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Brothers and sisters, such is the state of affairs. The following additional information about the varak industry comes from an extensive and well-researched article written by Mrs. Menaka Gandhi; now the cabinet minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet in India. “In India, by law, every food item has to have a green dot on it, if it is vegetarian, and a maroon dot, if it is non-vegetarian. If a manufacturer is found to be cheating by mislabeling his product, the sentence is many years in jail. So, why have the mithai (sweets) people not been arrested so far? Milk has been treated as vegetarian to appease the powerful dairy lobby, but the silver foil on each mithai cannot by any stretch of imagination be considered vegetarian”. Beauty without Cruelty, a Pune-based NGO that investigates product ingredients, has produced a remarkable booklet on the varak industry. Here is their report on how it is made. “The varakh-makers select animals at the slaughterhouse. Each animal is felt for the softness of its skin before it is killed. This means that a substantial number of goat, sheep, and cattle are killed specifically for the industry. Their skins are soaked in filthy, infested vats for few days to dehair them. Then, workers peel away the epidermal layer, which they call jhilli, just under the top layer of the skin in a single piece. These layers are soaked for 30 minutes in another decoction to soften them and left to dry on wooden boards. Once these are dry, the workers cut out square pieces 19 cm by 15 cm. These pieces are made into pouches called auzaar and stacked into booklets. Each booklet has a cover of thick lamb suede called khol. Thin strips of silver called alagaa are placed inside the pouches. Workers now hit the booklet with wooden mallets for three hours to beat the silver inside into the ultrathin varakh of a thickness less than one micron called “999.” This varakh is then sent to sweet shops.” Here are the statistics that you should know. An (one) animals skin can only make twenty to twenty-five pieces or pouches. 138
An Ahimsa Crisis: You Decide
