Getting sophisticated about drinking

If you’ve seen upwardly mobile Indians lately – which is a roundabout way of saying if you’ve kept your eyes open lately – you would have noticed how incredibly sophisticated they have become. They drive fancy cars, wear cool eyeshades that match their Bermuda shorts, bark out Americanisms like “cut to the chase” and even play golf. But the area where their progress from crudeness to elegance has been breath-taking is their attitude and behaviour towards alcohol. If you throw your mind back twenty years, you will recall that drinking used to be considered wicked in India, much in the way that gambling was. The two vices were always linked in my mind, probably because the Hindi movie villain would invariably plan devious plots at the gambling table with a glass in his hand (and Monica standing seductively at his side). My mother would lecture me on the evils of alcohol while my father nodded in sage agreement, undeterred by the drink in his hand.

In those days, Indians started drinking when far away from their parents, relatives and well-wishers, usually in the college hostel. And they developed the habit in a quiet, unobtrusive – one might even say furtive – manner, devoid of any ostentation. They usually indulged in the activity with friends at a bar. And they did not consider stocking the stuff at home where it would be visible in broad daylight.  On the rare occasions that they hosted a ‘wet’ party at home, they would serve their guests from the single bottle purchased on the way home from office, about an hour previously. And the bottle was invariably either Old Monk Rum or Bagpiper Whisky: the only choice that the guests had was the amount of water and ice they wanted with the drink.

Amul: the invaluable Kurien legacy

Dr Verghese Kurien, the man behind Operation Flood, passed away on 9^th September 2012 at the age of 90. In 1949, Kurien began the transformation of the dairy co-operative model in Anand into a nationwide institution. Thanks largely to him, India is the biggest producer of milk today. Many Indian prime ministers have recognized Kurien’s contributions, from Jawaharlal Nehru who inaugurated the first dairy “factory”, to Lal Bahadur Shastri who made Kurien chairman of the National Dairy Development Board for his “extraordinary and dynamic leadership”, to Manmohan Singh who described him as an icon of India’s cooperative movement and the dairy industry. In 1989, when Dr Kurien was awarded the World Food Prize, its founder Dr Norman Borlaug called him “one of the world’s great agricultural leaders of this century.”

We are all proud of the dairy legacy Dr Kurien has left us. But we’re equally proud of the brand behind that legacy: Amul, which comes from the Sanskrit word amulya, meaning invaluable. Amul was at the heart of the milk movement, being sold in pouches, UHT packs and as solid infant milk food. However, to cater to a largely vegetarian nation that literally drinks milk, Amul expanded to offer products such as cheese, paneer, yoghurt, ice cream and shrikhand. But the product that has caught the fancy of the nation is Amul butter.

Perhaps the brand is so popular because of its mascot, the loveable, wide-eyed girl in polka-dots who introduced us to “utterly butterly Amul” in 1967. Since then, she has appeared on hoardings across the nation posing as a cinema actress (Madhuri Dixit for example), politician, cricketer, villager, artist, wrestler or just herself, and making tongue-in-cheek observations on subjects of topical interest. The nation waits with bated breath for the hoarding to change and reveal what the sassy girl chooses as the next target of her wit (revisit this ad campaign at http://www.amul.com/m/amul-hits).

Compulsive Clickers

“We’re visiting a museum this evening,” my Korean colleague announced grandly during a recent meeting in Seoul.

“What kind of museum?” I asked, excited at the prospect of perhaps seeing ancient Korean relics.

“That’s a surprise,” she said.

Aha! I thought, we’re going to the National Museum of Korea, known for national treasures like the Pensive Bodhisattva statue and the Gyeongcheonsa Ten-Story Pagoda.

Therefore my disappointment was acute when we entered a building filled entirely with gruesome objects: drawings on the floor, portraits with parts jutting out in an unseemly manner and sculptures in grotesque postures. It is called the Trick Eye Museum, the trick being to place yourself in close juxtaposition to each object and have a picture taken by your companion and then reciprocate the favour by taking their picture. These pictures will capture you doing odd things like picking coins being poured on to the floor by a character in a picture; standing on top of a huge can of Coke; interacting with an animal protruding from the wall; and eating food being offered by some idiot in a portrait. I had myself photographed in a couple of silly situations but on the whole, the Trick Museum left me feeling tricked.