Middle India

The word “middle” is amazingly versatile.  When I was growing up, my father used to write articles in the local newspaper which were termed “middles”, because of their position on the page.  Having just got on the wrong (or is it right?) side of 40, I can now blog authoritatively about “middle” age.  Marx and Lenin termed them the bourgeoisie and Mao had them eliminated, but there’s no getting away from the influence wielded by the “middle” class in society. From “middle” school to “middlemen” to being “in the middle”—the word is undoubtedly one of the most versatile in English, with a dexterity that enables it to be used in many places based on context.  Which brings me to the title of this blog post, which has nothing to do with any of the above.  The context of “Middle India” is exactly that—this is what sits in the middle of most Indians, irrespective of gender, region, language, caste or creed.  It is a unifying symbol that transcends boundaries, a widely and easily recognizable emblem of this great nation, spanning a demographic so vast (no pun intended) that it’s amazing as to why no political party has so far recognized its electoral possibilities.  It goes by various synonyms (tube and tyre come to mind) but the simplest ones are usually paunch, pot-belly or gut; it is, in other words, the literal “middle” of most Indians.

What is it about our race that makes us so susceptible to gravity that we resist the evolutionary urge to grow vertically and instead take the perpendicular route to being horizontal instead?  Is it our genes, so we can conveniently blame those who came before us? Is it our diet which—North or South, East or West—is liberally double fried and ghee-endorsed?  Is it our obsession with our children being “healthy” that effectively turns them into living McAloo Tikkis? Or is it, yet again, the Mughals and the British, who invaded our dal and chappati, rasam and curd rice-eating land and turned us into a nation of biryani and beer addicts? The facts don’t lie—Indians as a race have amongst the highest rates of coronary heart disease and diabetes in the world.  Yeah, right—tell that to the dhaba-wallah churning out chole bhaturas and aloo parathas as if his life depended on it, and ask him if demand for his life-shortening products has in any way reduced as knowledge about health has apparently become more widespread.  The answer will in all likelihood be a hearty guffaw, sufficient evidence that most people don’t believe anything they read.  So that brings us back to the original question—what makes us so likely to turn into lards and assume shapes for which new geometrical terms will soon need to be invented?  The answer, IMHO (that’s “In My Humble Opinion” for those born before 1990), is elementary—that is, marriage.

Ever seen anyone’s wedding pictures (of course not your own)?  These are usually quite prominently displayed in the living room in the beginning, almost as if they are a work of art.  They are (mostly) quite pleasant to look at, and if you’ve seen one you’ve probably seen them all—the smiling couple, formally sitting or standing next to each other (though today’s newly-weds tend to re-enact scenes from their favourite Bollywood tearjerker), relieved that they won’t have to go through any more match-making trauma.  After a few years, however, the pictures usually move from the living room to the bedroom or in many cases, are removed from the walls altogether.  Why would this happen, you think innocently?  Aren’t wedding pictures supposed to be family heirlooms and treasured as such, protected against aging even if the protagonists haven’t been so fortunate? Well by now, most couples (and again, that doesn’t mean YOU) look rather different than what they did in those early days.  The male has usually lost a lot of his crown, and made up for this loss by expanding his “middle” and assuming the shape of our very own naashpati (pear in English).  The lady, not to be outdone (this is marriage after all, the ultimate competition), has decided to expand in additional regions as well, which we won’t go into except to say that no wonder the sari is so popular in India, with its unique ability to adorn any shape or size.  All in all, the couple tends to soon bear no resemblance to those in the pictures, and it’s usually easier to just remove the offending portraits rather than have to face that most dreaded of all questions from innocent visitors, “Is that really you??”, in a rhetorical tone which leaves no illusions as to what the questioner really thinks.

If marriage equates to happiness (please get up from the floor and stop laughing so loud), then Indian marriages are certainly amongst the happiest in the world.  The happiness is manifest in the joy of sharing that first (but by no means last) bite of pav bhaaji , the slurp of the 20^th gol gappa (with extra paani as one’s birth right), the mandatory mithai on every occasion, the inevitable upgrade of the wardrobe at quarterly intervals that makes India’s textile industry a world leader.  No wonder that divorce rates in India are amongst the lowest in the world.  It has, IMHO again, nothing to do with arranged marriages, the joint family system, culture, or what have you.  It has everything to do with indulging in culinary pleasures (jointly, of course) without giving a second thought to the belt notch, in keeping the spouse ecstatic by making every excursion to a restaurant a gourmet affair (snacks, soup, main course and dessert are par for the course, with perhaps a late night ice cream as a digestive), in ensuring the kids are not considered “weak” by making them the excuses for our partaking in gluttony.  The way things are going, and you only need to take a walk in the latest shopping mall in town to know what I’m talking about, the Indian Middle will soon come to embody (bad pun again) this great nation.  “We are like this only” was never a more apt self-description for all those in Middle India.