My wife and I are as megalopolitan as the next puffed-up Delhiwallah; well-read, semi-sophisticated and just snobbish enough to sneer at people who say aloo sabzi instead of potato-au-gratin. Yet I was intrigued by that bizarrely shaped gadget in the store window. I asked the missus what it could be, but she merely shrugged her shoulders. “Why don’t you go in and ask?”
So we entered the shop. It had that peculiar reverential hush which seems to embrace the loaded shopaholic while booting out the impoverished window shopper. I diffidently approached the salesgirl—who was studying her nails with great concentration.
“Excuse me,” I said politely, “that oddly shaped thing in the show window… what might it be?”
She drew herself up to her full height of five-feet-nothing and looked down at me, though how she managed to do that was a mystery.
“That, sir,” she said with unwarranted superciliousness, “is a nail-clipper.” And then taking me to be a total bumpkin, she added in Hindi, “Is se nakhoon kate jaate hain [These are used to cut nails]. Nails. Cut. Karte. Hain.”
If my face could have changed colour, it would have gone from swarthy to tomato-red. I mumbled something incoherent, fled the shop, and the missus trailed behind, giggling so hard she nearly tripped over her own amusement.
Once outside, I exploded. “Why the bloody hell do they have to turn a simple nail-clipper into something that looks like it is part of a spacecraft?”
The missus kept laughing and almost collapsed to the ground. Many passersby stopped to stare, some were perplexed, others smiled indulgently. Delhi is seldom treated to the sight of a septuagenarian losing his cool in the corridors of Connaught Place while his wife literally rolls on the floor, laughing!
This wasn’t my first humiliation at the hands of over-design. Take my recent encounter in the washroom of a fancy restaurant with something that we used to call a tap. You know—a tap? Turn handle, water flows out? Simple!
Instead, there was this stainless-steel swan-cum-snake with a neck twisted in a manner that would make any contortionist jealous. No handle, no lever, no knob, no nothing! Just a gleaming question mark perched on the basin like a floating dream. I assumed it was a tap, but the thingamajig had me baffled completely. I waved my hands under it, above it, around it—nothing. I even tried whispering commands in case it was voice-activated. Again nothing! So, I sneaked out of the restroom without washing my hands.
It’s not just objects that are fancified beyond reason. There seems to be a universal tendency to convert the plain to be pretentious and to fancify vanilla to become tutti frutti. Coffee is no longer a hot black liquid to perk you up in the morn. It is now ‘single-origin Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, anaerobic natural-processed, 92-point cupping score, hand-poured at 94°C in a classic 1:16.5 ratio by a barista who has a PhD in bean metaphysics’.
Our daily bread? It trespasses against common sense and masquerades as ‘heirloom-grain sourdough levain, 72-hour cold-fermented, scorched crust with artisanal scoring pattern’—designed expressly to be Instagrammed; but certainly not to be eaten.
My seat in the budget airlines economy section is sold as ‘an ergonomically sculpted personal cocoon featuring virtual noise-cancellation, curated ambient mood illumination lighting and bespoke mouthfeel snack synergy at a modest premium’. The claptrap means nothing because I still find myself wedged between two garlic-eating hulks, with my knees jammed into the tray table. The only ‘mood lighting’ is the flickering overhead that makes me look jaundiced. And the modest premium is anything but modest!
Even water has gone posh. Ours is the generation that drank water straight from the tap, except in summers—when we drank the cool water of the earthen pot, the matka. The only ‘filtration’ we ever encountered was the chipped Royal Doulton ceramic thing in some forgotten dak bungalow, occasionally sporting a dead beetle inside it. All that is gone—replaced by ‘glacial spring essence, pH 8.4, naturally electrolyte-infused, bottled at source in Icelandic lava fields, presented in mouth-blown glass vials with wax-dipped cork’. All for a price that could buy a small kingdom!
If the copywriters, those high priests of gobbledegook, had their way, a pencil would be ‘an analogue, non-replenishable, hand-held stylus comprising a narrow cylindrical core of graphite-clay composite encapsulated within a typically hexagonal sacrificial wooden sheath, precision-pointed via abrasion for tribological inscription on substrates’. Similarly, the fancified description of lipstick would be ‘a pigmented, anhydrous or emulsion-based colourant formulated with structuring agents like beeswax, emollients, antioxidants, preservatives, and sensory modifiers, precision-dispensed via a convenient swivel-up mechanism for optical modification of labial epidermis’. And a spade would never be called a spade. It would be called an ‘ergonomic earth-displacement implement with sustainable ash-wood haft and carbon-neutral forging’.
Sadly, fancification has turned beauty into a weapon against usefulness. Everything is elevated until it is unrecognisable—and utterly useless. To make matters worse, I must pay more for choosing the convoluted over the straightforward, the jalebi over the simple laddoo. And just when I think the jalebi can’t get more twisted, along comes the imarti—that double-coiled, syrup-soaked tortuous phenomenon—to remind me that pretension will always find a way to outdo itself!
K.C. Verma is former chief of R&AW. kcverma345@gmail.com