Milkshake

I suppose it is just typical of being an ex-pat that I vacillate between feeling impatient with India and wanting to stick up for it around other foreigners. No one is allowed to complain about this place but me!

Last week I overheard someone complain to a waiter about the lack of ice cream in her milkshake. One of India’s culinary quirks is that, unless you request otherwise, a milkshake doesn’t have ice cream in it. (I think the default shake is made from a sort of malt-powder and heavy cream. And, in further random speculations, perhaps this is because of the relatively patchy quality of refrigeration or because India’s “pure-veg” dieters, like the Jainists, don’t usually eat ice cream, since it contains gelatin. Which is made from horse hooves, in case you didn’t know.) In particular there was a lady at the Hilton who declared that ice cream is part of “what a milk shake is.” Not so fast lady! Granted, some things are not culturally relative (speed of light, core human rights, swooningly delicious qualities of tandoori naan) but surely every people has the right to define the milkshake for themselves? Why not just ask the waiter for ice cream instead of loudly dressing him down? Why get all high-and-mighty as though you have unique knowledge of the urtext properties of dairy-based desserts?

Exhibit 2: this column by Hendrik Hertzberg (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2008/04/hello-kali.html) where he gripes that Indian English isn’t that good despite most of the languages being Indo-European. (A misstatement which 30 seconds on Wikipedia could have corrected.) I hope Mr. Hertzberg knows 2 or more alphabets if he is going to be gripping about Indian English. And he posts this music video in Tamil where someone has added “English” subtitles – though, to both his credit and his shame, he wasn’t able to figure out that the singing wasn’t in English at all. Some of the homophonic subtitles are pretty raunchy, so the net effect is “your weird language sounds like a bunch of bad porn dialogue.”

But, speaking of pornographic images: for the last week of March I was in Orissa, home to several hundred Hindu temples. The World Heritage temple (“the sun temple”) is a good one to go see because at one point it was heavily damaged in a typhoon. As a result, the gods were removed and the temple isn’t in use as a pace of worship. I really don’t feel so great about going to a temple while other people are trying to actually be religious there—I feel I probably detract from the mystical ambience, what with my sweaty, dirty camping-gear-esque clothes and large camera.

The sun temple is also, as is reasonably common, covered in statues of people gettin’ it on. The standard “don’t be such an up-tight Westerner” explanation for this is that Hinduism embraces all aspects of life instead of being all prudish about sex and that this is a sun temple=creation =scenes of procreation. Which does raise the question of why there aren’t any other procreation-related aspects of life depicted—like agriculture or, indeed, children. There is another theory that the pictures were a sort of instruction manual for the all-male brood of Brahmins being raised at the temple. I’m not totally sure about that, since much of what the, shall we say, unusually proportioned stone statues are doing is not strictly realistic.

Doctrinal issues aside, the interaction of the racy temple architecture and the more-than-middle-aged local tour guide was highly reminiscent of health class, where you just don’t know quite what facial expression you should be adopting. The oddest moment being when the guide explained that many people come to the temple from all over Europe and they tell him that this next statue is “69. Very important position there. Very important.” I challenge you to think of an appropriate response to that remark.