Life's Pleasures Quote by Morarji Desai

Desai’s sentence reads like an accountant’s moral philosophy: life is a ledger of harms, and the only ethical move is to pick the smaller debit. The clunky repetition of “choose” and “two evils” isn’t ornamental; it performs his core argument. Eating is not framed as pleasure, culture, or even nourishment, but as unavoidable compromise. By calling food itself an “evil,” Desai strips diet of sentiment and forces a cold question: if survival requires violence somewhere in the chain, where do you draw the line?

The intent is pragmatic persuasion, not lyrical idealism. Desai isn’t selling vegetarianism as purity; he’s selling it as damage control. That matters in an Indian political context where vegetarianism can signal religious identity, caste norms, and nationalist respectability. His phrasing sidesteps explicit scripture and instead borrows the language of governance: minimize harm, preserve life, choose the lesser option. It’s vegetarianism as policy.

The subtext is powerfully prescriptive. “Has got to be taken” turns a personal practice into a civic obligation, implying that a good society disciplines appetite the way it disciplines budgets or borders. There’s also a quiet attempt to universalize a culturally specific ethic: “by man” slides from an Indian moral debate into a claim about human necessity.

Desai, a leader known for austerity and moral rectitude, is doing what politicians often do best: turning a contested value into common sense. If the premise is accepted - that all eating is ethically compromised - the conclusion feels almost bureaucratically inevitable.