Actually that's NOT the title of the article, but it is so unlike anything I have read By Farrukh Dhondy, the original title does not do the piece justice.
And it does figure in the tale
Flatness will prevail
By Farrukh Dhondy
An Indian domestic airline asks its passengers to comment on their service as we get close to landing. Retaining a residual anti-capitalist bent (while taking advantage of all that it has to offer — like Lalu Prasad Yadav, who I believe refuses to drink Coca-Cola) I normally refuse to fill in market survey forms.
In this instance, I had something valuable to say. While everything else on the flight was as expected, with delays and uncouth fellow travellers barging into the check-in queue, I took the opportunity to remark on my adventures with a paper-wrapped object that arrived on the lunch tray and was presumably a "toothpick." It wasn’t. It was a cocktail stick. I had come across this substitution before in Indian hotels and restaurants, the distinction being that cocktail sticks, the sort that pierce olives in your drink, are cylindrical and toothpicks are flat.
Inserting this cocktail stick into the offending gap in my teeth to get the damned irritating bit of sopari or whatever it was out, I dislodged a bridge or cap from its hitherto secure place on my gum.
I was convinced, though a court of law may take a contrary view, that had it not been for the cylindrical shape of the cocktail stick, had I had a real flat toothpick, I would not have suffered the said damage. It was getting a round peg into the eye of a needle that did it.
Some very wise person said that it is easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than a cocktail stick through the frail gaps in one’s teeth — or words to that effect. I agree. I thought I’d register my agreement on the market survey form. My natural politeness and good breeding turned the complaint, even as I composed it, into a "suggestion" for improvement of services.
I had the cap or bridge refitted at a modest cost and never once considered my legal position in this respect. I counted the penning of that suggestion on the airline form as the inauguration of the "campaign for real toothpicks" in India.
Now months later, nothing has changed. My "suggestion’ was no doubt treated with contempt. Or worse. Working in the Indian television industry recently has taught me that things are not quite what they appear to be, that statements should never be taken at face value and that everyone else seems to know these rules. So it occurs to me that the consumer satisfaction branch of the airline may even suspect me of being someone with an interest in manufacturing and selling flat toothpicks and trying to place my product with them, thus chasing cocktail sticks out of the tooth-picking market, consigning them to their function of piercing sausages and kebabs or lumps of paneer and pineapple at garden parties.
I console myself with the observation that campaigns of this sort have their gestation periods. Think of how long it took to liberate South Africa from apartheid or to introduce anti-polio vaccines to the whole population. So never say die. Flatness will prevail.
Now I must warn anyone who stumbles on the idea of manufacturing such flat toothpicks and selling them to these airlines or other establishments, that I have registered the idea with the Screenwriters’ Guild of America and if anyone steals it and starts marketing flat toothpicks, they will have to face the legal consequences.
While thus putting this particular commodity out of the reach of budding entrepreneurs, I offer them a free substitute. Flying into Mumbai on a domestic airline — it may or may not have been the same one — I was offered another meal.
I was on my way to Bollywood to sell scripts and stories and was respectably dressed in a crisp white shirt. The meal came with plastic cutlery and several rectangular plastic sachets, one of them blue, with a dry milk powder and the other red containing tomato ketchup. The red packet had a dotted line at the top with the picture of a pair of scissors. Any fool could tell that this was a pictorial instruction on how to get the ketchup out: Cut along dotted line.
Again, the same fool would know that passengers on planes are stringently searched and all scissors are confiscated before they board.
Scissorless, I struggled to get the plastic packet open. It was stubborn. I dug at it with my nails. I pulled it this way and that. I tried to cut it with the white plastic knife. To no avail. The more it resisted, the more determined I became. I bit the wretched sachet between my teeth and wrenched. It sort of worked. The ketchup spilt all over my crisp white shirt. My immediate instinct was the wrong one. I grabbed a napkin and attempted to lift the red blobs off, but this only spread the stains over my shirt-front. Horror. I felt what Lady Macbeth must have after she’d murdered King Duncan and couldn’t get his blood off her hands.
The plane was late and so was I. I wasn’t carrying a spare shirt. I stopped the taxi at a cash dispensing machine. The wretched thing rejected my in-credit debit card and fobbed me off with a message to contact my bank.
I had just enough money to pay the cab and a couple of currency notes over. I stopped at a shirt shop. The shirts were priced beyond my instantly available budget.
The cab man sensed my panic and I described my predicament. He took the spare cash and went off to buy me a T-shirt. He returned with one in a plastic bag.
I changed in the foyer of the film company before a rather bewildered secretary and chucked the red-stained shirt into a covered bin. In my haste I hadn’t checked the design on the T-shirt but determined that in this emergency I would stoop to advertising the logo of some capitalist designer.
It was only when I had it on that I saw, emblazoned across my chest, the question
"AM I THE ONLY GAY MAN AT THE PARTY?" Too late. I was being ushered into the conference room to face the waiting buyers. I still don’t know what they thought of my script.
Meanwhile the "campaign for accessible ketchup" begins and I surrender the idea of the easy-open ketchup and coffee whitener sachet to any enterprising inventor.
