All that glitters...

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 5 February 2013

 

Just as poignant I feel about the anomalies in life and disappointed with the violations in the world, I feel equally amused by the eccentricities that are put on show by the quirky lot among us.

The kind of odd things we sometimes do tickles me, even when they cannot be dismissed as petty, considering the enormity of the situations.

Recently, there was a report on how a daughter in India decided to take legal action against against her father, who gifted her imitation jewellery for her wedding. Considering the skyrocketing prices at which gold is selling these days, and the parents’s desire to send their daughter(s) utterly decked up in gold that makes onlookers feels jaundiced in his eyes, this was bound to happen sooner or later.

I must admit that we Indians are famous for our love for the bling-bling. Baroque and Indianness are inseparable. I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked about the heavy neck chain that I wear as part of my mangalsutra. “Do you always wear this?” the Filipina at the salon asked me once. I nodded. “You are very rich,” she quipped. “Nothing about wealth, just tradition,” I explained.

But how much of our ornamental leanings is actually tradition and how much unadulterated vanity is a debatable topic. But the truth of the matter is that our cravings for ostentatious things have made us such hopeless freaks that a dad, and a well-heeled one in the daughter’s version of the story, chooses to give his daughter counterfeit gifts.

The same love for the gold has made Indian women good bets for those in the artificial jewellery business. No jokes, unless you are so savvy to see the real from the rolled one, anyone can easily pass one for the other. Two cases in point — I was at a shop recently looking for some imitation stuff (come on, who said I was immune to the bling fever?). As I was haggling and trying the ear rings out, the salesman asked, “What are you wearing on your ears now?”

“Er..diamonds,” I said, eyeing him suspiciously, and tightening my grip on the originals.

“How are these different from yours? No one can make out the difference, madam.”

I ‘bling’ed and felt like a complete idiot. So why on this good earth did I spend those hefty Dirham bills last year?

In another place, when I argued over the price of an artificial ‘uncut diamond’ piece, the guy dictated airily that I take a walk down the road, look at the things on gold shop windows, come back and tell him if I found any difference except in the price tag. The man seemed to know his business.

I went, and believe you me — certain things in the gold store looked not a shade more real to me than the ones at the artificial shop. Some even looked tarnished and junky. They said it was the antique kind and the seemingly lacklustre chunks hark back to the historic times. “Jodha Akbar, madam,” said the salesman, but his clever sales pitch neither made me feel like Jodhabai nor Ashwariya Rai. Wedged between two ranks of ornaments, I got seriously reflective about how the real and the bogus had overlapped in our lives and how the space between them had got so nebulous that only the most discerning eye could tell the difference. Truth and lie have become interchangeable.

Honesty now looks pricey and antiquated. Deceit looks easy and inexpensive. We wear glitzy masks to cover malice and meanness, and peddle ourselves as ornaments to each other. It suits our pretensions and satisfies our self love. No one can ever make out the travesty of our times because it has become so invasive and inseparable. I surveyed my life and wondered if on several occasions I wasn’t like the dad who gifted his daughter the imitation stuff? It was moot point to ponder.