The Perfect Blend of Tradition and Modernity

May 30, 2015

 

My father, whom I respect, love, and admire, is admittedly not infallible. And one of the major mistakes he made where my own life is concerned was in 2013, when in a mood that was mixed parts of ‘Nothing else is working’, ‘Customised service is better than faceless matrimonial websites’, and ‘The upside could be great and how bad could the downside be?’, he enrolled me in the lists of Sycorian Matrimonials (back then, it had not yet become Sycoriaan).

As it turns out, there was one upside and four downsides. The upside was that the whole association with Sycorian left me with stories upon which I will be able to dine out for years and years. The downsides were:

  1. The hefty enrolment fee they charged. As Amba said, for that amount of money they ought to be manufacturing brides and grooms, Pygmalion style, to customer specifications.
  2. The customised service being far, far worse than faceless matrimonial websites because the Sycorian relationship managers refused to reply coherently to email, kept begging for phone calls or face to face meetings (in which nothing ever happened), and in general did nothing beyond sending profiles of prospective brides, which matrimonial website algorithms do anyway, at far less cost.
  3. The psychological pain which my father suffered when he was repeatedly spurned by prospective brides’ parents, either because they were yuppies and shuddered at the thought of their daughter marrying into a crass Punjabi business family, or because they were lalas and shuddered at the thought of their daughter marrying into a business family so manifestly unsuccessful that the father in law drove a Toyota Corolla and the groom himself rode a bicycle to work.
  4. The time I wasted and psychological despair I suffered while reading the profiles of said prospective brides.

This despair was largely because most (though to be fair, not all) bridal profiles were very much like each other, especially in the following respects:

  • Education at a British university
  • Worked in a family business or didn’t have a job
  • Claimed to be from a cultured family (though neither any profile nor a Sycorian relationship manager could ever give a satisfactory explanation of what a cultured family is, and if it involves petri dishes)
  • Claimed to be the perfect blend of tradition and modernity

What impressed me over give months of reading Sycorian profiles is that whenever it came up, everyone claimed to be only a perfect blend of tradition and modernity. There were no imperfect blends, near-perfect blends, ninety-fifth percentile blends, off-spec blends, or cheap-but-serviceable blends. The only parallel is to olive oil, where if you go to a supermarket you can find extra virgin olive oil, olive oil, and even that gross pomace olive oil, but never virgin olive oil without the extra virginity.

Just as with cultured families, no explanation was ever forthcoming on what exactly a perfect blend of tradition and modernity is, and what it implies for one’s daily life. Nor was it ever explained why being a perfect blend was a desirable trait in a bride, when in whiskey blends are looked down upon and single malts are preferred.

RoKo and I once speculated that the modernity consisted of meeting in a five star hotel coffee shop, and the tradition consisted of getting the prospective groom to pick up the bill, but that was just us being bitchy, and anyway, as the months went by, I ended up meeting ladies from Sycorian even in mall coffee shops. So I eventually decided that “perfect blend of tradition and modernity” was just something that people used to fill in matrimonial profiles when they could think of nothing else to write, the way we, as Class XI students who had to come up with farewell dedications for graduating Class XII seniors whom  we had no clue about, used to write “Amit Kumar’s smiling face and cheerful personality will never be forgotten!”

So after completely giving up on Sycorian around the beginning 2014, I paid the expression no more attention until the very end of 2014.

In the end of 2014, I was vacationing in Bavaria, and went to Neuschwanstein castle.

It is important to note that Neuschwanstein, which inspired the shape of Walt Disney’s Cinderella Castle has no military value. It looks like a fairy tale castle because the mad king Ludwig II wanted to build a castle that looked like it was out of a fairy tale and which would be the perfect backdrop in which to perform Wagner operas. In fact, in pursuit of this goal, he actually wanted to build three more fairytale castles, all without military value, just so he would have the perfect simulacrum of an imagined age of chivalry and knights.

However, as the guide at Neuschwanstein pointed out, it wasn’t just opera backdrops and medieval high fantasy and impractical castles. Neuschwanstein also had a toilet that automatically flushed whenever you stepped off it, and one of the first telephone lines in Bavaria. All the modcons that the late nineteenth century had to offer, really.

A couple of days after going to Neuschwanstein, I was in Nuremberg, where I visited the transportation museum, which exhibits the personal train coaches of Chancellor Bismarck and King Ludwig II next to each other. Bismarck’s coach is straightforward, free of frippery, and has a stenographer’s desk and telegraph machine. Ludwig’s coach is a bright blue with gilt all over the place. Talk about contrasts.

 

Anyway, by 1886, the rest of the government of Bavaria was fed up with Ludwig spending the entire treasury on his impractical romantic castles, so they had him declared mentally unsound and unfit to be king, and replaced him with a prince-Regent. He mysteriously died by drowning shortly thereafter. Even more mysteriously, the psychologist who signed off on the medical report declaring him insane died the very next day.

It was after learning all of this that I had a flash of insight: with his obsession for creating the perfect medieval castles, but also making sure that said castles had flushing toilets, telephone connections and electricity, and were linked by a train that had a gorgeously medieval livery; it is actually Ludwig II of Bavaria who was the perfect blend of tradition and modernity. If you aspire to be the perfect blend, nothing but bankrupting a nation, being declared insane, being deposed from the execution of all your responsibilities, and then dying under mysterious circumstances will do. Anybody claiming to be a perfect blend without going through all this is either ignorant or a liar.

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Different Boons

May 24, 2015

Last November, I started reading the K M Ganguli translation of the Mahabharata (the only English translation of the complete, unabridged Mahabharata before Bibek Debroy completed his translation).  Seven months on, I’ve only managed to finish the Bhishma Parva. On the one hand this means that I’ve finished everything leading up to the war and ten days of the war itself. On the other hand there are twelve out of eighteen parvas to go. In all this while, I’ve read nothing else; and this month I finally decided to take a break from the Mahabharata just so that I could read Seveneves, The House That BJ Built, and Royal Wedding.

And since I’m taking this pause, I might as well use it to write about something I noticed in the first six parvas – that is, that the boons various characters receive from various gods and goddesses play out very differently.

  • Boons granted by Shiva or Brahma: Usually, these boons are won by demons through severe austerity or devotion, after which Brahma or Shiva rewards the petitioner with an excellent boon. After that, the recipient of the boon uses it to terrorise the natural order, and finally Vishnu (on in one case, Durga) has to step in and exploit a loophole in the boon to restore status quo. Examples: Ravana, Mahishasura, Bakasura, and so forth. The only exception I’ve seen to this pattern so far is Shiva’s boon to Amba that she will be transformed into Shikhandin in her next birth in order to slay Bhishma – with this boon, there is no interference by Vishnu.
  • Boons granted by Indra or Agni: Indra or Agni ask Arjuna to go to war with somebody. In Indra’s case, this is the Nivatakavacha asuras. In Agni’s case, Agni asks Arjuna to battle Indra himself, so that he can burn the Khandava forest without worrying about Indra’s rain putting out his fires. Once Arjuna has successfully won his battles, these gods grant him weapons.
  • Boons granted by Surya or Savitri: Somebody will ask for a boon. Savitri will say “No, I will not grant you what you are asking for. But instead I will give you this. Accept it graciously.” What Savitri promises eventually takes place. And then, through a series of coincidences, that will lead to what was originally asked for.
  • Boons granted by Shakti (Mahadevi or Durga): These are straightforward. You ask for something. You get it. But perhaps you bring about the dawn of Kalyug in the process.

I wonder which of these story structures arose out of poetry, which out of allegory and metaphor, and which out of plain old sectarian “My god is better than yours”.

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Real Estate and Travel Fetishes

May 16, 2015

A long time ago, somebody on Twitter shared an article (possibly on medium) about how, instead of looking forward to your next vacation and a life full of travel, you should make your career and life so fulfilling that you never wonder where your next vacation is going to be. Unfortunately, I forgot to bookmark it, and can no longer find the link, but I am certainly one of those people whom the article was chiding. Sadly, despite all my cool product development projects at work, I still get more excited by the prospect of travel.

In my defence, it is easier to share the excitement of travel with friends, family, and loved ones, than it is to share the excitement of developing a flame-retardant conveyor belt.

But, looking at my Facebook news feed, I certainly get the feeling that the scolding in that missing article had a point. There are so many people who seem to give off the impression that all that their life is missing is a vacation to somewhere cool and undiscovered.

That’s Facebook. And then there’s advertising on FM radio in Delhi.

Delhi radio is chock full of advertisements about buying apartments (and also commercial real estate sometimes). And the vast majority of these advertisements feature emotionally maudlin husbands or wives or children crying (or as Jagadguru used to say, crying up and down) about how miserable their lives are, and how the new real estate development can magically solve all this misery.

I find the radio advertisements far more awful than my Facebook feed, though that could be because of two sorts of bias:

  1. Cringing at what my friends say on Facebook would be awkward because they are my friends
  2. I share the hankering after travel but don’t see the point of buying real estate, to the extent that I roll my eyes at people who do (especially in India). This is probably the result of reading all those internet pop science articles about how experiences make us happier than things. (For an enjoyable pop science book that takes it a step further, I recommend Geoffrey Miller’s Spent, of which I really ought to write more in another post.)

But even with this bias and the previous excuse, I have to admit that both the hankering after travel and the hankering to own real estate are a sort of cargo cult which imbue either vacations or houses with magical powers. To wit:

  • All my problems will be solved if only I have a 3 BHK in which everyone in my family has a room to themselves and covered parking!

or

  • I will achieve remarkable insights and self-knowledge if only I travel to all the spots on this list of 25 places to see before I die!

Although I know many remarkable people who are free from either of these fetishes, the people I know personally who do suffer from this all seem to fall in Category 2 rather than Category 1, with minor exceptions like my bua (who does not so much believe that all her problems will be solved by buying real estate, as that everyone’s problems will be solved by buying real estate, and indeed that the source of marital discord is in living in rented accomodation). I know very few people who overlap, which leads me to suspect that these are mutually exclusive (perhaps because of that experiences versus things dichotomy).

This acquired relevance a while ago, when Gradwolf and I were discussing this article about online dating for rich people, and he was wondering what the entry qualifications were for such a thing. It was then, that I had a flash of insight and realised that to join these gated singles’ networks, the deciding factor was not how much you earn, but how much you spend and on what.

That is, if you are the sort of rich person who gets excited about buying a 3 BHK flat in Greater NOIDA (West), Floh and A World Alike will probably regretfully decline to let you in. But if you are the sort of rich person who travels to vineyards in Tuscany (or at least Nashik) and posts pictures of it on Facebook, they will probably welcome you with arms wide open.

This is potentially the source of the next class civil war between the different types of rich people.

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A Modest Proposal for Persian Gharwapsi

March 28, 2015

There is a question that has been bothering me for a long while: how are we (as a species, but particularly as Indians) going to cope with the looming extinction of the Zoroastrian Parsi race? In the past week, two things have brought this question from merely background, low grade worrying to a major preoccupation: Navroz, and Justice Rohinton Nariman’s judgement on Section 66A. Within four days, we saw how much we have to lose if India no longer has Parsis: not just dhansak, but also a robust defence of the freedom of speech. The stakes are high enough that I am putting down my thoughts on the problem, and also advancing a possible solution with the hope that it may find support among the concerned stakeholders – though, as I hope to demonstrate in the following paragraphs, all of us are concerned stakeholders.

As I grow older, I find myself agreeing with Aakar Patel more and more. Most recently, I agreed with him on the ridiculousness of Indian formal wear. But this was something that really started back in April 2012, when I visited the Godrej office in South Bombay, for a panel discussion with Supriya Nair, Sidharth Bhatia, and Sathya Saran about Indian cinema. This was a talk conducted by the Godrej India Culture Lab, which was something started by Godrej to regularly showcase artists and writers and filmmakers both to Godrej employees and to the public at large. That in itself is quite a remarkable way for an Indian corporation to spend its money. However, what was even more remarkable was the venue itself: the terrace garden of the Godrej office.

This terrace garden was not the usual terrace garden which is a bunch of potted plants placed around the corners of a concrete terrace. Someone had filled the terrace in with soil, created a lawn, and then put paths across the turf. Which is impressive in itself, but again, not unique. A bunch of people have done that. What made it truly remarkable was that this terrace garden had trees. Full grown ones, big enough that you could sit in their shade on a hot Bombay afternoon (and really, eleven months of the year, is there any other kind?). These were trees which had to have been planted at least ten years prior, perhaps even earlier. They could not have been so large, full grown, and shady otherwise.

Think through the implications of that. Whoever was in charge of managing the Godrej head office in South Bombay would have been fairly senior. Let’s say, late thirties at the youngest. In twenty or twenty five years, they would have been retired and out of the office. When they planted these trees (or had them planted), it would have been with the awareness that it would take them at least five years to enjoy their shade; and that they would perhaps never get to enjoy the shade. Certainly, they would never get to see the trees they planted be as full grown as possible. And without any immediate or major benefit to themselves, they went ahead and did it anyway. Ten years on, shameless dilettantes such as myself were the ones to reap the effort of their vision.

It was this, that for the first time, made me realise that Aakar Patel’s wild generalisations are not merely trolling Indian smugness (which is worth trolling even if the means being used are idiotic), but actually arise out of a kernel of truth. So here was a stark validation of his claim that Parsis are the only people in India to make an effort to do good for other people.

Aakar Patel’s characterisation of non-Parsi Indians as merely cultured (if even that) and not civilised is, of course, reckless exaggeration. But the rest of India truly has a way to go before it can catch up with the Parsis. In this I am optimistic, and think that we will get there someday – and that day will come faster as long as we have Parsis to be role models. In fact, another Parsi had once drawn the analogy on his now defunct blog about how all change is like making dahi – first you put in a starter (the role model), then you churn through furious effort, and finally you end up with something delicious. To my annoyance, this analogy conflicts massively with Aakar Patel’s article: he thinks the Parsis have a civilisation and not a culture, but dahi starter is a culture and not a civilisation. And it also conflicts with the origin story of Parsis in India, in which they claim to be sugar being added to milk, and not curd added to milk. Even so, my original point of Parsis being vital role models to the rest of us, who can improve Indian society as a whole, stands.

There is, alas, one problem with this: by the time other Indians get around to behaving like Parsis, the Parsis may themselves be extinct. The Parsi population is plummeting. What can be done?

Well, the government of India is on it, and has started a campaign of moral suasion to get Parsis to make more babies. Like so many other efforts of the Government of India, it has been widely criticised for being really stupid and really insensitive. But even if the campaign had been sensitive and well done, there is no guarantee that it would have worked in the long run. Surrounded by a hegemonic Bollywood culture, any new Parsis might have grown up doing disco dance instead of listening to Haydn. Some of them might even end up adopting (shudder) Bengali culture and propagating the virtues of rosogollas. Then, there would be many Parsis, but no Parsi civilization. And while the more Parsis the better, retaining the Parsi civilization is equally important.

The simplest way to spread the Parsi civilization would be for the Parsis to start converting all the non Parsis around them to Zoroastrianism. By itself, this wouldn’t be good enough – after all, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians have been carrying out conversions but the cultural baggage of the caste system persisted – but at least it would speed things up. Alas, Indian Zoroastrianism doesn’t do conversion, possibly because of the origin story I mentioned earlier, so even that is ruled out. Is there no way out?

Actually, there is! And it relies on a loophole. When the Parsis came to India, they were asked not to carry out conversions of the local population. But nobody said anything about not converting other Persians, of whom there is luckily an abundance.

My solution to the whole vexed problem (which, as we shall see, also ends up solving other problems) is for India to throw open the borders and offer Indian citizenship and residency to any Iranian who is willing to start speaking English and/ or Gujarati, adopt Zoroastrianism, and act by the Parsi virtues.

The advantages of this are massive. First, as Sumeet Kulkarni points out, people who become Parsis by choice will probably be much more motivated in their propagation of Parsi civilization than those who just happen to be born Parsi.

Second, it avoids the whole conversion mess. Since the people being converted to Zoroastrianism are people whose ancestors used to be Zoroastrians themselves, it’s actually much more like a gharwapsi. In fact, from my (admittedly very limited) observations from my visit to Iran in 2012, Iranians are extremely proud of their pre-Islamic heritage, to the extent that you could make a case that converting to Islam for them was like doing an operating system upgrade on an existing phone, not throwing out an iPhone and getting an Android as it is made out to be in India. Extending this analogy, going back to Zoroastrianism is like installing a previous OS version because you find it’s better for battery life. Or to use the gharwapsi analogy itself, it’s not even coming back home, but moving from the first floor to the ground floor of the same house so that you can help your cousins out with taking care of their kids or aged relatives.

Thirdly, it benefits the Iranians themselves, who are currently suffering under the sanctions regime. They get a chance to move from a wrecked economy to a… well, also tottering economy, but not a wrecked one, and importantly, one in which they will be looked up to as business and professional superstars and in which a hugely rich Zoroastrian Parsi community stands ready to subsidise their housing and children’s education.

Fourthly, if the civilisational and societal advantages are not enough to convince you, there is a baser motive to support this: an influx of Iranian people will make the average attractiveness of the Indian population skyrocket.

Finally, there will be benefits even at a governmental level, since this pool of freshly arrived Iranians will be able to spur Indo-Iranian trade and carry out Track II Diplomacy. Nitin Pai and K Subrahmanyam’s dream of India getting involved in Iran-centric diplomacy and carrying out a USA-Iran rapprochement could come one step closer to reality.

The many benefits of this plan mean that Persian gharwapsi is a win-win scenario for all involved. It has massive and visible benefits for all concerned, which is much more than can be said about the VHP conducted gharwapsi, which has no benefits for anybody, except perhaps VHP officials who are desperate footage seekers.

I hope, therefore, that my plan is taken up by anybody competent to implement it. I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country.

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Android R

March 21, 2015

Google names major Android versions after desserts. Which is why, two and a half years ago, when the ‘K’ version of Android was scheduled to be released, Indians started campaigning for Android Kaju Katli. In a great blow to deliciousness, Google named Android 4.4 KitKat instead.

The year after that, Laddoo was bypassed for Lollipop. We now face a situation where at one major release a year, there could be a few years before another Indian sweet is in the running. Consider:

  • This year should be Android M, where the best contender from India is Mysore Pak. It faces fierce competition like marshmallows, macarons, macaroons, marzipan, and marble cake. Its prospects are not good.
  • After M comes N, and I can’t think of a single Indian dessert that begins with n. Whereas the west has nougat. Which is disgusting, but at least it has a name beginning with n.
  • Next we have O, where again I can’t think of a single Indian dessert. Even Asian desserts, which I thought might have a chance, because apparently the preferred spelling is Umm Ali, not Om Ali, which is just Indian caterer spelling. So… Android Orange Marmalade?
  • Android P next. We could potentially have Android Pedha, Android Petha, or Android Piste ki lauj. But if you can’t get Android Laddoo, no way are you getting Android Pedha.
  • I can’t think of anything, Indian or Western, that starts with Q and is also a dessert.

Which brings us to R, where for the first time India has a serious contender: Rasmalai.

It would be wrong to call Rasmalai the king of desserts. For starters, it’s feminine in Hindi. But more than that, it has no monarchical pretensions, so you couldn’t even call it the queen of desserts. Go to a sweet shop – particularly Evergreen Sweet House if you want to have the greatest rasmalai in India – and you’ll find rasmalai lying placidly (in plain or kesar form) among the gulab jamuns, kala jamuns, and cham cham, not at all suggesting that it tastes better than anything else around. The laddoos may occupy the top shelf, the anjeer ki barfi may come at the beginning on an alphabetical listing, but the rasmalai is content to maintain a low profile until it comes to the crucial question of how it tastes. It is, therefore, the primus inter pares of desserts. It is a dessert for republics, not decadent monarchies. For reasons of deliciousness as well as reasons of politics and philosophy, we should therefore devote all our energy to campaigning for Android Rasmalai, even if this means taking away our chances for an Android Mysore Pak.

At one Android release a year, there are five years to go. This gives us enough time to build up our campaign. You might say it is too much time. You would be wrong, because we have to defeat the enemy within: Rasgulla/ Rosogolla.

There is a grave threat that by the time Android’s R release is coming up, the insidious Bengalee lobby will try to promote Rosogolla as an alternative contender for the name. This is all the more sinister, because if they succeed, not only will they have scuppered the chances of the more delicious Rasmalai, they will have further succeeded in promoting the originally Oriya Rosogolla as something Bengali. For the sake of both deliciousness and Oriya pride, we must not let this happen. It will be a matter of great shame for all Indians if the first Indian dessert to make it to an Android codename is an abominable, oversugary mess instead of a perfectly balanced, nutty and spicy rasmalai. Besides, the Bongs can always try for Sondesh.

Join me to promote R for Rasmalai my comrades!

3 Comments | Food, My New NGO, Racism, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Two Losses

March 15, 2015

In May 2001, I was about to end the first year of a Bachelor of Engineering course in a university that I hated. In retrospect, this may have been my fault – or the fault of external circumstances – as much, or more, as the university’s. Six months earlier, my grandmother had had a massive lung failure, my father had injured his leg and was being extorted for a bribe by the Income Tax department, and my mother had developed tuberculosis or something very like it. I myself was compounding my misery into depression, barely eating, not attending classes, and doing atrociously in them as a consequence.

But there were some routines I clung to that prevented the depression from getting full blown – attending laboratories, going home on the weekend, and reading the newspapers in the hostel common area.

On the twelfth or thirteenth – by which time final exams had probably started, I read in the Indian Express that Douglas Adams had died.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so wretched about the death of somebody I had never met, either up to that point, or since then. In a very shitty year, this was news that hurt me even more. I had spent 1999 reading and rereading the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy, and it was tragic that the person who had created it would never create anything more.

I went for my exams, and ended the semester with five D’s and an F.

*

In December 2001, things were not so bad.

My father’s leg had healed, my mother’s TB (or whatever it was) had disappeared, my hostel roommates were now friends, and I was doing better in classes. And by a happy alignment of the calendar and the timetable, I got to come home for my birthday between two exams.

When I took the train back to college, it was with my birthday present – a copy of Terry Pratchett’s The Truth. I managed to complete it on the train itself, grinning and laughing all the way from New Delhi Railway Station to Rajpura at the puns, the jokes, and the real world references.

Over the next five years, I began to work my way through the entire Discworld series.

In 2003, I read Hogfather, and its line about humanity being the place where the falling angel met the rising ape, and for at least five years, it stayed with me and kept me from getting into too much existential angst.

Right up to 2013, I read the new Discworld books, Good Omens, and Terry Pratchett’s other books, loving them. I also read his announcement of his Alzheimer’s, and his interviews and letters to the Times where he managed to be far angrier and sharper than he was in his books, and came to appreciate that side of him too.

Earlier this week, I saw on Twitter that he had died.

*

Although Terry Pratchett’s worlds had captured me just as much as – probably more than – Douglas Adams’, I did not feel the same shock and pain on his death as I had almost fourteen years ago.

Maybe this was because Terry Pratchett had already started planning for his death, so that when it did come, it wasn’t a shock.

Maybe it was because with Death as a character in every book of the Discworld series, it seemed like he was only meeting an old friend.

Maybe it was because in the past fourteen years, I lost my own innocence.

But perhaps it was because this past week, the pain was less noticeable than all the love that his fans have been expressing, all over the internet.

*

In 2001, the only news I had about the death of Douglas Adams were those two columns in The Indian Express. Later that week, I may have seen a thread on slashdot. Much later, I would see a tribute on the h2g2 website, where I believe he is still User 42. (On a side note, what an irony that Wikipedia achieved Douglas Adams’ vision of being a guide to everything faster and better than his own project could.) And much much later, I would come across other tributes and obituaries and biographies.

This past week, within an hour of first hearing of Terry Pratchett’s death (on Twitter), my Twitter and Facebook feeds began to fill up with messages of sadness, tributes to Pratchett (nonfictional, fictional, artistic), and links to obituaries. Compared to 2001, where I may have been one of ten people in the entire university to know who Douglas Adams was, I was now connected to people I knew and complete strangers who were feeling the same sadness (or more) than me.

We have been so inundated with social media and breaking news in the past few years that it’s very easy to be cynical about them and give up in disgust. I personally have deleted my Facebook profile once (though I came back), done mass Twitter unfollowing, and tried to strictly avoid daily news. It’s easy to extend that cynicism and disgust to the Internet itself.

And yet, in the past few days, I saw and realised that the Internet still holds the promise that it had back in 2001, and that Douglas Adams himself had marveled over: that it could bring together strangers who were otherwise alone in their usual milieus. Maybe that is Terry Pratchett’s last gift to me.

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Bollywood’s Queen of Trolling

February 26, 2015

Last week, almost a year after actually watching Queen, I realised that the lyrics of its opening song, London Thumakda, are blowing big, big, raspberries at Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengein.

Before I start explaining how it does this, let’s check out the song itself. In fact, I might get carried away explaining, so anytime you get tired or need a break, come back and check out the song which is a hugely fun song.

Right. So. London Thumukda. Long before I had this sudden realisation, I had thoroughly liked the song. Admittedly, a lot of this liking came out of familiarity, because it is such a Delhi Punjabi song, and I am myself a Delhi Punjabi. And Queen‘s use and depiction of the Delhi Punjabi culture is quite genuine. I wouldn’t call it accurate, because I thought it exaggerated Punjabi culture instead of playing it straight – but at least it started with something genuine and exaggerated it. This is much preferable to abominations like Singh is Kingg and Jab We Met, which both featured Hindi speaking sardars with token “tussis” and “mainus”. Jab We Met even had an entire ‘Punjabi’ family incapable of pronouncing Bhatinda the correct way. So Queen is a fairly genuine depiction of the Delhi Punjabi culture. And London Thumukda is itself very much in the tradition of wedding sangeet songs, though not actually a traditional wedding sangeet song.

A note about the tradition of wedding sangeet songs. In the nineties, the malign influence of Hindi movies that were effectively three hour long wedding videos turned weddings themselves into movie style extravaganzas. (Though I note from reading Miss Manners advice columns that this problem isn’t unique to the Hindi movie watching world.) Since the nineties, wedding sangeets have been vulgar events where people wear expensive outfits and dance to movie songs. However, back in the day, sangeets themselves were simple, low-key events – but events which involved extremely vulgar songs.

How vulgar? Well, they fell into two categories: songs that had suggestive lyrics about sex, and songs which were either daughters in law singing about how useless the mothers in law were, or the other way around. The songs in a traditional sangeet have the potential keep the moral police so outraged that they would be filing FIRs for a year.

That the moral police has not yet done this is perhaps because traditions usually get a free pass that newfangled comedy collectives don’t, but also perhaps because Punjabi ladies sing so terribly that it is impossible to actually make out the lyrics. When my brother got married about a year ago,  we had one such traditional ladies sangeet at home, and it was a traumatic experience on many levels. Apart from the sheer concentration of family members, there were also around twenty ladies singing tunelessly and out of harmony in a confined space.

My feelings towards my female relatives are very much like those of Fulliautomatix towards Cacofonix. I am fond of them and will go berserk if somebody else tries to do anything to them but I refuse to let them sing.

Anyway. Back to London Thumukda. It falls into the first category – that is, songs going nudge nudge wink wink about sex, what with that entire verse about transparent muslin kurtas and inadequately sized bed linen. But it’s composed and sung professionally, which means that it has far more going for it than traditional sangeet songs. So much going for it, in fact, that for over a year I utilised it as the perfect background music for such tasks as waking up and showering, pricing conveyor belts, and checking spare stocks of raw material against unexpected orders. And last week, while pricing one such conveyor belt – about six hours after I had watched the Pretentious Movie Review of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengein – I realised that the song didn’t just have a catchy beat and innuendo filled lyrics, it was mocking Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengein mercilessly.

To a small extent, the movie Queen itself is a sort of antithesis to Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengein considering its lead character moves from being a romantic who wants a big wedding and a European vacation to someone who gets that vacation and then realises that she’s an independent woman who don’t need no wedding. But that is mostly at a philosophical level. London Thumakda gets blatant about it. How, you ask? Well, I’m sorry to make you do this, but cast your mind back to the beginning of DDLJ.

We see Amrish Puri telling us in voiceover that he lives and works in Southall but that actually London is rubbish, and what his heart thirsts for is India because fuck yeah India! India is the greatest! This raises two questions:

  1. If Amrish Puri hates London and loves India so much, why doesn’t he just go back to India? Even if his finances are straitened, he surely owns either his shop or his house, if not both. And even in 1995, London property had to be massively expensive. And although the rupee hadn’t sunk in value to a single British penny by then, he could still have cashed out, bought property in India, and retired to a life of ease and having Farida Jalal and impoverished Biharis at his beck and call. As it is, he liked rural Punjab, where land is far cheaper than Gurgaon, where most other NRIs were buying property.
  2. If he was walking home from Southall to Southall, just how did his route take him past so many landmarks of Central London? (This question came courtesy RoKo.)

Now, in swaggers London Thumakda with these lyrics:

Saanu te lagta, Southall toh changi
Jaga koi nahi hai badiya

Translating for make benefit non-Punjabi speakers: “To us it looks like, out of all the good places, there’s none more amazing than Southall.”

What a slap in the face for Amrish Puri! After his extended monologue about the wretchedness of Southall and the awesomeness of India, a bunch of Punjabis in Rajouri Garden, who actually live in India and so have a better idea about India snap back that actually, no, Amrish Puri is wrong, and Southall is just amazing. Not just amazing, it’s the greatest place in the world.

Even that might just be coincidence, you say. But look at how that verse starts:

Trafalgar de
Kabootar vargi, O meman phir di
Gootar goo kardi

That’s a DDLJ opening reference right there! The song isn’t just doing nudge nudge wink wink about wedding night bonking, it’s doing even more nudge nudge wink wink in the direction of Amrish Puri!

It’s so obvious when you look at it that at first I was ashamed of myself for not realising this earlier. And then I googled to see if anybody else had written about it and found nothing. So now I’m amazed that I seem to have come up with an original insight. Whatay.

Having googled to see if anybody else had made this connection, I then googled to see who was responsible for this masterful trolling, and found that the lyricist of London Thumakda is Anvita Dutt Guptan. That name sounded familiar, so I googled her, and realised that, holy shit, she was also the lyricist for the last song I was moved to write a long, rambling, blogpost about: Radha. Which makes perfect sense: once you’ve undermined the Bhagvad Gita by means of a catchy dance number, undermining Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenegein (also extremely popular and also about a powerful authority figure) the same way is probably all in a day’s work. Maybe even an hour’s work.

What is most charming about the whole affair is that hardly anybody notices the trolling that Anvita Dutt Guptan carries out. As I wrote in the earlier blogpost, people were outraged not that the song was refuting the Bhagvad Gita, but that it was calling Radha sexy. And with London Thumakda, nobody except me seems to have noticed, or at least been moved enough to write about it online. So Anvita Dutt Guptan is not just irreverent, she’s also extremely subtle about it. What a woman.

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A Drop of Honey

February 10, 2015

There is a story in the Mahabharata which I am retelling below. I may have added some details, forgotten others, or even grievously changed yet others; but I trust that I will have reproduced the essence of the story.

Once, a man is being chased through the forest by hungry wild beasts who want to eat him. Fleeing in terror, he finds himself at the edge of a high cliff. He slides down, and finds a young tree growing out of the side of the cliff. He grabs at it desperately and arrests his fall.

Unluckily for the man, the tigers, lions, bears and/ or other carnivores who have been pursuing him are also at the edge of the cliff, and waiting for him to climb back up. If he goes up, he will be messily devoured. If he lets go of the young tree, he will plunge to his death.

In fact, letting go is not even a choice, because just his own weight is beginning to pull the tree out by its roots, and so he will have to fall soon.

Looking around desperately for some means to escape his predicament, the man realises that above him, on a higher branch of the tree, there is also a beehive.

At that instant, the man accepts his fate; and stops worrying about whether he will die by tiger or by impact. Instead, he stretches himself, and catches a drop of honey as it falls from the beehive onto his tongue.

The story ends there.

Today, Delhi finds itself in a situation similar to the man hanging from the tree.

The wild animals here are the venality, divisiveness, and the sheer contempt for the electorate prevalent in the Congress and the BJP.

The horrifying fall that awaits him is the inexperience, lack of fiscal rectitude, and Somnath Bharti’s racism and thuggish disrespect for due process that the AAP brings to Delhi.

But in all this, there is a drop of honey and the drop of honey is that Amit Shah is now looking like a complete idiot.

It will not last very long, and at some point we must undergo the fall.

But it is important to enjoy the drop of honey while it is there.

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Yes, Messenger

January 17, 2015

The controversy about MSG: Messenger of God is now more delicious than ajinomoto.

In the last four days, unelected bureaucrats have resigned in fury because elected politicians, seeking a marginal political advantage (over politicians from allied political parties!), have interfered in their functioning, and in the process, shattered a major bureaucratic obstacle to freedom of speech.

After six months of political news that seemed like it was out of 1980s Alan Moore comics, we now finally have news that seems like it’s out of Yes, Minister. Of course, the new vacancies in the censor board mean that it’s incredibly likely the next one will be full of RSS-ish fellows, but lets enjoy this turn of events until then.

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Rice Must Be Annihilated

November 2, 2014

When I moped last week about the dust and haze in Delhi, I forgot all about the reason it’s so particularly horrific at the beginning of the winter: because farmers all over Punjab and Haryana are burning rice straw to clear the fields; and the smoke from this is drifting over to Delhi. This means that you actually see the air getting darker and more horrifying as you leave the urban parts of Delhi and enter the rural parts towards Haryana (whether towards Gurgaon, where I bicycled yesterday, or towards Sonepat, where I drove on Thursday). The urban parts might be nastier in terms of automobile exhausts pumping the air full of nitrogen and sulphur oxides; but the outskirts just look horrible.

The Times of India had an oped last week about how air quality is not the only ecological disaster that rice cultivation causes. It’s also sucking up groundwater, turning land fallow, and runaway power consumption.

For one, withdrawal of groundwater substantially exceeds annual recharge, with the result that the water table falls continuously each year. As the water table falls, each additional kilolitre of water requires more power for its extraction than the last kilolitre. The subsidy on power thus increases continuously and is met from the state budget.

In many regions the water table, which was initially less than 10 metres, has already fallen below 500 metres, leading to a huge adverse impact on state finances.

(The Times of India)

All things being equal, this would have hit a limit when power tariffs (or diesel prices for gensets) kept rising to respond to the demand. Or, additional power would have been generated.

However, thanks to a combination of subsidised power tariffs for agricultural users, state owned utilities, and agricultural landlords’ grip over politics in Haryana and Punjab, it hasn’t happened. The state owned utilities are too broke to put up new power plants or buy more power for that matter. All that happens is status quo, and less and less power availability, so everyone just starts running their pumps or factories on diesel gensets.

All this limited electricity supply being used to help produce something that isn’t that tasty, and could make me diabetic; when it could instead be used to power my Haryana factories hurts me personally.

The oped also cribs about the part Minimum Support Prices and FCI procurement rules play:

Coupled with attractive minimum support prices (MSPs) and policy directives to FCI to procure the bulk of its rice supplies from these two states, an irresistible economic incentive is created for the farmer to grow rice, rather than the alternatives – maize, other grains, pulses, horticulture, that are more suited to the natural ecology of the region.

The writers suggest moving to average cost pricing for power, hiking MSP for rice, and getting the FCI to purchase rice from eastern India instead of Punjab and Haryana to fix this problem. All well and good, and I hope this happens. But this works either on the supply or the intermediary side, and doesn’t really fix the problem of demand. And the problem of demand is this: Indians are obsessed with eating rice. If nobody was eating rice in the first place, it wouldn’t be getting sold in the private sector, non-FCI market.

How do we get people to stop eating rice? One way is to appeal to their better sentiments and point out that they’re just bringing horrible air pollution upon themselves. But in a society where people refuse to stop bursting firecrackers, even though with firecrackers they suffer the pollution effects of their behaviour directly and immediately, I have my doubts about whether this will work. We will therefore have to resort to guile.

I think the best way to discourage rice eating is with a flanking attack of shame and aspiration. When rice eating is shown to be a matter of shame, people will feel embarrassed about doing so; but also ask ‘What shall we do instead?!’ When an alternative is presented that is actually better and more aspirational than rice eating itself, this objection will also crumble.

Fortunately, this alternative already exists. The keto and other low-carb or no-carb diets preclude rice eating altogether. And they lead to awesome fitness and good looks, as seen in low-carber Hariflute.

Look at that sexy beast. Just look at him. That’s what you become when you cut out rice and switch to ghee and bacon.

So that’s what people have to aspire to when they cut out rice. But how to shame them into considering giving it up in the first place? For that, I think the impetus has to come from another Twitter heartthrob – @majorlyprofound, who has for many years now mounted a campaign of scorn against short, dark, small hearted rice eaters who can’t become fast bowlers.

If Major’s rants are more widely spread across the world (or at any rate in India), people will begin to refrain from eating rice for fear of becoming short and dark. In North India, which is where the devastation caused by rice cultivation is the worst anyway, we could even accelerate this campaign of shame by pointing out that rice is for cowardly monkey-cap wearing Bangaalis and traitorous Madrasis who refuse to speak Hindi. Yes, this is a course of action that plays on lamentable stereotypes, but fuck it, those stereotypes are there anyway, and we might as well put them to good use in cleaning up Delhi and Haryana’s air.

The time has come for a Biryani and Basmati Boycott. Are you with me, comrades?!

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