Hair

I am addicted to Masterchef Australia, and am so sad that  its gonna end today L

So I thought I would write a post inspired by Masterchef.  As everyone knows, the universal sign for the chef profession is that long hat they wear. I remember seeing it for the first time in Richie Rich comics – Chef Pierre used to wear it. Later I saw in the ads and banners of many restaurants – a smiling guy wearing that damn stupid hat. 

‘Why do they wear it ?’ I asked my mom

‘It’s to prevent their hair from falling in the food dear’ she told me.

Oh. But why such a tall hat? I wondered...wouldn’t it be easier to wear a normal cap or something? And now you do see a lot of chefs wearing plastic hair nets, or Hayden wearing a baseball cap.

And with good reason too. Seeing a hair in your food, or much worse, finding one in your mouth is the most disgusting experience. Ugh. You are chomping on some succulent food, and suddenly you feel a foreign object in your mouth. You play with it with your tongue, and find that it is a hair! Yech. Then you pull out a long strand from your mouth and throw it out and glare at the cook, who shrivels in shame. You sit there and wonder whether to puke, or get up from the table in disgust and just shrug and carry on eating.  I know people in each category.

In fact, finding stray hairs anywhere is a disgusting experience. You pick up the wife’s comb to run through your hair, and recoil on seeing her long strands caught in it. You see it lying on the floor and it’s disgusting – you turn to berate the person who is supposed to sweep it up. Hairs which clog the bathroom drain are even worse.

Hair! Ugh!

But isn’t it strange?

 That same hair, when it was attached to the scalp, was the most beautiful thing.  It was one the most beautiful attributes of the wife’s beauty. You ran your fingers through it and caressed the satin like threads, you smelt the hair after a shampoo, and bought strands of flowers to adorn those dark tresses. Hair neatly oiled and combed were a sign of culture and civilisation, hair kept loose were erotic and alluring. Nothing but the best oils, shampoos and conditioners were good enough for that hair.

But now that it is separated from the body -  it’s a disgusting thing. It makes you shudder.

Why?

When I thought about it, I realised that this applies to all things. The love you flourish on something which is a part of your system, turns to an equal amount of disgust when it is separated from the system.

The food and drink which you so lovingly prepared and ate, enjoying all aspects of look, feel, smell and taste, evoke disgust when they exit your body as shit and piss.

The hair you lose, the skin which is shed, the sweat that is lost, even the air you breathe out – all of it is seen as disgusting, and something to loathe.

And not just in your bodily system, even in a social or political system. Someone you have purged from your system is seen as something to be avoided and repelled.

Organisations  actively hate ex employees – especially victims of sacking or layoffs. They are not allowed to come inside the office or interact with the current employees. They are treated as scum.

You would hate an ex partner – an old spouse or girl/boy friend -  with a passion. The bitter relations of divorcees are legendary.

Even in society, the worst punishment that can be imposed is to make someone a pariah – cut him off from the social structure. He/ she becomes a waste product, and something to be avoided at all costs.

A person who used to be a friend, and with whom you have had a falling out – is more reviled and hated than any other enemy.

This is not something natural – nature is a circle, and all that is blooming today will become waste tomorrow, become fertiliser, get absorbed back into the system and the day after tomorrow again be a part of the blooming tree.

If you were wondering what is the point of this rambling write up – that is it.

Don’t hate things illogically – don’t cringe at stray hairs and don’t hate people you have fallen out of relationships with.

If you have ever hated someone, just think of a chef’s silly  hat, think of a girl’s beautiful hair, think of  a hair in your food and smile.

Bad books drive out good books

Some of you might remember a principle from your economics classes = 'Greshams law' - which says bad money drives out good money.

A similar thing seems to be happening with books today. Bad books drive out good books.

Let me explain.

The fall of Indian writing which can be traced back to 'The Inscrutable americans' by Anurag Mathur. This was the first simple language low IQ book about a horny Indian boy in USA, and it struck a chord with many first time readers, who were turned off by the depressing, turgid, self absorbed and unreadable prose from the 'serious' indian writers.

Anurag took it down the 'dumbing down' path and wrote a simple book for the less sophisticated crowd. . I had a discussion with R Sriram of Crossword on this, and he was very clear that this was because a much larger amount of people - the non serious readers - could read and enjoy this kind of book. This made this a huge hit with the college crowd in the nineties.

Among this college crowd was a wannabe litteraeur from  a corporate background - Chetan Bhagat.

 He sparked off a massive change in Indian publishing which will go down in history as Chetan Bhagats revolution.

Chetan wrote a book from the heart -'5.1 someone at IIT'. It was crappily written and plotted, but at least it was from the heart. It became an unexpected best seller, due to its easy paced language and identifiable characters. It fulfilled the basic need of written entertainment - it identified, it engrossed, it entertained. Rupa also played ball by launching at an incredible price of 95 rs - accessible to all. the average penguin book was about 200- 300 bucks.

A combination of factors - the uniqueness of the book, the zeitgiest of the times, the burgeoning college and young professional audience, the allure of the 'IIT' branding, the pricepoint, exploding word of mouth, all combined to make it the highest selling book in indian english history. BOOM. Never before had the publishing industry seen anything like this - it left the entire industry shell shocked.

It made enough money for an IIM A investment banker in Hongkong to leave his hugely paying job and come back to India to take up writing and gyaan baazi full time - that kind of money. The first indian book to be optioned for a movie.

It was a publishing and writing wet dream.

CB could see a good thing when he saw it, and using his management skills, he  identifying his target audience and writing for a large  populace - call center people in '1 night at a call centre' ,   Cricket and religion in '3 mistakes of my life' - intercaste marriages in '2 state' and the social revolution in '2020'  - all making him a juggernaut of the Indian writing scene in his thirties.

All this when the entire traditional reading, writing and publishing fraternity sneered at him. 'Pop writing' , they said, 'no substance'. Not a patch on Rushdie or Naipaul or Ghosh. A Justin Beiber of indian writing.

But hey - who the fuck cares? He was the king. He was selling. The masses loved him. and most importantly - people realised that this was the way to bypass the traditional literature scene completely. Screw the intellectual mofos and the elitist editors and reviewers.

People realised that you dont need to write good literature to be a success - you just need to be simple in your language and write about college, and price it cheap.

A shit storm of crap books ensued.

This lead to a range of writers writing about their college lives, and even a publisher who specialised only in such books -  a bengali owned firm called Srishti publications. Soon you had books on IIT, IIM, JNU, REC, Delhi college, architecture colleges - you name it.

These books made it big too -see these books in the flipkart best seller list 'Life is what you make it', 'I too had a love story', 'Horn ok pls' 'oh shit not again' 'you were my crush' etc etc. Walk into any shop and see the piles of these books.

So a number of people jump on the bandwagon with more such books with pathetic writing and plot, shoddy copyediting and overall book quality, and more newbie readers go for them. The book shop owner sees this and starts promoting these books in their stores at the expense of more traditional books - and the vicious circle continues, finally resulting in a bookshop having only crappy bestsellers, and a generation of readers who have grown up reading only crappy books and thus have no taste whatsoever.

A normal wellwritten traditional type of book has very little chance of success now, because no one will want to take the effort of reading it, therefore Book shops wont stock it, therefore the publisher will not be able to afford to publicise it, and therefore it wont sell. Therefore the bookshop wont stock it. therefore the publisher will not print it. therefore, such books will not be available at all.


The cycle is complete. The bad book has driven out the good book.