The Art of Exaggeration
Somewhere among the beginning paragraphs of his novel A Passage to India, the author E.M.
Forster left behind a nugget of wisdom for the human race. He stated something
to the effect that much of life is simply too boring to be worth being written
about. That, right there was a truly underappreciated gem of enlightenment from
him. It was a gem because apart from incidentally being the truth, it also implicitly
explained the origin of the antidote invented by humans for such boredom: exaggeration.
In the 1990s, I lived in the eastern Indian city of Rourkela
Every once in a while at the plant, a day came along that
was quiet, and such exceptions were usually enjoyed and appreciated for the
leisure they brought along. Once in a blue moon however, such days gifted so
much of inactivity that it would verge on boredom, and a little extra gossip
through the course of the day went a long way to counter the ennui. The
increased dosage of gossip on such days was more than just a way of passing
idle time. It was almost as if the deprivation of the usual exercising of hands
and feet made people compensate for it with the overuse of their tongues.
It was a humid July afternoon. I was headed on my
scooter to work in the afternoon 'B' shift that ran from 2 PM to 10 PM. Sights on
the way of red flags and people grouped in protest, replete with symbols vaguely reminiscent of communist China or the erstwhile Soviet Union, reminded me that a strike
had been called by a trade union for that day.
The strike had been organized by one of the two dominant
trade unions that divided up the workers' loyalties among themselves. Those two
trade unions had to me always seemed to be at loggerheads with each other. The
steel plant management, the supposed foe of the working class, curiously seemed
to be a distant second in the enemy list of each. Workers on the roll of one
union were as a result not always enthusiastic participants in the strikes
organized by the other- so we usually had just enough staff to get by through
such strikes. The whole arrangement seemed to emanate a splendid whiff of divide and rule set up in order to protect the interests of the management.
Loyalty to the rival union wasn't the only reason for some
workers to ignore a strike call. Some others, still retaining good old-fashioned
values, were far too serious about their work and their moral debt to the
organisation to consider not showing up for duty at such times.
One such gentleman was a Mr. Zuberry. Of course, that was
not this real name, and I sincerely hope that the fake one I am bestowing on
him today will suffice to continue protecting his identity and, well, his good
health.
Earlier that morning, he had showed up for the 'A' shift
that ran 6 AM to 2 PM , in
order to put in another honest day's worth of work. Living close-by, he was
among the rare few that walked to and from the steel plant on a daily basis.
The sight of Zuberry approaching or departing with his conventional black
umbrella, which seemed to double as a walking stick too, was one that the
department's employees had become quite familiar with.
If at all Zuberry had encountered striking workers on the
way to work that day, he had managed to dodge them. His way back home was, however, not incident-free.
While heading out of one of the gates of Rourkela Steel Plant, he had run
into a group of protestors. "Management ka chamcha! (Stooge of the
management!)", someone shouted at him. Some other employees, stepping in
late for the 'B' shift, happened to notice that incident from a distance, while
they awaited their own opportunity to get inside the premises. To Zuberry's
misfortune, they carried the news inside the plant.
Soon after I had finished assigning the day's duties to the maintenance
staff, a colleague of mine popped his head into the door of the shift-office to
tell me the news.
"Did you hear what happened to Zuberry?", he
asked. "Yes, I understand he was
shouted at by some of the workers on strike.", I answered.
"Then you do not know the whole story.", he said-
with an authority that almost made him sound like an eye-witness to the event.
He went on, "A few men shouted at him, hurled abuses,
and one striking worker tried pushing him to the ground!"
"That's terrible!", I said, as I headed off to the
control room to request the shutting down of some equipment that needed to be
opened up for repairs.
At the control room, I announced to my friend, Satpathy, who
was in-charge of operations that day, what I'd heard. However, it turned out
that it was in fact I who was still unaware of the "full" story. So in addition
to his duty of running the plant operations, Satpathy also fulfilled the
equally sacred duty of updating me with the more complete version that he knew:
"Zuberry was shouted at, pushed to the ground, and thoroughly beaten up.
You know, the mob even snatched that umbrella of his, and used it as a stick to
hit him!"
Until then, I hadn't realized that this was nothing but
quite literally, a case of exaggeration at work. Each time the story made a
hop, it was acquiring some more spice. That dawned on me only when I heard the
next version about an hour later:
"You know, Zuberry was abused, pushed to the ground,
beaten up, including with his own umbrella. And when the beating was done, the
umbrella's end was poked into his posterior!"
I suspect thousands of years of human evolution have not
really made the human posterior particularly receptive as a parking slot for
the end of an umbrella. However, a few minutes is all that it seemingly took
for fertile human imagination to overtake snail-paced evolution, and make the
same part of human anatomy rather accommodative of such a possibility.
In no time, people eagerly starting subscribing to and
sharing the story of how poor Zuberry had endured a terrible ordeal at the end,
both of the incident as well as of his digestive system. Mentally conjured images now
abounded- of a poor Zuberry lying bruised and muddied, reduced to being a
pincushion for his umbrella. His very own favourite umbrella, which had seemed
inseparable from him in more dignified ways before, had been triumphantly planted into
him like a flag of conquest by the mob, to literally top all of his agony.
"Well, at least the story can't be coated with any more
masala than that, now!", I
declared with a wry smile to the person who narrated that version to me.
Looking back, that statement of mine was an act of
sacrilege. Assigning limits to exaggeration, after all equated to defining a
ceiling for the great human imagination. Who was I to disparage human
creativity thus? If ever anybody needed proof of its ability to stretch the
story a little further, we did not have to wait long.
Towards the end of the shift, I visited the control room
once more to have a coal mill taken back into service, after its maintenance
was complete. There, I learned of yet another update on the incident. I learned
that after Mr. Zuberry's favourite,
long umbrella had been misused in an unmentionable way on him, the crowd had
remained unrelenting in its anger and rowdiness. What I had not heard before though was that in all the
commotion, with Zuberry still holding up the umbrella with a part of his body he
could not have ever imagined, one of the attackers was reportedly seen trying to,
believe it or not, deploy the umbrella open.
Now that was, I think, stretching it a bit too much..
