Columns: Shooting from the Hip

Columns

India Today, May 31, 1999
May 31, 1999

SHOOTING FROM THE HIP
Scent of India

Will deodorants change the way Indians think and smell?

By Ravi Shankar

A pretty young thing with dreamy eyes and shining hair is smiling to herself, thinking of the hunk who is going to take her watersporting. Her reverie is interrupted by malicious giggles. Two bitchy beauties are sniggering about the fact that her date is going to turn into a cold one. Voila! A deodorant is the answer, and they smell happily ever after. A new ad on Indian television, that too about a deodorant of desi make!

In a country which assails the uninitiated with its tempestuous odours, the Indian armpit is finally coming of age. Deodorants were once largely meant for the minority Indian: the urbanite and yuppie who bought his Lomani on the black market. The urban Indian landscape contains bizarre paradoxes of reality. Delhi's Hauz Khas Village has restaurants with fancy names like The Bistro, Mezza Luna and Jharokha where soft-skinned women fragrant with Yves Saint Laurent deposit kisses on the smooth cheeks of their escorts who smell of Davidoff as they link arms and walk from their cars to dinner, immune to the cud-chewing buffaloes nearby which are dropping dung while tethered to poles outside designer boutiques like Ogaan, Krishna ki Chaupal and Rina Dhaka. For the average city Indian, whose sweaty non-airconditioned summers are only punctuated by the clackety clack of ceiling fan blades odour has never been an important issue. No other country has public figures whose sweaty underarms, captured on television and camera as they wave to the audience, elicit hardly a shiver of dismay. We have learnt with Hindu stoicism to separate reality from the environment we live in. The corridors of government offices stink of urine, and the staircases of buildings are dirty with the time-stained stigmata of betel juice. Take a walk through Delhi's Lodhi Gardens, the landscaped grass an undulating carpet interrupted by boughs full of flowers and bushes crimson with bougainvillea and rose gardens redolent in the breeze, and suddenly you are assailed by the smell of piss; a crumbling period wall, part of its lush landscape, is stained damp by those who have emptied their bladders in passing. On the sidewalks of roads lie blobs of phlegm as people casually clear their throats while going about their daily chores. Take a morning stroll along a suburban road and you could step straight into trouble. The Indian burps in public (there is even a Sprite ad on it), farts while he makes love, according to women's magazines, and dirties the seats of public toilets. It is precisely for this reason a friend of mine refuses to fly Air-India. "I refuse to be a janitor on a trans-Atlantic flight," she huffs, "especially if it is a man who has gone into the loo before me."

When it rains in the cities and the cesspools disgorge themselves on to the streets, mixing with cowpat and offal, a pretty young thing with her hair glistening with fresh shampoo, an umbrella held in a manicured hand, steps daintily on well-shod feet. She avoids the stinking puddles with practised ease and skips over upturned garbage cans like an urban athlete.

And boy, does she smell good!

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