A pickle story

A pickle story, politics through the eyes of a gourmand

Once upon a time there were three pickles who were fast friends. This despite being very different in their temperaments. They were, after all, strong specimens of their type. The youngest and friendliest was the sweet pickle, spreading sweetness and light wherever she went. The middling one was the sour pickle who never could see the positive in anything. He had a sharp tongue that miffed friend and foe alike as neither ranked very high in his esteem. The eldest and the leader of the pack of three, was the hot pickle, ever ready to take offence at the drop of a hat, but decisive for all that.

The unique thing about this unlikely trio was that they were practically inseparable. They went all over the country and abroad always agreeing to disagree but each in their own predictable way. The cementing factor, in so far as anyone could see, was that between them, they had any topic very well covered. Each of them was delectably individual and had distinct groups of followers who swore by them, and what is more, never went to a meal without asking for them. The three pickles had to be careful not to spread themselves too thin so that they didn’t get wiped out.

This imperative of survival, despite their loyal constituencies, held the three friends together through thick and thin. The three pickles had a great impact on every kind of meal they were present at and had so much character that quite often they would take over the taste buds of the consumer. This made it necessary to exclude them on occasion or at any rate restrict their participation.

All three also had to be wary of pranksters who identified them with being in trouble of one sort or the other. They were of one accord that consorting with them did not constitute a hazard and were indignant that popular perceptions looked on their relevance with a jaundiced eye.

They thought of amalgamating so that they would no longer stick out like sore thumbs, exposed to threat from over zealous fans. However, after a lot of deliberation, they had to give up the idea because there is little demand for a three-legged pickle with no distinctiveness to its name.

So each one had to perforce carry on, true to type, and individual as ever. The funny thing is, they were not viewed as all that separate, because people ate sweet and sour and hot, all at the same meal, without blinking an eyelid. The irony was they preferred to determine the proportions themselves.

Spiced and preserved as they were, the pickles had yet another worry to do with their shelf-life. To them there was no humiliation greater than to end up a rotten pickle not fit for man or beast. So there was a sense of sharpness and urgency about them. This also helped cement their friendship.

Over indulgence in pickle consumption brings on a heartburn threatening the very root of their popularity. The life of a pickle is a fine balance at the best of times. Then there is the fierce competition. Alien delicacies like chocolates and pastries, the conglomerate ketchup from the US, the halwai’s sweetmeats, namkeen cornucopias in ever-glitzier packaging. Then there are the pretenders like paan-bahar and multifarious churan. What was a well-bred pickle to do with all these contenders for the consumer’s attention?

A fairy tale beginning it might have been on the day of a pickle’s creation, but after that it’s all down hill. The gluttony of the pickle eating public gives the survivors the paranoias of an endangered species. There is, in any case, a declining market in salivatory excesses in these health conscious times. The three pickles gradually came to think of the world as a rather unforgiving place. They agree with all the press comment that it is going to take a lot of doing to live happily ever after, even for a fine pickle picked out of the trio.

(769 words)

Gautam Mukerji
October 9, 1996
First published in The Pioneer, India, 1996www.dailypioneer.com as "Hot, sweet and sour" on Wednesday November 6th, 1996 in the OP-ED page

The international relevance of rock n roll

The international relevance of rock n roll

“Golly, Gee!
What have you done to me,
Well I guess it doesn’t matter anymore”

Fragment from a song by Buddy Holly & The Crickets

During the Second World War, when the world, as it was known up to that point, was crumbling all around, to keep spirits up became a top priority everywhere. Popular music and song have always been major flag bearers of public sentiment. The music of WW2 had a hectic gaiety to go with the times, and a smaltzy air, rhyming “moon” with “June” without embarrassment. With everything all around under threat, unabashed sentimentality was indeed a soothing anodyne.The American popular music business establishment jettisoned its prejudices against “black” music, inappropriate, when thousands of coloured folk were dying for the “free world”, shoulder to shoulder with white people in unsegregated circumstances, and it was undeniable that the blood that ran in their veins was not purple, but red.

The music of this cataclysmic plight which was WW2, cross-fertilised the black beat with the white ditty, and rock n roll was born. The new music grew rapidly in acceptance and took the world by storm. Back in the US, it was the baby boomer 50’s, as all the surviving enlisted men came back to their wives and sweethearts. Everything was big, brash, and impossibly romantic, from the chromium-plated cars with voluptuous lines, to the bouffant hairdos, tight sweaters, and stretch tights. To galvanise the imagination, rocking to Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, Winifred Atwell, Buddy Holly et al, a supremo was born. He was a handsome King, blue eyes, dyed black ducktail, a winsome pout, a restless hip, and a voice as tender as the night. Elvis the King was the gorgeous white face of the hybrid rock n roll, which has stormed on for the next half century, showing no signs of age or decrepitude, or a reduction in popularity.

Rock n roll has evolved and spawned many top-flight practitioners, but as another great, Eric Clapton, sang, it has more to do with “a rock n roll heart”, than hard-core innovation. Its salience lies in the eternity of hope that washes over each succeeding generation, linking them, with one part enthusiasm and one part nostalgia. For the older rocker, comes the realisation, to put it in the words of the Mussoorie writer and poet, Ruskin Bond,”It’s not time that is passing/ It’s you and I”. For the younger new entrant to the rock n roll party, it’s the blending of cultures and technology, married to a robust and reliable beat, that draws him and her in. Ask Bhappi Lahiri.

International television has given imagery and style to the whole world, alongside the music itself, and the dream has grown. There is a badge of youth all over the world that is readily identifiable, and just as committed to the arcana of the genre, as his Shammi uncle, Mithun bhaiya, Javed mian, Gita mummy, or Kishore daddy, before him. The blood rhythm of the medium is attractive in any language and has gathered influences ranging from reggae from the Caribbean, to Bhangra from India. Arabic plainitiveness might be blended with Spanish excitement, but always underpinned with the simple messages of love and loss that dominate the rock n roll heart.

The real time message of rock n roll which underscores its relevance, was eerily defined by John Lennon, in his corny but beautiful one world anthem, “Imagine”. He lays out an unabashed if naive dream, and ends the song with, “You may say that I’m a dreamer/ but I’m not the only one/ I hope some day you’ll join us/ and the world will live as one”. That’s rock n roll style assertion for you, and what I want to know now, ‘afore I go is, will a sip of water alone, dissolve that lump in your throat?

(665 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
September 24, 1996
First published in The Pioneer, India, 1996www.dailypioneer.com as "Brash yet incurably romantic" on Thursday October 17, 1996 on the OP-Ed page

A fable on the new monks in cyberspace

A fable on the new monks in cyberspace

“... The Internet is a tidal wave. It will wash over the computer industry and many other, drowning those who don’t learn to swim in its waves.”
Bill Gates

We are approaching the end of two thousand years of recorded history. In all this time mankind has rarely succeeded in being democratic in any form of organisation larger than a city-state, the likes of Athens and Sparta. Even there, it ended in Socrates having to drink hemlock when his observations became too bizarre for the “thinking” majority.

The twentieth century has seen a technological flowering never before witnessed in the history of mankind. All this advancement however did not free man from his primordial impulse of the few dominating the many. Technology just made it easier and more efficient. At last however, scarce years before the dawn of the 21st century the same technology has come in the garb of a liberator and its fathers have the mien of the ascetic.

The computer whiz is the new monk. He is spartan in his single-minded obsession with cyberspace. He is unconcerned about boundaries and sceptical of hierarchies. He thinks like an anarchist, wants free access to information as a birthright for every surfer. His genius explodes on the PC screens of the world, careening down the information highway like a drunken juice truck with the driver inebriated at the wheel.

Alas! he cannot keep things pristine outside the confines of his work-station monastery. Mammon comes visiting, regular as a rent collector, in a suit and stuffed shirt, slithers around the new-born software, offering lewd blandishments, corrupting the new monk’s innocence and commercialising his anarchism.Mammon damns the cyberspace monk with faint praise, and weaves languages of denial around the hardware he controls so that the monk is reduced to writing software, in effect, for Mammon’s acceptance. There are many precious gems mined by the monk from his inner reflections, but the buyer, Mammon, makes it clear that he, not the monk, will set the price.

The new monk hates this fettering of his spirit. So he climbs another mountain, more stark, far away from the cacophony of the bazaar, and there invents a new language and gives it a sunny name, Java, after his dreams of Utopia. This is a universal new language of enabling cues that transform difficult access commands into pictures a child can point his mouse at. It is an open sesame that blows away all the locks and controls installed by Mammon. Suddenly, the arcane, jealously guarded study of adepts, shut away in ivory towers, is stripped and laid bare, cowering and shivering under the lustful appraisal of the ignorant. The rag-tag band swarms up from the streets and alleys, dancing their way in after the pied-piper monk of cyberspace. Soon the numbers of the converted become legion, some thirty million strong, and growing continuously, like the self-reproducing amoeba.

The joiner is a neophyte but he goes from virginal coyness to seasoned convert in the twinkling of a graphic wink. His appetite for cyberjunk grows stronger, more demanding and familiar everyday. To provide for his hunger and burgeoning numbers, the new monk undertakes a recruitment drive. But here a contradiction arises. A true monk is, by definition, a solitary individual. A good joiner he is not! Conformity, with its elaborate language is like poison to his original thinking. The new monk can find hardly any joiners, but all is by no means wasted. The clarion call is heard in isolated caves, metal and glass towers, fishing cabins, deep in the desert, high on the mountains, on islands, on trains and undergrounds, in short, all over cyberspace...

Then the responses come, tumbling onto bulletin boards and virtual shopping malls. The message is unambiguous; unstoppable, a new set of Commandments, “there is no one way to use the Internet. It will become what you make of it. I can join you from my work-station wherever I am. We can work together even though we have never met, and probably, never will”, and, “let me show you how”.The truth shines in like divine light, penetrating in its simplicity. Neophytes who can’t type, others who are phobic about computerese, all kinds of doubting Thomases, have no need to worry. The new generation software, to come, soon enough to greet the millennium, will take voice commands.

The etiquette of the Internet is being established. Because of its free-wheeling democratic parentage, soon it will be de rigueur that ordinary level access to basic information on any topic under the heavens, will be granted to any thirsty visitor to a website.The new monk has already left his mark, that too in his lifetime. Commonsense told him old fashioned window-shopping is a ritual old as time, in the tango between buyer and seller. Access to websites half way around the world in seconds, will gradually become as ubiquitous as the STD/ISD/PCO booths we now find from Mathura to Mallikery.

The basic allure is that of a bordello;-- no would be lover is turned away from a whore-house because his pockets are shallow, but, for that all important walk up the stairs and the comfort of company behind closed doors, you’ve gotta pay!Everyone needs to strut his stuff and display his wares on the virtual mall, for the millions of browsers and cruisers. It is no wonder that the earliest Johns came looking for smut, not wisdom. Others came for cyber-romance, intimacies of mouses and screens in mardi-gras masks of anonymity.

Marshall Mcluhan punned prophetically on the medium and the massage in the dreamy sixties, but at the turn of the millennium, the massage has become all-pervasive and the medium is the Internet, through cyberspace, via satellite and other wired and wireless deliverers. This medium is global, cheap, comprehensive and virtually irresistible. It mocks the epaulettes off global policemen who wish to block access in this “pernicious and anarchic manner”. It is a technology that threatens to bankrupt authority everywhere, handing over dominion to the masses. It will crown and anoint the rag-tag legions of surfers in global cyberspace. It will gift each surfer an itty-bitty piece of a sovereign crown as a souvenir, reminiscent of the “bits of brick in plastic” that came from the Berlin wall, when that abomination, in its turn, was wiped off the face of the earth.

But can there be a cyberspace heaven without a concomitant hell? Purveyors of child porn, as well as porn for our children, are lurking out there on the mall. Modern day safe crackers can reduce carefully crafted clandestine passwords to child’s play as they rifle through secrets housed in unsuspecting PCs. Experts! you scream for experts, to prevent this invasion of privacy, but who will keep us safe from these saviours?

The cyber-monk will have to solve these problems of voyeurs and safe crackers and new, improved, pestilences from Pandora’s box, lest Mammon hijacks his platform again. He will have to reassure the timorous while simultaneously pursuing his quest to discover fresh galaxies in cyberspace. He is probably not afraid because the monk knows how to work patiently, and with abiding faith in his futuristic creed.

He knows that most of humanity will become purveyors of information in the 21st century. Hierarchies will be flattened by technological great-levellers and there will be little power to be gleaned in the future, from position alone. Wild new technology will seep into everything and transform our things, cars, houses, films, music, books, and even the nature of energy itself.The new monk knows all this because he has the vision to renew the earth and rescue all its inhabitants from blind alleys, where all the corruption of the neo-imperial age stands slavering in the shadows, waiting to make quick work of any innocent who ventures into its recesses, after dark.

(1,331 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
March 11, 1996
First published in The Times of India, 1996www.timesofindia.com on Sunday April 7, 1996 in the TOUCHSTONE column on the Edit page

Falling in love versus love that grows

Falling in love versus love that grows

“You ask how much I need you
Must I explain,
I need you, Oh my darling!
Like roses need rain--

You ask how long I’ll love you--
I’m telling you true,
Until the 12th of never
I’ll still be loving you...”

Excerpt from a song by Cliff Richard

Both Cliff Richard and Johnny Mathis had number one hits singing “The 12th of Never” on both sides of the Atlantic. The outlying English-speaking world in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand also took the wildly romantic promises embodied in the song to heart. In India it featured on the radio programme “A date with you” right up there with another Cliff Richard blockbuster called “Constantly”.

Romantic love is extravagant on promise and exalted in tragedy as the sagas ranging from Romeo and Juliet to Frankie and Johnnie will attest. The love that grows, on the other hand, is the province of the landed gentry in all cultures, because property is not something to be trifled with, and the domain of ancient civilisations, not enamoured of flighty romance, like India and China.

In these nations with thousands of years of recorded history, a distinction is made between romantic love, which is treated as an indulgence not to be allowed to interfere with preordained matters, and the taking of a suitable wife or husband at the appropriate time. Any desires left unadressed by the pressure of this requirement can be dealt with discreetly via mistresses, “kept” women, visits to refined and crude houses of ill repute for the men, and secretly celebrated but euphemistic liaisons on the part of the women.

Oddly enough, though the arranged marriage is under some pressure in a unipolar world, it turns up, on statistical average, a stunningly durable marriage. Romantic love, with its concomitants of sampled sexual compatibility and obvious pulse quickening glamour, fares poorly in this respect. A blight seems to descend on the expectations versus reality nexus in as little as a month or two, sometimes stretching hopefully to a few years.

So is the system of family support the key cementing factor in an arranged marriage? Does the blindfold on expectations imposed by a lack of familiarity before the event have anything to do with its durability? The seemingly risky business of marrying a stranger works out quite frequently into a viable relationship. Are the formulae of selection employed by the arranged marriage process more objective and enduring? Are the participants more willing to accept their lot in life and make the most of it? Or is the docility no more than passive acceptance of one’s fate and Karma? Are the manners and mores of romantic love being incorporated into arranged marriages to breathe life into the sensible but boring arrangements? The questions indeed are many and the answers vary.

In India, a growing phenomenon is a hybrid alliance which is partially arranged and allowed to blossom thereafter on its own, nudged along if it falters, by approving well-wishers and relatives. There are an increasing number of inter-region and inter-caste connections alongside the nettlesome inter-faith marriages. The good thing is that they don’t generally result in blood feuds and reactionary carnage anymore. Integration as a national concept is flowing into the mating game and just as the opposite methodologies seem to be meeting at the culvert, the cross roads themselves represent no more than different routes towards the same goal.

What seems to be the consensus is that there develops a convergence of views in time. That is, falling in love bears a striking resemblance to love that grows and vice versa. If there is anything at all to the chemistry of love which implies much more than physical attraction, all roads do lead to the same Rome. Those who lose their way on the straight as a die Apian highways must confront the mirage that held them in thrall and try again. Because when the fog clears, they will be only too ready to admit that whatever it is that they went through, they were never in love, in the first place.

(701 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
December 18, 1996
First published in The Pioneer, India, 1996

Beam me up Scotty...

Beam me up Scotty...

The television serial “Star Trek”, developed in the sixties, was a wildly popular cult classic. So much so, that when the original actors who played the key roles got old, the studios got a new bunch of actors, updated the saliences and went for it one more time, calling it “Star Trek,... the next generation”. In many ways it captured the popular imagination in the same way as the Sean Connery James Bond movies did. Bond also goes on and on in new incarnations and avatars.

“Star Trek”, the younger, still puts in an occasional dated appearance on Star Plus channel. There were memorable characters in it that have been retained in the update. There is the pivotal Captain Kirk of course, with an older and more mature actor playing him. There is the Vulcan, Mr. Spock, with pointy ears and a total lack of emotion, a person very similar to a human, but run entirely by logic! The First Officer is Scotty, forever manning the bridge of the Starship Enterprise travelling the galaxies, and at the receiving end of the celebrated phrase “beam me up Scotty” which ended many a half hour episode in the decades before satellite beams and footprints.

Captain Kirk on his travels, whenever he wanted to return to the Starship Enterprise, would say the phrase into a device rather like a cellular phone of today. A beam would come down from the ship to wherever the Captain might be located, and hey presto, he’d be “beamed” back to the Starship, just as if he was faxed through an invisible elevator! The Star Trek serial was prescient science fiction that is rapidly turning into reality.

Not only have we got space shuttles going in and out of earth’s orbit with great regularity now but we also have hundreds of satellites in geostationary orbits collecting and beaming down all sorts of information and imagery. We have space stations where astronauts live and breathe for months. We have missiles and warheads capable of flying unerringly to targets thousands of miles away and others that can arrest them in mid-flight. We have stealth bombers that can hit a specific chimney from the stratosphere. We have communication technology galloping forward from the telexes and faxes of yore to the modems, e-mailings, cellular telephony and the Internet of today.

There are already prototype planes that can travel between London and Sydney in a couple of hours but the researchers are trying to reduce the effects of the several gravities built up, so that ordinarily unfit people don’t blow-up in the attempt!

Technology marches inexorably on. How long will it be before we can dispense with aeroplanes altogether and just get beamed to England or America? Imagine traffic jams on the beamways as harried businessmen gesticulate wildly at languid holidaymakers to clear their path. And after that why not time travel back to the past or future like the phenomenally successful films in the eighties? That was beaming too even if Michael J Fox did it stylishly in a De Lorean in a techno-update of the man-and-horse syndrome.

Life, it is said, imitates art. It is doubtful that Star Trek, the serial, will go on long enough to see its viewers speaking into little cellular phone-like devices instructing their myriad Scotty archetypes in many tongues, to “beam me up”. But that won’t take anything away from its prescience.

(582 words)

By Gautam Mukerji
1 August 1996
First published in The Pioneer, India, 1996www.dailypioneer.com on August 26th, 1996 in the MUSINGS slot

Of obelisks and pyramids, meaning in stone

Of obelisks and pyramids, meanings in stone

What does a monument to time really mean? Ask the Sphinx and he will reward you with an impassive, sand-blasted, stare. It took persistent archaeologists, they beloved of the spade and brush, to uncover the secrets of the Valley of the Kings. It is these painstaking individuals who, driven by a passion for knowledge and not a little curiosity, unearthed the pyramids from the soft sand dunes which had covered them over. Archaeologists revealed for the world to see, in tandem with historians, the terrific emphasis the ancient Egyptians placed on the afterlife.

Why do some of us attempt to uncover the past like this? Is it an unconscious but strong bond between the living and the dead? The former, gone before, through the traces and marks they leave behind, bestow meaning and continuity on the latter, the living, who will become, all too soon, the dead in turn. Some cultures have institutionalised this symbiotic relationship in the form of ancestor worship. Others exalt particularly worthy predecessors by burying them in houses of worship or creating hallowed ground in their memory, endowing it with monuments and symbolic eternal flames.

But all this imprinting on the sands of time presupposes that future generations will venerate that which the monument builders thought worthy. Verily there is a tribe spread thin all over mankind that has responded through the millennia. Who are they and what holds them distinct from the herd? They are people who believe that the achievements of past generations have valuable lessons for mankind. They turn this fundamental faith into skills as engravers, restorers, decipherers, interpreters, linguists, scholars of dead languages and obscure dialects, archivists, historians and lovers of old times and artefacts. Quite a few people in the end who stand willing and able to reach out across the mists and veils to the long ago.

So the tomb makers have toiled on through the ages sanguine about their aficionados in the ranks of the unborn. They make their statements to posterity, in forms great and mighty and if time applies a patina and if future generations cannot really understand the importance of mummifying or triumphal arches, then so be it!

The point of all the puissant monuments and tombs is a bid for immortality. If the flesh is dust let it go but let not the legacy also disappear without trace. It is too frightening to contemplate a complete demise of body and soul both. Many an atheist falters on the rock of posterity. The living see children as being their continuity, and not everyone is willing to acknowledge a debt to the dead of other tribes. This is the way of the philistine and the uncaring it breeds trivialises the ignored other, and demeans the posturer too.

So when you walk among the tombs that scatter the plains of Delhi, realise that at a minimum they are living history worthy of respect. I walked among graveyards in different places and saw cenotaphs and mausolea, pyramids and obelisks to record a passing on definitely but also to emphasise the significance of a life and its times.

The terraced cemetery outside Naini Tal on the road going down to the plains is a document to an era in which a lot of people died young. There were no antibiotics then but it didn’t keep away the intrepid. Ranks of serried graves and their inscriptions tell tales of dogged persistence through infant mortality and spouses torn away. They record that death is no respecter of rank, pomp or circumstance. The South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta houses the grave of Sir William Jones, who founded the Asiatic Society, most significant in the 19th century. Now even though his is the tallest obelisk in the cemetery, his legacy, the Society, has been overtaken by creeping senility and gradual obsolescence.

Sometimes, a mausoleum becomes, and remains, all that it was intended to be. I am referring, of course, to the Taj Mahal. It transcended, perhaps from the laying of the first slab of luminescent white marble, its function as a tomb and transformed itself for all eternity into the world’s greatest monument to love undying.

(714 words)

4th July 1996
By Gautam Mukerji
First published in The Pioneer, India, 1996www.dailypioneer.com as "Of obelisks and pyramids" on July 15, 1996 in the MUSINGS column