How to offend Indians and chew bubble gum
Comedian Kiku Sharda was recently arrested for mimicking a godman. In 2012, a professor of chemistry at Jadavpur University was jailed for forwarding a cartoon lampooning West Bengal chief minister, Mamata Banerjee.
Siddartha Deb's book had to be published without the chapter on Arindam Chaudhuri, the pony-tailed guru of IIPM, because the latter had managed to get a court injunction. Films are routinely banned and censored.
What makes it really difficult for comedians, filmmakers, writers and cartoonists is that we don't know where the boundaries lie. It's an easier job in Saudi Arabia, North Korea or China, where forbidden territory is marked by electrified barb-wire fencing. Our problem is that we like to pretend to be the free world, but our natural instincts lie in a more draconian aesthetic of power and control.
The safest thing to do is to stay away from reality. Don't make references to real people and real events. Reality bites back. Our public discourse is then reduced to bubble gum. Since bubble gum is the safest thing to write about, I'll dedicate the rest of this piece to understanding the humble bubble, or Bubble ji - I'd rather err on the side of caution and go with the respectable suffix, lest Bubble ji is offended, though bubble gum makers are not known to file FIRs and get people arrested. But then, you never know.
Bubble gum was invented in America in the early 20th century, and, like cinema, arrived in India soon after. Its inventor, Walter Deimer, taught salesmen how to blow bubbles, a unique selling point of the new "candy". That fact that it cost almost nothing, made it a popular and affordable treat during the Great Depression.
A pastoral race to begin with, we Indians too took to it instantly, like a bovine creature taking to cud. Being an assimilative culture, we had to Indianise it, and so we did, renaming it "chingum".
Right from Independence onwards, the Indian nanny state and society at large, which includes innumerable religions, castes and communities, and assorted hyper sensitive individuals who claim to represent these groupings, have made sure that Indians remain in a state of constant gum-chewing stupor.
Bubble gum, which in America had a whiff of teenage rebellion attached to it, was in India a mind-numbing pellet of minty vyom that was used to induce conformity.
In the 1960s, Nehru banned Aubrey Menen's Rama Retold because he felt it offended Hindu sentiments. Not much has changed in Indian society. We've been loyally chewing gum ever since. A well-worn Indian colloquialism is "Take it light, yaar."
We've been trained since childhood to keep it light. Nothing is lighter than bubblegum. It's the metaphor for all things froth. As Leonard Cohen sang, "The maestro says it's Mozart, but it sounds like bubble gum." Until Sharda got arrested, he too thought he was "keeping it light", wading in the shallow waters of front-row hee-haw. He never claimed he was Mozart.
Has anyone noticed how bubble gum prices haven't gone up in the last 30 years? A pellet of gum used to cost a rupee in 1985. A pack of Orbit today costs Rs 5 for five pellets. Bubble gum prices have defied inflation. Maybe, prices are deliberately kept low, for subsidised bubble gum is the new opium for the masses.
We are known to be an ingenious people. Indian ingenuity is the toast of the Milky Way. Perhaps it's not surprising that we'd do something with chewing gum, apart from chewing it of course. We turned it into currency.
Nowadays, in the bubble gum culture that we inhabit, the idea is grow wealth and shrink our intelligence. Using bubble gum as currency is the perfect way to do so. Money is chingum. Chingum is money. I've collected several packets of Orbit over the last year.
Every time I go to buy torch batteries or bread or eggs, the shopkeeper, instead of tendering me the exact change, tenders me with a five-rupee Orbit. Beware though, for in this parallel economy, Orbit constitutes a one-way currency. You cannot buy a bar of soap in exchange for ten Orbits.
This monetary exchange has been fine-tuned down to 50 paise. Instead of returning you a rupee, the shopkeeper will give you a 50-paisa gum. He has still saved 50 paise. As the English said, save the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves. No wonder we have become a nation of rich shopkeepers.
Still, we should be grateful that we are allowed to chew cheap subsidised gum, a nation of happy chew-tiyas. There are countries in the world where the bubble gum is considered a threat to the social fabric. Yes, dear reader, even the bubble gum is a dangerous and fraught thing. In Singapore, for example, the bubble gum is banned by law. There is no gum in the shops. Anyone found spitting gum on the pavement is fined 700 Singaporean Orbits, sorry dollars.
As poor Sharda, the camp comedian learnt, you keep blowing the gum bigger, the way Mr Deimer taught his salesmen, only to find some spoil sport prick it with a safety pin.
Gum is a dangerous thing. Please don't blow bubbles and get yourself into trouble. As the tagline for Centrefresh, India's best-selling gum goes, the idea of gum is to keep "Zubaan pe lagaam".
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)