I love potatoes for the different forms they appear in, such as when they are shaped as crisp salty fries or when my mother a little too generously stuffs the parathas she makes with these high-carb babies.

A pretty cool fact that comes to mind, related to potatoes (from somewhere on X I read recently), is that Dosa itself is guessed to have been invented around the 5th century, but potatoes came to India only somewhere in the 17th century, creating about a 1200 year gap between the invention of Dosa and Masala Dosa.
That’s a lot of generations that missed on life-changing food.

I find potatoes very cool because of how easily they absorb their surroundings. They act as the holder for a lot of taste when mixed with spices. They can be cut up into so many different shapes (as we know today). They serve extremely useful when there’s a need to absorb excess salt from dishes where we sprinked a bit too much.

I’d like to think humans are comparable to potatoes.

We’re all born in so many different parts of this world, each of us slightly differently shaped and coloured. We start with a mind that in itself is also pretty bland. With time we start understanding our surroundings and start learning things. We intentionally pick up the good from the ideas we like and the people we want to become, and unfortunately pick up the bad from probably a lack of knowing better.

Along this journey, we find other humans, rich with seasoning from even more humans they’d met along their individual journeys and these humans rub off on us. It rubs off in the conversations we have, in the hobbies we arrive at, in the learnings we stumble upon, in the actions we show, in the love we give and receive, and in so many more ways.
It’s likely we also rub off on these humans a little bit in the same ways.

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to be introduce to so many people, each of us so different and interesting in our journeys. Different stories, different professions, different books and learnings, and different outlooks on this world. The last few times after I’ve hung out with these people, I’ve noticed myself being in awe at how interesting each one of us is, and how much there is to learn just by being around people.

I’m so excited to see where these same humans end up in a few years as we walk our own paths, and what else there will be to learn from them.

There are so many more potatoes to find and understand.