A TRAFFIC-STOPPER, AGED CIRCA 45

She has been attracting more eyeballs than even Bollywood bombshells. She has always fascinated everyone with her wit, her sharp sense of humour and her unique style of analysing current affairs.

Peering down billboards at prominent landmarks all over the country for over the last four decades is the Amul girl in a polka dotted frock with a matching bow in her hair. A brainchild of Sylvester DaCunha, she is perhaps second in popularity only to the Air India’s mascot Maharaja created by Bobby Kooka. Like him, no subject is taboo to her, no individual beyond her jibes.

The moppet made her first appearance in 1966 – long, long before I saw the first billboard. I think it was in the Readers’ Digest that I saw the first ad featuring her – at prayer, genuflecting, with one eye closed and another on the pack of butter with the words, ‘Give us this day our daily bread with Amul Butter.’ There has been no looking back.

There was this lovable sign-off line – ‘Utterly Butterly delicious’. Purists frowned. ‘Butterly’ is not grammatically correct, they cried. But, by then, the tagline had become so hugely popular that a solescism on the part of the impish and lovable mascot was not considered a serious transgression. It was perhaps a sign of things to come – she could get away with blue murder as long as she could tickle your ribs.

No mean achievement this, if you recall that this is a country where a sixty year-old cartoon reproduced in a textbook can spark off a political crisis and a professor distributing cartoons lampooning the Chief Minister is sent to the cooler, making us wonder what we are coming to.

There is no sphere that the tongue-in-cheek humour has not touched – be it cinema, politics, sports, science, society, art or infrastructure.

Like, at the dawn of the millennium, when the wired world feared a collapse, Amul girl interpreted the Y2K phenomenon as 'Yes to Khana'. The first escalator in Mumbai in 1979 was celebrated with a slogan 'Automatically Amul'. In the early '90s, when Coca-cola was getting popular after its re-entry, she twisted their slogan ‘The Real Thing’ to 'Eat the Real Thing'. 

When Mumbai, electrified by BEST, a Tata Company, witnessed a power shortage, the Amul girl said, with characteristically evocative humour, 'Ta ta power? Amul, unlimited supply.' When Mumbai Police were engaging with Haseena Parkar (underworld don Dawood Ibrahim's sister),she lifted the title of a yester-year's movie and simply asked, 'Haseena maan jaayegi'? 

She learnt it the hard way that a joke is a joke only as long as it is not at one’s expense on the eve of a strike in the Indian Airlines. When the Amul hoarding declared, ‘Indian Airlines Won’t Fly With­out Amul’, the national carrier was not amused. It threatened to cancel all orders unless the hoarding was taken off.

Congress was heckled when she wore a Gandhi cap. The plea the High Command took was that the Gandhi cap was a symbol of independence and one could not take that lightly.

Not everyone was that stern. Known for flaunting his obsession with Madhuri Dixit, the bare-footed artist liked the ad ‘Heroine addiction’ featuring him so much that he requested for a blow-up to be put up in ‘Gufa’, his art gallery in Ahmedabad, designed him and famed architect B V Doshi.

It is not as if she is always seen in the polka-dotted frock. In an ad in the late 60’s, she was seen wearing a white apron in the 'Taste Tube baby' ad, referring to the developments in medical science. When the Bollywood blockbuster Khalnayak's 'choli ke peechhe kya hai' song created ripples in 1993, she dropped her frock and appeared in ghagra to sing, 'Roti Keniche Kya Hai? Amul, Asalnayak'!

There were times when Amul hit below the belt. Like, it ran the ‘Cadbura’ campaign when worms were reportedly found in Cadbury’s choco­lates.

The best way to sign off this post, I guess, is by stringing together a mosaic of a few great Amul hoardings of the past.

 I

Nam Nam Nam Nam - A Viet Namese Primer

The disembarkation card the pretty airhostess of Tiger Airways handed us over when the aircraft was preparing to land at Ho Chi Minh City Airport was bilingual. In such situations, for want of anything better to do, I do two things: the first is to look for typos; the other, to compare the English words and the corresponding words in the 'other' language, to find similarities between the two.

This time I was not lucky on either count. No typos, no similar words. They I decided I could try learning some Viet Namese words. 'Nam', I found, was Year - as in Date of birth (Date/Month/Year).

Soon, it was touchdown time. Presently, we were in the terminal building. After the immigration and customs formalitis which took an unduly long tme, as we waited for the carousel to bring our registed baggage, I thought I could go to the loo. Proceeding in the general direction, I saw two doors adjacent to each other bearing the words NU (with the picture of a woman) on one and NAM (with the picture of a man) on the other. Pretty obvious.

Then it struck me: the two words - the words for year and man in Viet Namese - are the same! I know there are a few words in most languages which have two or more meanings (Without them, life would be hard for the punsters!) but usually they would be used in only one very commonly understood sense. Like in Sanskrit, Raatri (or nisha, rajani or nisheetHini etc) means night, but all of them mean turmeric too. It must be tough, I thought.

But surprise was yet to come. A couple of days later, I accompanied my son Hari to the vegetable market in Buon Ma Thuot, the capital of Dak Lak Province in Central Highlands. (He causes a flutter wherever he goes in Viet Nam, as he stands a jaw-dropping six foot three inches tall in a land where the average adut male height is 5' 3". I often see that by the time the jaws are hoisted back to their normal position, they drop again when he opens his mouth: he likes to show off the more than usual proficiency he has acquired in Viet Namese language in less than nine months of stay here!) He asked for a kilogram of broccoli. The piece that the vendor picked weighed a kilo and a half. Hari said, 'Don't cut it, I'll take it, though it is 500 grams heavier.' I thought I heard the word 'nam' there. When I asked him, Hari told me, Nam means 'five'. And he added, 'Nam' can mean South, too.

I wondered: If someone wanted to say in Viet Namese that a man had lived in the South for five years, what would he say?

That was not the end. We were in an upmarket cafe in Da Lat that serves coffee in different forms - espresso, mocha, cappucino, cold coffee, chocolate coffee, cafe au lait, etc. I opted for coffee with milk and a lot of ice and Bhawani for hot coffee. Hari translated our choice for the benefit of the attendant: 'Ca phe sua da for him and ca phe nam for her.'

It is a testimony to the strength of my mind that I did not faint when I realised that 'Nam' also means hot!

Haircut by Menaka

Saturday afternoon. Hari came back from office and announced that he would go for a haircut in the evening.

Bhawani said, ‘You too can accompany him and get your hair cut.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘It’s not due yet.’

She tried to reason out, 'Your last haircut was in India. You mean you’ll wait till end-October for the next?'

‘Bhawani, you know that once I am happy with a tailor or a brand of toiletry, I don’t like to try out a new one. Ditto with hairdressers. My haircut will be done by none other than our friendly neighborhood barber Babu in Trivandrum.’

‘You can’t speak Viet Namese. If you feel you need a haircut a month later, you’ll have to seek Hari’s help to take you to the saloon. Better go now,’ Bhawani again tried to persuade me.

I did a quick mental math: my last haircut was about a month before we left India. We had been in Vietnam for a fortnight and would not be back in India until after two months. Three months and a half would be too long a gap between two haircuts, I reckoned. I was not too sure I’d be able to last that long. Yet, I stuck to my guns and said, ‘No haircut for me in Viet Nam.’

Bhawani left it at that.

When Hari got ready in the evening for the visit to the hairdressers, I too jumped into the car. Let me see how the place looks like, I thought.
The car took us through broad streets, past the sports complex to Ngoc (pronounced ngop), a saloon. Hari parked the car and in we went.

There were over a dozen reclining chairs, all with soft upholstery. A third of them were unoccupied. Hari sat on one of them.

I surveyed the premises. One of the attendants was a young man, all the others being pretty young things (PYTs). They were all smartly attired in black trousers and lemon-yellow shirts with ruffles and frills instead of collars. The white aprons the PYTs sported while on the job bore the legend ‘Ngoc – The Professional Hairdressing Artists’. That surprised me because though the Viet Namese use the Roman script, hardly any of them speak, forget reading and writing, English.

Some of the clients were in near-horizontal position. Two of them were lying with their eyes closed, being subjected to facial. Three were being attended to by PYTs with tiny headlights beaming from their forehead. Curious, I looked closer, to find the 'artists' peering into the ears of their clients, long slender stainless steel instruments in their hand. They were cleaning the ears of the clients. (Later Hari told me that pedicure, manicure, shampooing, dyeing and massage are all provided in such outfits.)

I looked for a visitor’s chair or the area where clients would wait, but found none. Hari said, ‘You can sit on one of the vacant chairs. You need get up only if a customer comes and finds he has no free slot.’ I complied.

A little while later, one of the PYTs came to me and asked me something. Realising that what I said in reply would not matter (for, she would not understand me), I nodded. She switched on the trimmer and went about her job. In less than ten minutes, I was done. I looked at Hari's chair. Though he had started early, it was still in the work-in-progress stage.

My attendant returned, with the headlight and other gears and motioned me to another chair. I had no intentions of yielding to further ministrations by her and conveyed the idea to her by putting on my footwear and stepping out.

When we returned home, Bhawani was surprised that despite all my protestations, I really had had a haircut, after all. Before I could say anything in defence, Hari said, ‘When the PYT at the saloon proposed, Daja could not say ‘No’ to her!’

‘That is an old technique even the gods used to employ. Remember Devendra assigning the celestial dancer Menaka the duty of disrupting the penance of Vishwamitra?’

I am not sure if it was Radhika or Bhawani who said that. All I know is that the joke was at my expense.

National Holidays

When I was posted to Patiala in the early 1990's, everybody was against taking my family along and risking their lives because Punjab was grappling with the terrorist problem. Ours is a close-knit family and we were not used to long spells of separation. My wife and kids would not have agreed if I had heeded those warnings. NOr would I be happy away from them. So I paid no heed to attention to the advice of my well-wishers. (I must add that the five years I spent there were the best years of my life, the ones I cherish most even today.)

Thus it was that we came to stay in a well-appointed bungalow in Punjabi Bagh, a respected residential locality. The kids were admitted in the Kendriya Vidyalaya and my wife found herself a job in the Our Lady of Fatima High School and Convent. We were totally new to Punjab, but settled down in no time.

Life was placid, though occasional gunshots and news of violence did wake us up at times. One thing we missed was my friends and relatives in Kerala. We were in splendid isolation. In fact, there were hardly ten Malayali families in the whole of Patiala, not reckoning those in the cantonment who were a community unto themselves.

We were therefore delighted that Ipe would be driving down to spend the weekend with us. Ipe was an old friend and colleague. He was the life of the party. My family had, to borrow a term rom the Theory of Sets in Mathematics, a one-to-one correspondence with his. My wife Bhawani and Ammini were good friends. In fact, they were at the same stage of pregnancy at one time. Which meant that Hari and Miriam were of the same age. Their respective siblings Gautam and Anu too were contemporaries. Naturally, we were all looking forward to their visit.

They arrived in the evening on a wintry Saturday . We had a great time together, a few drinks, jokes, fun, games and dinner.

The next morning, after a late breakfast, we decided to go for a drive in the 'city'. Hari, then 12 years, was eager to be the guide for the 'conducted tour'. As the car traversed the roads of Patiala, he would point out to structures old and new and identify and describe it to the visitors. That is the Moti Bagh Palace' housing the Netaji Institute of Sports, on your left is the Rajindra Hospital, inside that wooded area is the Gymkhana Club, the road on the left leads to the Dukh Niwaran Gurdwara, he would go on and on. My driver, Gurnam Singh, a native of Patiala was there to supplement the information and add some tidbits.

Pointing at an ancient building, Hari exclaimed, 'Uncle, look there, that is my school'. Ipe could not believe what he saw. It was a circular, single-storeyed structure, which hardly looked like a school. 'That is the Kendriya Vidyala?' Ipe was incredulous. 'It looks more like the soldiers barracks!' he added.

Hari affirmed, 'Yes, uncle. It is called the Leela Bhawan Palace. It has 360 rooms!'

Gurnam Singh was ready with more information. 'Yes, sir. Hari-beta is right. It was surrendered to the Government of India after independence. Before that, it was used by the Maharaja of Patiala to accommodate his concubines.'

'I have read The Prince by Diwan Jarmani Dass and know about the colourful life these kings led, but I did not know he had 360 of them,' said Ipe.

'Oh yes, one in each room,' added Hari knowledgeably.

Ipe did a quick mental calculation and asked, more to himself rather than expecting a response, 'How about the remaining five days?'

'Gandhi Jayanti, Independence Day, Christmas, ....' Hari did not know why the remainder of his reply was drowned in the collective guffaw of five adults.

A MAN OF LETTERS

During my annual holiday last month, I ran into Ramettan, the village postman. Shrivelled and shrunk, he was still trudging long distances for delivering messages. I had thought he had retired long back, for he was a postman even when I was in school, which makes it about fifty years of service! When I asked him about superannuation, Ramettan shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘A couple of years more to go.’

A genial soul, he was (and still is) Ramettan to everyone, man or woman, old or young, though the suffix ‘ettan’ implies seniority in age. He had started life as a peon in the elementary school and doubled as a postman – quite like his boss Balan master – a school teacher who ‘moonlighted’ as the postmaster. They were part of a large contingent of what was called EDL staff (Extra Departmental … – what does the L stand for?)

He had set his own practices and rules for delivery of mail. The first batch of delivery was at the point of origin – the post office. A small crowd would be waiting at the post office in the evening for the ‘Jayashree bus' to bring the mail bag. Ramettan would open the bag, separate the special mail (registered letters, money orders etc) for scrutiny of the post master. Then thud, thud, he would affix the delivery stamp on each of the remaining items – one thud on the stamp pad and another on the letter.

As the loud thuds resound rhythmically, the expectant crowd outside would swell in size. He would read aloud the names of the addressees of the missives. Among them, those present there would come forward to collect them. People were free to collect letters meant for their neighbours too.

The vigilant observer could notice a pattern he followed while putting away the letters that could not be disposed of at this point: they were sorted into a few heaps – geographically, one presumed.

Ramettan would first head for the banyan tree in front of the Krishna temple where people would assemble in the evening to exchange the hottest gossip, play cards or ambulate. Delivering the first bunch of letters there, he would dispose of half the day’s arrivals.

The peripatetic delivery would start in the morning. Other things being equal, he gave priority to money orders and registered letters. He knew that aged parents might be looking forward to remittances from their employed children and youngsters would be awaiting call letters for interviews and appointment orders. The small tip that recipients of these would grant him was incidental, but incentive enough.

Bookpost and newspapers (Hard to believe, but, yes, they used to arrive by post!) received the lowest priority in Ramettan’s scheme of things. These would be held over till some ‘regular’ mail came for the same addressee – or his neighbour. Many are the days when three or four issues of the Indian Express would be delivered to my uncle in a bunch.

Most of the letters in those days when money was hard to come by were postcards because in the trade-off between privacy and frugality, the latter won hands down. As he walked through the fields and through the lanes, he would glance at the letters. While delivering the letters, he would also announce, ‘Nothing to worry, Karthiyedathi, Raghavettan has reached NEFA safe’ or ‘Kanaetta, your grand-daughter’s milk tooth has fallen off.’ The recipients would not take offence at his having had a sneak preview of the letter before they could read it.

Not many were literate in those days and needed help to decipher the contents. Help was always at hand in the form of Ramettan. At times, his assistance would be sought for writing out replies – something he happily did. This role of reader-cum-scribe made Ramettan privy to the secrets in several families. To give the devil his due, Ramettan would keep all those to himself; he would be the last to cause embarrassment to them by broadcasting these at the village fair.

Ramettan was, to use an overworked cliché, an institution. He had a share in the joys and the sorrows of every family in the village. He rejoiced when Appukkuttan got an appointment order, he was crestfallen when he brought the news that the right leg of Kumaran Nair was blown off when he stepped on a mine in Kargil.

One thing, however, has always been an enigma to me. It is one thing to scan a postcard and be a privy to the contents, but how on earth could he know the contents of inland letters and envelopes which were sealed? I recall that one evening during a summer vacation, he brought an envelope and handed it over to my grandmother, telling her, ‘Santhedathi has missed her periods again. You must ask her to stop, Kalyani Amma. This would be her seventh child, right?’