Som's Blog

During my recent to trip to India, I happen to visit one of the Ashtavinayaka (Eight Ganesha) temple at Ranjangaon near Pune(India). On the way to the temple, we stopped by an agrofarm which was making fresh jaggery from sugarcane procured from their own farm. I am always thrilled at the idea of eating fresh, non-adulterated produce directly from the farm. Other than that, I also like the idea of directly passing the benefit to the farmers by cutting the middle-man. So, I went ahead and bought some, to be precise, 2 jaggery blocks. I remember paying around Rs. 300 (approx 4 USD) in total.

I was about to return back to Amsterdam the following week. The day I was going to land in Amsterdam was the day when all of the India would have been celebrating Ganesh festival. As a child brought up in state of Maharashtra, this religious festival is very close to my heart. And I know for sure, Lord Ganesha will do anything for you if you offer him Modak. Modak is a dumpling made from rice flour dough and sweet coconut jaggery.

The timing was just right. I could use the unadulterated jaggery to make Lord Ganesh his favourite sweet. Hence, I decided to carry this with me to Netherlands. These blocks aren’t heavy and also they don’t take much space. Thats what I thought. But, as it always happens, while packing you realise that you have accumulated so many things in your short trip to India that they hardly fit in your checkin bag. A simple task of just putting all your stuff into the checkin bag will transform into a complicated task of skilfully fitting everything without violating the airlines’ baggage weight limit. After spending an hour figuring out what goes where and packing my checkin baggage to the brim, I wasn’t able to find a place for my jaggery blocks. Hence, I decided to carry that in my hand luggage and inside the cabin. My hand luggage was also over limit, but I have an option to remove these jaggery blocks if the agent at the airline checkin counter complained. As luck would have it, the lady at the counter, didn’t ask me anything about my hand luggage and thats how these jaggery blocks accompanied me from Bangalore to Amsterdam with a layover in Frankfurt.

When you get down at Frankfurt airport, one has to do an immigration if you are continuing your journey to other Schengen country. So after my immigration, I headed towards the terminal from where I had my connecting flight to Amsterdam. And of course, you will now go through another security check. I put my handbag to x-ray screening machine and went through the another screen machine myself and stood on the other side waiting for my bag to come straight to me. And to my surprise, my bag, after coming out of the screening machine, took a detour and went straight to security officer who standing and opening everyone’s bag which took that detour. I patiently waited for my turn to come and didn’t expect any trouble as I am not Khan and I am wasn’t carrying any illegal or dangerous stuff.

After some patient waiting, the officer picked up my bag, looked into the screen in front of him and asked me – “Is there any radioactive item in the bag?” What?? I was shocked by his question. I kept a straight face and said “No”. It has to be no. I was sure I didn’t pack anything that would remotely be radioactive. But what if someone has dropped something in my bag as they do in Bollywood movies. This thought definitely crossed my mind. I waited patiently. The officer opened by bag and started looking into it. Then he took the jaggery blocks and asked me what they were. I felt like laughing at his face. But again, keeping my composure, I said “That’s jaggery, something that you eat”. The other travellers who were waiting for their bag to be checked started smiling. He looked at me as if I was telling him some joke. He wasn’t amused. He called his colleague (another officer) and the colleague took the jaggery block and using a small paper (looked like litmus paper), scratched the surface and placed that paper in some special machine that, I assume, was supposed to check if the material was radioactive or not. And then came another shocker – the test was positive. That means this jaggery was radioactive, may be low intensity or low value, but it was. The officers didn’t know what to do. One of them asked me, if it will explode. By then, I wasn’t able to control and I laughed out loud. I told them to “eat and see if it explodes”. My fellow travellers, who were waiting for their bags to be checked, also started laughing. By now, the officer also gave up and loosened a bit and started smiling. He asked me to wait and made a phone call. In couple of minutes, 2 huge German policemen with their bulging attire and rifle guns arrived at the scene. Now, I got a bit scared and I was ready to put my hands to the back of my head and kneel down. One of the police officer looked at the jaggery, smelled it and asked the other officer is there is anything else suspicious. The other officer replied in negative. I composed myself and I offered them to seize that and I said I don’t need it if they consider it as unsafe. The police with rifle gun asked me how much does it cost. I didn’t know how to answer, my left-brain had stopped working and I wasn’t able to do a simple Rupee to Euro conversion. I blurted out “5 euros”. He looked at me surprised and with a look “For 5 euros you took this much risk?” and just smiled. He then put the jaggery block back into my bag and handed the bag to me and said “Thank you for your patience, have a good flight !”

To this date, I am not sure why a benign jaggery turned out to be radioactive, however low the percentage or intensity it might have been. I asked chatgpt about it and it said that jaggery itself does not naturally contain radioactive substances. However, like any agricultural product, it can sometimes contain trace amounts of radioactive isotopes that are harmless to humans!

That was satisfactory enough and confidence inducing for me to use this jaggery to make and offer Bappa his favourite modak!