How Mother Goose sneaked into my childhood.

Once upon a time, nearly three score years ago, there used to be a magical shop at the junction of Kalbadevi Road and Princess Street. The name board in all probability read either “Valabhdas Lakhmidas & Co.” or “The Talking Machine & Indian Record Co.”. Maybe, both. This shop, a favourite haunt of musicians and music lovers,  used to sell all manner of musical instruments, phonographs, vinyl records and related paraphernalia. Among the plethora of things on sale was a wind-up toy gramophone with a dark almond-hued leather body and a detachable golden-tinted tone arm made of aluminum. The turntable of this contraption was wobbly. In turn, the sound emanating from the sound box was a tad scratchy and cartoonish-sounding. This did not matter, though. The stack of 7-inch vinyl discs accompanying the wee little phonograph was a bunch of Mother Goose’s handiwork. A nursery rhyme bonanza was my sixth-birthday gift received scant 14 days after His Majesty’s Government received the Quit India ultimatum from Gandhi & Co. delivered at Gowalia Tank. This historic venue, later christened August Kranti Maidan, is, as the crow flies, a kilometer or so away from my childhood residence at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://bit.ly/1fcggIG and a couple of kilometers away from that musical corner of Kalbadevi Road and Princess Street. That, boys and girls, is how and when I first heard of Jack and Jill, Little Jack Horner, Hickory Dickory Dock, Little Miss Muffet, Humpty Dumpty, Ol’ King Cole, the Quite Contrary Mary, the other Mary with her Little Lamb, Old Mother Hubbard, Wee Willie Winkie, Little Boy Blue, Three Wise Men of Gotham, Solomon Grundy, The Old Woman in a Shoe, Baby Bunting, Georgie Porgie, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Jack Sprat, Little Bo Peep, Little Boy Blue among others. I became aware of their celebrated eccentricities by and by. Only much, much later did I read the various Freudian and post-modern reinterpretations of Mother Goose’s handiwork that completely strips them of every shred of childlike innocence.

Celebrity DIY instruction sheet. Step #1: Open mouth. Step #2: Shove foot in. Step #3: Go blab, blab, blab.

The foot-in-the-mouth disease spares no one. Its most famous victim was India’s (most probably) No.1 ‘icon’ when tied himself into knots on being asked if he would continue to work for a cola that’s at the toxic hub of the pesticide scandal. First he said Yes. Then he said ask the company because he didn’t understand ‘these things’. All he needed to say was, he was only the hired help, he did what he was told to do. (Remember the factoid that Alfred Hitchcock reportedly called actors cattle?) In the same newspaper another ‘icon’ made an ass of himself in a special ‘interview’ – obviously a part of the publicity blitz for his new release – by telling his equally clueless interviewer that Hollywood started making spectacularly mounted sci-fi flicks only twenty years back. (Huh? Duh!) Obviously, he wasn’t aware of, say, George Pal’s The War of The Worlds with its Oscar-winning special effects made as early as 1953. He also proudly said that he had persuaded his dad to make India’s first (?) sci-fi movie to clear the way for others to follow. If they didn’t do it, that genre would be lost forever to Bollywood. (Huh? Duh!) What about Kidar Sharma’s Armaan made as early as 1942, the Quit India year? I stopped reading the gibberish at that point vowing never to read another word uttered by him – a promise to myself I’m sure I shall break. Serves me right for my ‘scratch an icon to find an intellectual’ frame of mind, what? P.S.: All the critics were hailing the ‘ten-year-IQ-in-an-eighteen-year-old’ act put on by the latter ‘icon’ in the new sci-fi-set-to-music flick. Maybe, it’s not an act, after all. To read a bunch of ‘foot-in-the-mouth’ jokes concerning ordinary mortals, head for http://footinmymouth.com/ http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8034 http://www.jn10.co.uk/stories/index.php?cat=7.