"So why are you a vegetarian?"

"So why are you a vegetarian? because of your religion?"
When I am traveling outside India this is a question I often get from friends and colleagues in cafeteria queues as we wait to get the lunch. I think over years I have an coined an answer for this which is exactly the reason why I choose to be a vegetarian.
My response these days is "To start with yes, but now I choose to be a vegetarian because I view it to be a  better choice to make".

Before I describe briefly why I think its a better choice let me mention a surprising fact I came to know about countries in Europe. Increasingly there are more and more veggies here, I just quickly checked over the internet and found around 9% of Swiss population is veggie[1]. Definitely that can't be only because of "just the religion" because there are hardly any hindus here. So there are definitely some benefits of being a veggie because of which more and more people are interested in following this way of life.

I was born and brought up in a a veggie family and when I look back today I feel really lucky for that. However my up-bringing also ensured that I don't anything just because "its ought to be that way" and be dogmatic but was always encouraged to be able to reason out what is right and what is wrong. This later helped me re-assert is this really the right choice? and the answer was an over-whelming yes, for reasons as below:

(a) Being vegetarian has enormous health benefits. To point out just one "large-scale studies have shown that 'Mortality from ischemic heart disease was 24% lower in vegetarians than in nonvegetarians'" [2]
(b) To extend the basic moral rights to live to all living creatures and to not be the reason of animal deaths each morning you get up.
(c) Staying away from non-veg food helps my mind stay calm and negative energies like high-BP and anger under control (I know this is purely a personal thing but I feel it this way and a lot of experiences of people I have talked to/read about have been similar).


Now some miss-conceptions, veg diet lacks in certain ingredients which prevents brain development, ok but Albert Einstein was a veggie. Veg diet prevents you from being able to make your body strong, ok but several sports-persons and wrestlers are veggies, just 2 names Martina Navratilova (Tennis player), Sushil Kumar (2008-Olympic medal winner in wrestling). How to survive in west just on veggie diets? OK but as the link below shows some of the European countries have around 10% population vegetarian(and definitely not due to religious reasons) and trust me they survive really well :-)

There can be excuses for everything but what excuse can there be to be the reason for someone's death every-time you feel hungry? No excuse ever worked here for me.

Few famous veggies, who have been significantly successful in their profession  :-

          

The list is endless[3] and these are just few people whom I like personally. Definitely not alone right?

Being veggie is a choice I make because of these reasons and not because I am dogmatic.

And thats why I am a vegetarian :-)

1. http://www.euroveg.eu/lang/en/info/howmany.php
2. http://eatright.org/ada/files/veg.pdf
3. http://www.ivu.org/people/