Never since the heady days of the freedom struggle has the country been as united as it is today. In those days, the unfurling of the tricolour brought tears to the eyes of every Indian. Today, the price of onions has the very same effect. Mention the onion to any red-blooded citizen and kuch kuch seems to hota hain - the chest heaves, a deep exhalation of breath follows, and emotions of every description suffuse the face.Every conversation in every bus and train, in every chowk and nukkad, within every class and caste, in every restaurant and club, in fact in every public space where one person encounters another in this country of 3,287,263 sq km inevitably veers around to the price of onions. It could be a conversation on Durkheim or Dunkel, on aeronautics or art, it doesn't matter. At some point, there is the inevitable pause, followed by the inevitable sigh of despair and the inevitable observation about the price of onions.I would even say that the price of onions has fundamentallychanged the manner we Indians now relate to the world around us. A doctor taking the blood pressure reading of a patient suffering from chronic hypertension no longer says that the poor man has a reading of 210 mm Hg systolic and 100 mm Hg diastolic. He just whispers, ``Rs 70 per kilo.'' It amounts to the same thing.Lovers no longer wax eloquent about roses being red and violets being blue and inanities of this kind. Instead, they describe their everlasting adoration for the objects of their desire in terms of 60-kg boris of pyaas or vengayam (as the case may be). What's more, chartered accountants no longer spent time telling their clients how they can convert black money into white, or reveal a Swiss bank account without incurring tax liabilities. These days their expertise lies in advising worried clients on how they can legitimately account for the two and half kilos of pink onions that have been stashed away in some bank locker somewhere.Then take the average society hostess. She no longer takespride in having served caviar from Russia at her last do. It suffices to reveal, with studied casualness, that the onions in the salad were genuinely Russian. As for bridegrooms, they no longer burn their wives for not having brought a colour TV and a refrigerator as part of the dowry, but if the promised five kilos of Iranian onions don't make their appearance within a week of the ceremony, it's out with the kerosene can.A great deal of daylight time is also spent discussing where somebody's sister's nephew's girlfriend's mother got onions for Rs 18 a kilo from a particular mandi on the Ambala-Chandigarh highway, and whether green papaya sliced fine and lightly boiled can pass for the genuine article in a salad.As usually happens in situations of national crises, everybody but everybody has an opinion on what should be done to bring down the price of onions. Some hotheads want to call in the army to fight the traders in hand-to-hand combat, others more reasonable suggest that the pesticide peopleshould be requisitioned to fumigate them out of the woodwork.Economists have for the last few months forgotten frivolous concepts like the GDP or the poverty line. They are busy expending hour after hour working out three-pronged, four-pronged and five-pronged strategies to peg the price of onions. After working out complicated sums involving the wholesale price index, the money supply growth percentage and the fiscal deficit, they come to the startling conclusion that the onion hoarder is hoarding onions - something their wives could have told them months ago.The more public spirited among us have already set up neighbourhood samitis and those who have signed up in solidarity are now enjoined to contribute one onion to the National Relief Fund. Some Gandhians among them have called for a boycott of the vegetable in the true spirit of swadeshi, while others have led processions reliving the Dandi March - to their own backyards and sown the onion seeds of freedom, hoping no doubt to harvest their ownonions in time and defy the monopoly of the trader-politician combine.Now what, you may ask, has all this got to do with the price of potatoes? Well, everything. But that's another story.
