T wo ongoing developments — the first being the moralistic chest-beating that’s taking place in the name of “safeguarding Indian culture” as Valentine’s Day approaches, the second involving protests by hairdressers’ unions against the word “barber” in the title of the film Billu Barber — combine to make for an interesting contrast.
On the one hand, there’s a puritanical yearning for an idealised past, a time when women would never go to pubs (because there weren’t any. Pubs, I mean) and unmarried couples would never canoodle in public parks; and on the other hand, there’s excessive political correctness and word-nitpicking that is very much a malaise of the modern age.
Humour is now the only reasonable riposte to the guardians of our morality. Hence, a new email straight-facedly proclaims that Valentine’s Day was originally a Gujarati concept. “It began with housewives beating up their abusive husbands with velans,” says the mail, “Instead of the dough, the husbands were flattened, and soon this movement spread to western countries who mispronounced ‘Velan Time Day’ as ‘Valentine Day’.”
Meanwhile, a writer friend, Nisha Susan, had little idea of the storm she would unleash when she began a Facebook movement (http://tinyurl.com/cpx79v) inviting people to collect pink chaddis and send them to the Sri Ram Sene office as a token of appreciation on V-Day. The movement has grown to astonishing proportions — there were well over 15,000 members in just the first three days — and Nisha tells me she’s worried about hygiene, because some of the more enthusiastic members have expressed a desire to send soiled underwear to the various collection points. Other members show commendable initiative: “I don’t have any pink chaddis,” writes a lad, “but I fixed this by washing my red pajamas with my white chaddis.”
By doing his own laundry, this boy shows a healthy respect for dignity of labour, which is something that may be lacking in thousands of barbers — sorry, hairstylists — in the country, if their protest against Billu Barber is anything to go by. The controversy highlights an ugly side of our national character, says a commenter on Rediff (http://tinyurl.com/cee8pb). “People of India never respect their work,” he says, “A person who cannot live life with pride can be called by any name and he will object. Forget ‘hair stylist’, even if you are called ‘hair manager’ you will object and say call me a hair director instead.”
All this is also a reminder that words aren’t inherently bad; what matters is how they are used. (Consider “negro” which was once used in positive contexts such as the “Journal of Negro Education”, but which acquired negative connotations through its association with racist hate-speech. Any of its more politically correct replacements might easily suffer the same fate over time.) Blogger Arnab Ray, better known as Greatbong, cocks a snook at political correctness by supplying a list of safe alternatives for phrases that might hurt people’s sentiments. His suggestions include “economic offender” for “pickpocket”, “aggressively appreciating” for “leching” and “Bachelor of Engineering” for “ugly-looking man” http://tinyurl.com/bjc6kg).
Still, “taking offence” continues to be the order of the day. “Where will it all end?” asks a member of an email group I’m part of, “I’m surprised the ‘Assocation for people nicknamed Billu’ is not objecting now to the name Billu being used to refer to a barber.” In keeping with the general mood, I propose the formation of a six-billion member “Association for the Human Species” that can collectively froth at the mouth and burn effigies each time any generic person is portrayed negatively in a film or book.
