All Trumped Up

Here’s the thing – I’m not a religious nut job, I don’t think everybody having guns is a good idea at all and neither have I married one of my cousins. I do, however, harbour serious reservations about evolution. But it’s not because I buy into creationism. I don't believe that a big, bearded man in the sky dressed in flowing white robes created everything during a particularly hectic week before resting on Sunday and then flouncing off never to be seen again. And yes, while all of modern science points to the fact that evolution really has transpired and that humans have been getting smarter over the centuries, something seems to have gone terribly wrong over the last few months. I don’t know what Darwin would’ve made of it, but how can you equate humanity getting smarter with Donald Trump being voted as one of the presidential candidates in the USA? And this isn’t some banana-republic type outpost in the tropical backwaters we’re talking about – the sort where mosquitoes, diseases and tyrannical dictators pop up with alarming regularity – this is the world’s most powerful country. And a democracy, at that – what good is for the people, by the people and of the people if the people themselves are that foolish?

To the outside world, it neatly fits in with the whole stereotype about Americans being dumb. While I’ve never been an advocate for all things American, I somehow don't believe that stereotype to be true. Sure, there may be a large number of Americans who think that we Indians go back home riding an elephant once we’re done with our call centre shifts, but you don’t get to be the world’s most powerful country if you’re peopled entirely by idiots. So I’d always assumed that the US was more a country of contrasts – that for every dungaree clad, tobacco chewing, shotgun toting country bumpkin that was sitting on a farmyard porch all day; there was an overachieving, academically and extra-curricular-ly hyperactive, Ivy league educated, sharp suited city slicker working 20 hours a day to reinforce that country’s capitalist hegemony over the world. It’s the same if you looked at that country through the lens of health habits – while a large segment of the population is obese, there are also enough super-fit people to counter act that and establish some sort of weight equilibrium. For every oversized-cheeseburger-eating, cola-sipping, eat-all-you-can indulging, morbidly obese American that gets wedged in the doorway, there is a calorie counting, carbohydrate eliminating, gym-going, fitness paranoid, wellness obsessed American who only consumes something if it’s decaf, no fat, low-salt, no sodium, zero trans fat and without added sugar. So yes, it’s the most obese country in the world, but it’s also the country responsible for every single health food fad from wheat germ, quinoa and kale to all manner of diets and nutrition theories that have fuelled enough paranoia, anorexia and insecurity to allow an entire industry to get obscenely rich on the back of dodgy health promises.

Of course, it isn’t just America that’s showing signs that evolution has wandered off for a gentle stroll downhill. With our chief political preoccupations in India revolving around Modi’s degree, the extreme threat to national security posed by left-leaning JNU students and the critical need to establish nationalist credentials by screaming Bharat Mata kii jai, we’re not exactly the brightest when it comes to understanding priorities. Clearly, it isn’t too much of a stretch to conclude that we’re all plunging headlong, arms flailing and voices shrill with screaming, into a dumber race.

On the bright side, though, this isn’t the case with our machines – they’re only getting smarter with time. For a long time, the world was a simple place where mobile phones were as heavy as a brick, could double up as a weapon of self-defence and could be used to place calls, send texts or play Snakes. And then the smart phone came along – suddenly your phone could send emails, allow you to browse the internet, order a taxi, predict the weather and generally do just about anything apart from brewing a cup of coffee. Not content with smart phones, the companies decided that everything should be smart. So smart watches came up, which would do everything already being done by your smart phone, except that you could also wear it on your wrist and really squint to read all that stuff. Then along came the smart TV, which allowed you to do everything that you could do with your smart phone, except that you could also mount it on your wall and luxuriate in the vastness of the screen. It was the era of convergence – your smart phone became your secretary, your secretary became your lover, your lover became your computer, your computer became your home theatre, your home theatre became your smart phone and it all got very confusing indeed.

My only complaint is that if instead of running about like headless chickens making everything smart, the companies could just focus on making one thing really, really, clever. You know, take the smart phone, for example, and turn it into a clever, genius phone. A phone so clever, it could warn you not to drunk dial someone the next time you’re hammered. A phone so clever, it would shut down automatically if it feels you’re being too rude by constantly checking your phone when you’re out meeting people. A phone so clever, it could stop you sending that rude email that you’ll regret the next day by pretending to send the email but not actually sending it. A phone so clever, it would notify pesky clients you’re on holiday even if you’re not. A phone so clever, it’s GPS could warn you if the restaurant you’ve chosen for your next date is not any good, or ask you to get a life if you haven’t ventured out for days on end.

A phone so clever, it would convince Donald Trump not to run for presidency.

Multigrain Madness

I think it’s the Multigrain bread.

It sat there this morning, staring back at me from its customary position on the breakfast table. The Spartan ruggedness of its rough, craggy surface hinted at a new era of deprivation and restraint. The bland, in-your-face brownness made you yearn for the warm, golden excitement of toasted white bread. The dry, almost parched sensation as you bit into it, just lingered in your throat and settled there; a sullen, lumpen reminder of the luxuries you’d forsaken in the pursuit of health. The broken, grainy texture as you swallowed the bread harked back to bygone eras of hardship and suffering, the kind you only remembered as black and white pictures in history books or on television documentaries. With all those people lining up in the streets for bread during times of great hardship like the World Wars or the Great Depression.

It’s the Multigrain bread indeed.

That little, brown square of doughy sustenance, resting innocuously on my plate, ominously symbolic of the healthy lifestyle changes that I could no longer escape from. Beaming with undulating pride, gloating with the aura of victory, suffused with the warm glow of triumphalism. Ah, so you’ve finally admitted defeat, old sport. You’ve joined the brigade of the health freaks – it’s a lifetime of multigrain bread and skimmed milk and green tea and meals that are devoid of joy and carbohydrates.

While it may look like I bear a sullen resentment towards Multigrain bread that led to the rant above, this really isn’t true. The truth is I don’t even dislike Multigrain bread. Sure, it isn’t as good as white bread, but it isn’t bad at all. There is an inherent, satisfying crunchiness that gets enhanced when toasted just right, there’s a discreteness to each bite that feels deliberate and definite and there’s a rugged, earthy texture, a grainy-ness as it breaks down between your teeth, which gives you an outdoorsy feeling that breaks through the urbanity of day-to-day life. Within the universal maxim that health and taste have an inverse equation (the healthier a product, the less likely it is to be tasty), Multigrain bread is really quite all right.

If I had to pick a healthy breakfast item I didn’t like, it would be Oats. Yes, that soggy, amorphous and lumpy mass that sits apologetically in your bowl, begging to be eaten before it coalesces into an even more congealed and inedible collection of misshapen agglomerations. Its white, characterless demeanour and spongy, sticky elasticity ensures that it’s almost always partaken in stony silence, with only the odd disgruntled snort breaking the funereal pall. Like a sullen teenager, it’s angst-ridden presence and air of self-loathing alienation sucks the joie de vivre right out of your morning as it glares back at you with insouciant indifference. So why eat the damn thing, one might reasonably ask?

It’s probably a combination of vanity and the fact that I don’t want to end up like one of those obese Americans that get wedged in the doorway each time they decide to get out of the house. I’m not in the carefree 20s any longer, and the general lack of any form of exercise has begun to make itself visible in the form of a slight yet embarrassing layer around the waist. In simple terms, it’s a paunch. Since I don’t dress like a gym-going Delhi-ite, it isn’t very noticeable to most people, but I know it’s very much there, lurking in the shadows, expanding at a pace so glacial you think nothing’s happening until one fine day it suddenly assumes an enormous proportion and it’s too late to do anything about it.

So I’ve made a few changes towards a healthier diet, although it all falls in the token gesture category. It’s the beginner, entry-level, lazy everyman type changes - so while there’s skimmed milk and multigrain bread, one isn’t going to the extremes of health bars, protein shakes and egg whites. While salad is attempted for the first three days, the biryani backlash strikes on day four and by the weekend you let yourself go completely; a decadent, hedonistic orgy of calories far outstripping any minuscule gains made by any early-week restraint.

In short, it’s the kind of selective giving up of stuff that wont do you any good at all, but will at least make you feel like you haven’t stopped living. At the same time, there is the satisfaction of feeling like you’ve finally done something about it, a sort of moral victory that you can bask in even if it wont make any real difference. The problem is one fine day someone might come along and tell you that you were wrong all along. Like it happened with cigarettes. Imagine this - it’s the 1950s, and even though advertising is fairly new, you can see through most of it for the guff it actually is. So you don’t fall for the macho imagery projected by the Marlboro man or the adventurous spirit of the Camel chap. But then you see a Doctor come in an ad and say that smoking’s good for you. I mean, it’s a Doctor, for god’s sake – and you’re hooked to the damn thing, until a couple of decades later everyone concludes that it actually is harmful for you and lung cancer is only a matter of time. How would that make you feel?

Every day, someone somewhere in this world decides that something tasty is bad for you. Eminent researchers and august organisations are continuously classifying and reclassifying what you consume into different levels of good and bad – like processed meats were recently reclassified by the WHO as being as bad as cigarettes and alcohol. And if this isn’t enough, studies are conducted with the express purpose of confusing you even further by saying that there’s good fat and bad fat, or good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, or that multigrain is pointless if it isn’t also organic and so on.

I’m no longer even sure. Maybe it wasn’t even multigrain bread. Perhaps it was wholegrain bread all along.