Satire | Going bananas in New India

‘I’m not sure why but the bananas today ripen way faster than the ones we used to get in Old India’

Most days, I start my morning with a couple of bananas. Having sworn off simple sugars within two hours of waking up, they keep me going until breakfast and coffee. But last Sunday, instead of eating the bananas, I spent the better part of the morning shooting them. Shooting them from up-close, shooting them from a distance, shooting from the top, from the bottom, in artificial light, in natural light, panning from left to right, up to down, and doing everything I can as a cinematographer to convince an idiot bot (also known as artificial intelligence) that the bananas they’ve delivered are totally different from the bananas I had ordered.

It was no use. The chatbot wasn’t buying it. “Mr. Sampath, we find that the product matches your order. We will therefore not initiate a refund or replacement. We are closing this ticket.”

“Wait!” I screamed, or rather, typed. “I would like to speak to a customer care representative.” But the bot had already signed out.

I had paid ₹300 for nine bananas—that’s right, 33 bucks per banana, inclusive of 18% GST, 5% delivery charges and 3% crony capitalism cess. You might be wondering: why couldn’t I just step outside and buy from the vendor across the street? I would have got a dozen for 90 bucks at the most. That’s what I used to do—until the rains came and turned them all into Urbanana Naxals, which look exactly like regular bananas but are not. They are reincarnations of Urban Naxals, and just as malicious.

This column is a satirical take on life and society.

Once a bunch of Urbanana Naxals—they always operate in bunches—makes up its mind to troll you, there’s very little you can do. Your only option is to consume them on the street, as soon as you’ve bought them, right out of the banana seller’s hand. If you make the mistake of carrying them home, it’s game over.

Empty promises

Gone are the days you could buy a dozen bananas and eat them over four days. These days, you buy a dozen, consume two on the first day, and on the second day morning you’ll find the remaining 10 swimming in a puddle of banana water. I’m not sure why but the bananas of New India ripen way faster than the ones we used to get in Old India. In a matter of hours, and without any notice, they can lose the beautiful elongated firmness that made you pick them in the first place, and morph into damp tubes of limpness that disintegrate at first touch.

The worst are the ones that seduce you by pretending to be your best friend. They’ll be nice to you, and keep up an appearance of spotless bright yellow so long as you want nothing from them. They will pose with you for Insta Reels, discuss plans for a smoothie, and make tall promises about Viksit Bharat. But the moment you decide to peel them, they sense your intentions telepathically, and undergo a transformation. You suddenly discover that the golden yellow has turned dung brown, and if you go ahead and peel them, you’ll be greeted by mushiness so gross you’ll give up bananas for the rest of your life, as I did, many times.

Bad for the country

My unilateral sanctions never lasted because I needed the bananas more than they needed me. Bananas are rich in tryptophan, which your body uses to produce serotonin. If you live in Delhi, your serotonin gets depleted the moment you wake up and realise you are in Delhi. So you need a reliable source to replenish it, which is how I ended up ordering bananas from this quick delivery app and regretting it.

The app charged me for the regular-sized fruit, but sent me miniature ones—really tiny, I’m talking bonsai-level. They wanted video evidence of ‘wrong product’ before they would consider a replacement. But for some reason, the bonsai bananas looked rather large in my videos, no matter what angle I shot them in, and you know the rest of the story. Yet another instance of Urbanana duplicity.

This growing trend of rogue bananas, if you want my honest opinion, does not portend well for the country. As Aristotle observed in his classic ‘Poetics of the Banana’: “Misbehaving bananas are the surest sign that a nation’s rulers are misbehaving.” Fellow has a point. Forget about collapsing bridges, leaking exams, and tainted laddoos. If you can’t even trust your country’s banana, that’s major food for thought. I mean, are we a banana republic or what?

The author of this satire, is Social Affairs Editor, ‘The Hindu’.

sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

Published - September 27, 2024 01:14 pm IST