Ek kachori, do samosa, in mardon ka kya bharosa. Young women in Delhi were seen chanting it. With the second half I have no quarrel. Men have earned that line. My problem is the first half. Delhi girls should be the last people on earth to ignore crucial details in a delicious slogan? At best, it is a confession of cluelessness. Someone stood at a roadside stall, looked at two completely different lives being lived in oil, and prefixed random numbers in order. Because a Delhi girl will not legit say Ek Kachori, Do Samosa.
Here's how it must have happened. Samosa is there because it rhymes with bharosa. Kachori is there because somebody needed three syllables.
Kachori arrives hot, slightly passive-aggressive, and only calms down once aloo-tamatar ki sabzi comes down to negotiate. Chutney is the witness. You do not pair it with a samosa. That is an invitation to kalesh.
Samosa has its own ego thing going. It wants chhola. East of Banaras, it wants ghughni. If no chhola/ghughni, it will live with the chutney (imli meethi, or mirchi wali hari or both), because it longs for company. What it does not want is a kachori. Two swords do not share one sheath. For kachori and samosa, it's beneath. Their dignity, I mean.
Whoever coined this had only heard other people place orders. One. Two. Something fried. Something else fried. Done. That is how you end up with a plate that looks like an all-party meeting before a parliament session. Everyone present, Rijiju ji in charge, Naddaji smiling, and they all come out agreeing on absolutely nothing. Samosa and Kachori have never been agreeable in their history.
Try it on the vendor outside your society. He will pause to swallow the choicest words that almost left his lips. Then he will do the maths of regret. In his head, the kachori is already committed to sabzi. The samosa has been dating chhola for years. And here you are, asking him to arrange an inter-snacks marriage.
The vendor bhaiya will remember the soiled 10-rupee note that warned us all: Sonam Gupta bewafa hai. Bewafai he knows too well. Anybody sneaking out with anybody these days, muttering this he will make the plate. He has made worse. But he will curse under his breath, because where he comes from in UP, you do not marry outside the gravy.
You eat it. First bite kachori, second bite samosa, third bite kachori again because you no longer know whose side you are on. The chutney is confused. It was prepared for one relationship and got assigned to a situationship. Big kalesh.
Both kachori and samosa have fillings. But not for each other. You the eater end up full and still unsatisfied, which is personally offensive. The acid rises up your food pipe to make you revisit the decision.
"Variety bhi koi cheez hai" is no defence. Variety is finishing the kachori properly and then starting a samosa like an adult who can sequence events. The kuleen respect the order of the cuisine. That is what makes them kuleen-ary delight.
One can add, "aur thoda dahi dono pe." Dono pe. Dahi is a mediator, not Rajeev Shukla. It cannot be deployed everywhere just because you refused to choose a side.
So yes, in mardon ka kya bharosa. Say it loudly. But a movement about trust cannot open with a plate on which nobody trusts anybody. Samosa is from Mars, Kachori is also from Mars. Venus is AWOL. Fix the order first. Ek kachori, sabzi ke saath. Do samosa, chhole ke saath. Separate plates. Then we can talk about the men. But in mardon ka kya bharosa?