Opinion Smell the socialism

The British were quite mad about commemorating this and that with tea services and perfumes. Coronations were marked by little phials that now command ridiculously high prices at auctions. The last commemorative was a very cheesy bottle issued to mark the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana. Estee Lauder created a perfume with a limited edition of 150 phials to commemorate the 50th year of Harrods. Even communism and the Cold War occasioned commemorative perfumery. In 1975, Tass reported that Moscow’s New Dawn perfume factory had released a fragrance named “30”, to mark three decades of the defeat of fascism and “Epas”, from the Russian initials of the phrase “experimental flight of Apollo and Soyuz”, to mark a signal collaboration in space. It’s not known how these political odours did in the market.

With precedents of such excellent pedigree, what’s so laughable about a cow-belt politician hoping to smother criticism of his government with a dash of home-made socialist fragrance? The alternative would have been to commission YSL to customise its popular fragrance Opium into a new brand. It could have been named Ghazipur, the opium processing centre of the East Indian Company in UP. But for the SP, that would have been alarmingly capitalistic.