Straight face

Our fashion editor, who has thoughtfully visited thewardrobes of the well-heeled and well-coiffured draws our attention to the fact that Indian men have never been as clothes-conscious as they are at present and this season will see them looking their best. There is a new range of cargo trousers for the casually casual, who cultivate the `Hey! Hang Loose’ look. But Reid & Taylor, which outfits the First Class because it only bonds with the best, has come up with a cautionary selling line: `You Pass This Way But Once’. To get down to basics, Jockey underwear has come up with a “festive offer” that allows you to save Rs 10 per brief in celebration of the bare necessities of life, no doubt.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the Republic, in Kendrapura, Orissa, to be precise, according to the latest reports, people are combing the slushy soil for something to eat like roots and shoots (delicately flavoured with grit). Reliable reports have it that cattlefeed has become something of a rare delicacy for human beings in these parts, with people forcing fistfuls of bran(normally reserved for their buffaloes that are now mercifully drowned in the swirling waters), down their gullet to stem the pangs of hunger. If they can swim and wade their way to a public distribution outlet, some 20 km away, and still have the energy to elbow the people who have gathered there out of the way, they will be rewarded with half a kilo of rice and a fistful of peanuts. This, the local administrators calculate, should last them a week.

When asked whether the airdropping of essential commodities was a successful operation, a local villager admitted that his wife’s cousin’s uncle’s grandfather had reported sighting a noisy bird in the sky some six days ago but couldn’t lay his hands on the largesse it had disgorged because the more able-bodied in the community had just kicked him out of the way.

The ultimate irony is that amidst this embarrassment of water, there is not a drop to drink. According to eye-witness reports, the swollen rivers, which every now and then yields a bloated body,promises a rich harvest not of paddy or maize but of diarrhoea and malaria. But there are no doctors on standby here because no one in these parts can pay Rs 400 per consultation.

As for the Cyclone Collection from Orissa’s hinterland, our fashion correspondent reports that most people are now sporting either the wind-swept or the damp look. Our correspondent asked a local villager, Kundu Jena of Khuranta, what he felt most comfortable wearing these days and he is reported to have told her that he sports the only clothing that he can claim as his own under the bare sky a lungi which he teams with a gamcha that has providentially escaped the wrath of winds blowing at 175 km per hour. Truly it is what the ads say, You Pass This Way But Once and You Just Have to Hang In There.

The last word on this tableau must however go to Mrs Dimple Saxena, as she jingles her Diwali harvest of gold bangles and flings an ace on the table during her Diwali game of `teen pati’.“This cyclone-wyclone is so unfortunate.Why did it have to choose Diwali time and spoil all the fun-wun?” she observes with some dismay. Quite.