Vissable Views

Archive for August, 2010

‘The performing flea of the literary world’, was an epithet accorded with some contempt and assumed by wodehouse with substantial glee. A strangely appropriate choice of words, for like the performing flea, wodehouse’s works never held many surprises for his devotees. Formulaic to the last , the story of boy meets girl and sordid aunts set in Edwardian England never lost its charm. But the astonishing output blinds us to the beautiful prose, intersperse with elaborate misquotations and intricate wordplay, the hallmarks of a master wordsmith. It’s been my aim to have the complete works of Wodehouse before I die, a fanciful  goal you might say, still it gives me an incentive to resist the temptation to fall on the nearest uncovered spike the next time I’m dragged by my mother on one of her shopping jaunts.

Everyone’s  a cheat!, well , the chicken kabab restaurants anyway. The stiff rubbery chicken tastes like cardboard marinated in spicy gravy and wrapped around a few bones by someone with a very bad grounding in fowl anatomy. A summary investigation by yours truly into these foul goings on reveals a serpentine chain of deceit, involving a chicken farmer, a truck with a busted crankshaft and a dodgy meat distributor. While I unravel this tangled web of kababs, a hungry mob bays at me to get the rest of the order and be quick about it, I drop the investigation, after all ones family clutching your  hair and spewing out orders by the second  hardly allows the use of the little grey cells.

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Not many people seem too bothered by the recession here. Indeed sometimes its hard to find evidence of it affecting anybody. As far as Indians are concerned prices have always been rising and always will rise. My father says when he was a boy he once travelled from mysore to calcutta in comparative luxury on the princely sum of 30 rupees, an amount lesser than a dollar in today’s rates, but a positive nestegg in my father’s heyday. Which just goes to show the astonishing rate of inflation in this country.  Like all right thinking Indians I blame the politicians, our potbellied knights in white khadi. But sometimes, when I am filling the bike with petrol and watch the meter ticking, I wonder if we could have done something to stop this spiral of fiscal ruin. But it only lasts a moment, because there is a honking noise and the guy behind me tells me to move on.

Its cold in the mornings nowadays, its like London on a bad day, drizzling endlessly as if someone up there has a leaky tap and can’t be bothered to have it seen to. Some people enjoy this sort of weather but you can have too much of it as well.  The coffee sits like sludge at the bottom of my cup, pure Indian filter coffee, boiled endlessly to give it a substantial kick and sweetened with just a bit of milk and sugar.  The people in the darshini, a sort of vegetarian breakfast diner unique to south india mill around in groups. Most are just octogenarians fresh from the laughter club behind the temple, others are students waiting for their bus to college.