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Witerati | Barsaat ki baat
In these times of monsoon moodiness, rain vocabulary may call for (c)ouching in political correctness
It’s raining cats and dogs. Except that it really isn’t. Except that there are parties that could take exception to it.
This is thus a phrase that in present times of political correctness calls for cur-tail.
Either the cats could mind it or the dogs. For, it’s neither been raining in parts of the parched north, nor would current-day cats and dogs relish redundant proverbial allusions in times of monsoon deficit.
The other day we found our kitties contemplatively looking out of the window. They stared out in a state that methinks could be described better as looking under the weather.
Their concern indeed the weather. Global warming.
Come to think of it, cats and dogs would be fully justified were they to petition linguists to challenge the lexical validity of the phrase “raining cats and dogs” in this age of global warming, rain deficits and monsoon mood swings.
The mood swings of the monsoon but bring us to the matter of brollies.
Hollywood and Bollywood have scripted their own odes to immortalise the ubiquitous umbrella.
Fiction isn’t far behind, with Ruskin Bond’s fabled ode to the ‘Blue Umbrella”.
Of rain in Spain & speaking plain
From Hollywood, an all-time favourite remains the fashioning of the humble brolly into a style statement by Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady”.
“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” Doolittle diva catapulted to cult status the parasol by parading it as a pret prop.
Bollywood, too, has dished out its “Little” bit to imbue fifteen minutes of fame upon umbrellas of many a hue. Be it the lilting lyrics of the Vinod Mehra-Moushumi Chatterjee song “Chhatri naa khol udd jayegi” to the iconic big black umbrella of the rain sequence from the Nargis - Raj Kapoor starrer “Shree 420” to the contemporary twist courtesy Kareena-Aamir Khan’s “Zoobi Doobi” in ‘3 Idiots”, the brolly has travelled far.
So has brolly etiquette.
In days of yore, there used to be an antiquity parked in the portico or in a nook just beyond the main door.
The umbrella stand. A tall wooden stand that used to double up as a parking place for many a hat and all that.
Brollies of all colours, shapes and sizes used to adorn this relic of the Raj. And there were boundaries nobody crossed.
This meant never trotting off with another’s umbrella, by hook or by nook.
It, therefore, came as a surprise, as much as a subject of surmise, when a venerated defence veteran, given to parking his brolly on a club’s high stand, recently found it missing.
The mouse brown brolly wasn’t that much of a beauty to have proffered temptation in terms of trims.
“Who would want to flick such a boring brown umbrella!”
The curious case of When Folly Met Brolly.
Of being a boring brolly
This casual remark was a telling comment about the sex appeal of umbrellas.
Brolly Quotient. BQ.
Tweeple, too, can be akin to umbrellas.
There’s a tribe of Tweeple that may not be lookers – the Plain Jane like the boring brown or black brolly – but they are the solid, though staid, ones that give cover and protect on a rainy day.
The other breed is like those frilly, flashy new-age umbrellas – the Barbie pinks to the loud Rajasthani palettes, the circus and beach prints to the rain doodle art brollies – all great lookers. Alas, just when you need them most, off they fly.
The curious case of brollies that’re Gone With the Wind.
