Don’t get me wrong.

There is one amusing ad making the rounds of the idiot box just now. Its subtext is completely out of kilter with its own original intent. In trying to persuade the Indian metrosexual to take to a fairness cream, it unintentionally pokes fun at two desi demigods: cricket and people born with safed chamdi, preferably from abroad.

In it, the pretty girl busses the metrosexual businessman because he has apparently used the product with positive results. In the process, she pointedly ignores a star Indian cricketer as well as two white skinned colleagues of his.

Kya yaar, Doni?

Talk to me in Web 2.0.

I am, you could almost say, a man of (few?) words. On my word of honour, boys and girls. Words are my preoccupation. Or, shall we say my occupational accomplices? Playing with words comes to me fairly easily. I revel in it. I am word-friendly. I wish I were Lord of the Words. But I find myself at a loss for words far too often to harbour any such delusions of grandeur. http://digbig.com/4xsfr. My love affair with words is probably why I so highly value Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen and even Seinfeld http://digbig.com/4xsfw & http://digbig.com/4xsfx. My antennae, though, are always out for the meaning of words, even subtle nuanaces. The context and the subtext of word usage http://digbig.com/4xsft intrigue and often amuse me. For me, "There's a blaze of light/In every word," as Leonard Cohen puts it so eloquently in his Hallelujah. http://digbig.com/4xsfn. Take, for instance, the way Gmail insists on calling every exchange of email between two people, maybe a bit coyly and self-consciously, "conversation". That's Web 2.0 talk, dude. Keeping in touch. That's what Web 2.0 and social networking are all about, after all. At least, that's the mantra of the Web 2.0 gurus. Having been in advrtising long enough, though, I am painfully aware that many of the so-called breakthroughs in theoretical thinking are only a new use of old words. Or, the same old words in a new context. http://digbig.com/4xsfs.

Subtext.

Subtext = hidden meaning. Things left unsaid.

Are human beings suspicious by nature? I'm clueless. Nonetheless, every time I watch the television commercial for one of the two leading brands of women's high-end cosmetics, a warning bell starts sounding in my head as the final words are uttered by the actor. They are: "Take care" and "Because you're worth it" respectively. So, innocuous and innocent-sounding on the surface. In fact, the former makes you wonder if the marketer is not overly concerned and caring about the consumer, cloyingly so. The latter seems to be a ploy in the best of the contemporary tradition of boosting the consumer's self-worth or self-esteem. So far, so good. Take a moment or two to calmly contemplate both the messages though and you'll begin to wonder if there's not another layer of meaning being conveyed. When the actor tells the viewer in almost a conspiratorial whisper to take care, is she implying (not saying it in so many words) "because you're about to be fleeced considering the high price we are going to ask you to pay for our product"? Likewise, when the actor reassures the viewer that she is worth it in the other commericial, is she leaving unsaid the unpleasant "our price tag will convince you how high we estimate your worth" part? Maybe it's the cynic in me but I have a strong suspicion both are hidden warnings. Like the "Conditions apply" insert elsewhere (in most offer ads) = "Caveat emptor. [Let the buyer beware.] Please read the small print." After all, fair is fair. And, everything fair in love and marketing warfare. And, so forth. P.S.: This is also the case when a long warning is hurriedly read at the fag end of an ad for a financial ad to warn you that here money and market fluctuations are involved. So, better watch your butt, buddy. http://tinyurl.com/62lgkh.

Not just ha, ha, ho, ho but hmmm, is that really, really so?

Ask almost anyone about Pu(rshottam) La(xman) Deshpande’s Batatyachi Chaal (not Chawl – unless his Sokaji Nanaji Dadaji Trilokekar, apparently a Pathare Prabhu like me as one can see from all the subtext, would pronounce it) and the reaction is: ha, ha, hee, hee, how very funny. Talk to them a bit more and you realize that their reference point is his one-man show of the same title, later turned into a play format when Dilip Prabhawalkar started doing it after Deshpande’s demise. I don’t blame them. I had read this book long back and seen his one-man show also back then. And, my final take-away then was a very funny book, a very funny show as well. Yesterday, I found my ancient copy of Batatyachi Chaal, published by Mauj Prakashan and started reading it. “Wait a minute, mate,” I said to myself as I carried on. “This is not how I remember it.” What I found myself reading this time was not a book that took just a light-hearted look at the middle class Mumbaikar of the fifties eking a precarious existence in South Mumbai’s Khetwadi but something straight out of George Orwell but wittier and more palatable. I find this sort of thing happening to me more and more as I re-read stuff I had read long, long ago and consigned to memory as a pleasant experience. For instance, when I re-read Aldous Huxley’s Time Must Have A Stop fairly recently, it was like nothing I vaguely remembered. Maybe, it’s the blessing of experience altering your perspective and/or your capacity for interpreting what you’re reading or (pardon the dreaded word) “experiencing”. Coming back to Batatyachi Chaal, Pu La is in a socio-political parody/satire mode. Re-read the book if you don’t believe me. The piece called Gacchisaha – Zalich Pahijey, for instance, seems to me to be a take-off on the Samyukta Maharashtra movement as I recall it. Raghunananchi Kanyes Patrey parodies Jawaharlal Nehru’s Letters from a Father to His Daughter. And, so forth. There are quite a few digs at the then widely prevalent fad of sarvodaya via the caricature of Acharya Vinoba Bhave (Acharya Baba Barve). Pu La had reiterated his admiration for PG Wodehouse in an interview in the late nineties. http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/ie/daily/19981107/31151464.html. His own brand of parody/irony/satire was often much punchier than Wodehouse’s, though. And, much less gentle. Vijay Tendulkar unerringly pointed http://www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/advertise.nsf/(docid)/2041A42CA19FD93D6525694100300BAF to Pu La’s need to make people laugh. According to his wife http://punerimisal.googlepages.com/aapansaarebhartyaahot592 it was his nature (“dharma” = sacred duty as Sunita called it) to do so. The man of parody and wit was made of sterner stuff. He opposed Indira Gandhi’s Emergency vehemently. Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena chief and erstwhile pupil of Pu La in Orient High School, as well as Vinoba Bhave meekly accepted it as a fact of life. The latter even euphemistically called it 'Anushasan Parva' (= Government Epoch). When the BJP-Shiv Sena Government conferred on Pu La the Maharashtra Bhushan Award in 1998, he did not hesitate to upbraid Shiv Sena for its Fascist politics thereby causing quite a controversy. His hero, on the other hand, got himself into hot waters for making broadcasts from Berlin aimed at the US of A in World War II.

Rad humanist, who me?

I just came across a reference to MN Roy’s Radical Humanism in a translated-from-German book on Fearless Nadia. And I remembered my father used to read one of his books bound in maroon cloth at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/4xyxr a little after 1947. Around then, he was also reading a biography of Joseph Stalin. His interests were wide ranging from political theory to Sufi mystics and bhakti poets (Kabir, Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar and the rest). I guess that’s where I must have got my eclectic reading taste from. My reading as a child was fairy tales n English. But I also read a lot of social, historical and sword-and-sorcery stories in Marathi, regurgitating some of the latter in my class magazine. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/english-yes-english-grammar-no.html. Later, I switched my loyalty to pulp fiction in Marathi and in English. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2008/03/genre-pulp-fiction-avatar-marathi.html. I also flirted with the self-improvement genre at one point in my life. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/search?q=self-improvement. Literature absorbed me most of my adult life. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/never-judge-book-by-its-title-cover-is.html. Now, my interests are more non-fiction: geopolitics, sociology, history (particularly the subaltern stream), cinema. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/search/label/Arundhati%20Roy. As I said earlier, I came across this book on Fearless Nadia, originally titled in German “Zorro’s Blonde Sister” according to a blog post I found here: http://bmukhtiar.blogspot.com/. It is written by Dorothee Wenner, a Berlin-based filmmaker, writer and curator for the Berlin International Film Festival, with incredible insight into Indian socio-political, cultural and film history. I don’t agree with the political and feminist subtext she “reads” into the Nadia repertoire, though. I reckon she goes a bit too overboard there, almost to the point of sounding like a hagiographer. Yet she fills in the background of the Nadia story brilliantly with appropriate vignettes of personalities at various points (MN Roy, Mridula Sarabhai the not-quite-feminist Gandhi, for instance). Here’s what Wenner says about Nadia (aka Mary Evan): “For a blonde, blue-eyed, busty white girl to capture the collective imagination of Indians in the pre-Independence era, was no mean feat! Add to that the stunts she did! She was, along with the Wadias, a pioneer in the Stunt Film Genre in India. I pride myself for being a feminist, but Nadia represented a fearlessness with a dash of sparkling wit, that’s unmatched in any actress of any era.” http://saritharao.blogspot.com/2006/01/true-blue-bolly-interview-with.html. There’s a spiel about JBH Wadia’s desire “to make movies that touted the strength and emancipation of women” on this website. http://memsaabstory.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/fearless-nadia/.