Karma Cola by Gita Mehta

Author:Gita Mehta [Mehta, Gita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81463-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

You keep hearing the wrong song in the wrong place.

3

There was a time when people knew who they were and the occasional miscomprehensions were funny. In a Paris striptease parlor the non-English-speaking disc jockey used to play “St. James’ Infirmary” as background music for the saloon’s hottest stripper, a black girl from Martinique. While the speakers blared

She was laid out on a long white table

So cold, so dead, so fair …

the lady from Martinique, happily oblivious of the meaning of the dirge, would do her bumps and grinds to wild cheers from an international audience and an occasional double take from those who spoke English.

But that was way back in the Fifties when it was still possible to identify those who spoke English. In India anyway. Those of us who spoke it at all spoke in well-rounded sentences with more than a hint of Macaulayan grammar. True, the great Indian patriot Sarojini Naidi had publicly called Mahatma Gandhi her “little Mickey Mouse” forty years ago, but Dell Comics had not yet devastated our minds leaving us easy prey to the fractured prose of America.

By the Sixties, modulation had given way to acceleration. The explosive shorthand of America seemed infinitely preferable to the dilatory obliqueness of England.

By the Seventies, elderly Indian politicians who had never heard of the Mafia were demonstrating at Delhi Airport with placards reading “Kissinger of Death Go Home!” and a national Indian newspaper, with perfect linguistic confidence, carried the headline “Fag Hag Crooner.”

On the other side of the planet the world’s fastest speech looked for new words for slowing down. For twenty years we had burrowed in their vocabulary, now they scavenged in ours. Together with their own “laid backs” and “mellowed outs” went our Karmas, Sadhanas, Nirvanas, Tantras, and Sanyas.

With language as with goods you take what you need. The British took from us jodhpurs and bungalows, riding breeches and colonial cottages, words for more settled times. We had taken the idiom of modern America because it seemed to have no discernible provenance, a spontaneous verbalism that embraced the immediate as well as the immediate future. But now that America has taken our most complicated philosophical concepts as part of its everyday slang, things are getting sticky. Whose interpretations should be accepted as final authority—the Sanskrit scholar’s or the street hustler’s?

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