________________ French Vanilla ing, ironically, to consume me from within. A longtime family friend offers me ice cream at a New Year's party. "It doesn't have eggs," she promises me, stopping the question on the tip of my tongue. Normally, I'd check for myself, but I decide to trust her. She's known my family for ten years, and I don't want to offend her. My dad sees me eating ice cream and takes some himself, indulging the incorrigible sweet tooth that runs in our family. A few bites later, however, his instinctive suspicion returns, so he picks up the carton to reassure himself that the ice cream is fine to eat. In a society where it is already hard to talk openly about religion, it is even harder to speak about Jainism. Who are we to talk of non-absolutism in a world of alternative facts and fake news? Why lend any credence to our theory of karma when it is part of the same metaphysics that tells us our universe is geocentric? How can we extol the virtues of celibacy when our scriptures and stories routinely exalt men who married multiple wives, or vilify materialism in the face of the suffering of our country's poor? The world we live in is different from what it was like when our traditions were first written down, so much so that every inconsistency chips away at our beliefs and our will to adhere to them. What, then, are the roots of our religion worth? When he calls my name, I don't need to turn and see the carton in his hand or hear the rest of his sentence to realize what had happened. The more carefully you stick to your beliefs, the more sickening the pain of each transgression. My vegetarianism has always been a core part of my identity, forged in no small part from the paralyzing experiences of having to hungrily deny a guilty-eyed host or waitress every time I was offered food, the frustrating sensation of having to repeat to wide-eyed, incredulous classmates that I wouldn't die if I ate meat, but was vegetarian out of choice, the awkwardness of having to frame every conversation about food through a restrictive lens that people didn't want to understand. The vanilla ice cream, once cold and sweet, turns to napalm in my stomach--a hungry, angry flame that refuses to burn out, threaten The mostly silent car ride home gives my dad and I a chance to reflect. We're not the most emotional people, and for a moment I find it strangely silly about how upset a few bites of ice cream have made us. It strikes me that the depth of this reaction is perhaps a testament to the strength of our belief, that our religion at its core is not one about karma and penance, rules and regulations, or good and evil. It's about absolute awareness of the consequences and implications of our actions, and our unyielding determination to live our lives accordingly. Siddharth Challani (East Windsor, NJ) is the First Place winner of the 2018 YJA Convention's Essay Content.
