GOING out for a curry has become one of the most popular night-time activities for Scots and we are very lucky in this country to have many fabulous restaurants to choose from.

Whether or not the dishes on offer are authentically south Asian is neither here nor there as we wolf down millions of them every year.

The restaurant owners, most if not all from the sub-continent, don’t seem to mind that folk back home probably would run a mile if the dishes served here were replicated over there.

They make a tidy profit from selling versions of traditional curries to hungry punters in the UK and good luck to them.

It is one of the most basic principles of economics at play – namely supply and demand – and you don’t need to have read Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith to understand that.

However, a Californian-based food blogger has suggested that the term curry should be axed because of its relationship with British colonialism. Chaheti Bansal, 27, posted an Instagram video calling on people to “cancel the word curry”.

Due to the increased scrutiny over the UK’s imperial history, critics say the word curry is too often used to lump very distinct foods from different regions together because the British are lazy.

She added: “Curry shouldn’t be all that you think about when you think about south Asian food. There’s a saying that the food in India changes every 100km and yet we’re still using this umbrella term popularised by white people who couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual names of our dishes.”

What an absolute load of Balti that is. Having a feeling of unease over Britain’s colonial past is absolutely fine, but making things up to feed a grievance is quite another thing.

Many Asian restaurants in the UK, after all, call themselves curry houses on the basis that what they serve is, in fact, curry – and quite a few of them too.

They serve a variation of traditional Asian dishes to suit the British market. Only a fool would expect to find Chicken Tikka Masala on the menu in Mumbai, Karachi or Dhaka.

What they will find though are curry dishes – only different ones to those found over here.

To use a generic term like curry to describe spicy dishes from the sub-continent is neither racist nor a nod to colonisation – it is used because that is exactly what they are.

They are not served anywhere else than here and are made to suit the British palate Other country’s cuisines have been bastardised for centuries and curries are no different.

The Italians hate that we put mince in with pasta and even worse when we then name one of our most popular dishes after the city of Bologna – where they would never dream of eating spaghetti Bolognaise.

People really need to calm down and stop seeking historical grievances where there are none.