Three or four themes dominated advertisements in Kerala — wedding jewellery, wedding saris, luxury apartments and perhaps, consumer goods.
can you afford it?
The first two are ubiquitous, making you feel that you are in the midst of a gigantic wedding industry or life reduced to marriage at the expense of all other phases from living to maturing. Across big hoardings and TV advertisements, beautiful women, eligible men and benignly feudal parents promoted the world of gold and wedding.
There are even auspicious days for buying jewellery, something previously unheard of in a Kerala that prided itself as literate and rational. The sum total of necklace, sari, plush apartment and swanky car collapsed into one question – can you afford? No matter what you are, you have to pass through that hole. In Thiruvananthapuram, when I sought the balance due to me from a three-wheeler driver, I was roundly abused. He deemed anyone who wouldn’t round off fares to the next big figure and forget it, as base. Not even pauper; just insignificant! Seeing those advertisements, I understand. I probably failed the Kerala test.
matrimony, maternity and gold
Kerala’s conservative scrutiny drives home the importance of money. But is matrimony, maternity and gold all there is to life? I thought a literate society was multi-dimensional. In ageing Kerala, meeting people was an invitation to hear of their children’s careers, their addresses overseas and the grand parents’ trips to babysit newborns there; all this chat in big houses echoing with the voice of a couple of old residents. Kerala is becoming the mental equivalent of its plantations, where diverse forests gave way to one crop — rubber or tea. The State is gripped by some dominant mono-cropped imagination — marriage, money, disease, hospitalisation, plot of land and house in it, educating the young.
Where all this is headed — for instance, where the obsession to own a separate plot of land and build a mansion in it, where that will take everyone and land prices to — does not bother anyone as a question.
Already, there is little free land as relief from buildings. The lack of larger questions amazes against the backdrop of literacy. The purpose of education is to think in your times. That is yet a long way off in gold-obsessed, royalty-seeking Kerala.
Literate Kerala proves that everybody will become modern only after they have had their fill of living and reliving the feudal old. Why do you live? To command premium, pass the needle hole test. The arrest of the State’s leading cricketer shocked. Everyone asked ‘why’, although the why was all around.
money is the new nature
Kerala was hot this summer. I didn’t go to Kochi’s latest shopping mall despite its superlatives. Like plantations, if you have seen one mall, you have seen them all. But an article in the newspaper intrigued — it cited an ice skating rink at the mall and the availability of a foreign coach.
I thought of Leh, where ponds naturally freeze during deep winter and people skate, play ice hockey. As far as I know, in that land of ice skaters, they still don’t have an artificial skating rink to practise year round. Here was an ice skating rink in sunny Kerala. Interestingly, when Ladakhis first went overseas to play as an Indian ice hockey team, it was to the arid Middle East. Artificial ice in the desert and a skating rink in Kochi speak of how our lives are presently shaped — money is the new nature. Maybe that’s why the needle hole test rules.
The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai