India is that kind of hodgepodge. A melting pot that puts the United States to shame. It has 22 official local languages (Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, and so on), yet the lingua franca is the imported language of English. People from different parts of India – close enough to travel back and forth in an hour – can’t communicate in their own languages, but can often get by in English. Although it’s not uncommon for an Indian to speak 5-6 languages as a matter of course, either (another way that India puts the United States to shame).
India is all cultures at once, and yet quintessentially Indian. It absorbs cultures, absorbs religions, languages, art, and whole peoples like a sponge absorbs liquid, and yet, like a sponge, doesn’t really change as a result. It stubbornly, admirably, retains its own distinctive form and function. Wring all of those external influences out of it and there, still, is India, incredible India (as the motto goes), baking under a sweltering sun and deliquescing under torrential monsoons and bedazzling you with the sheer, titanic, interminable hammer-hammer-hammering of its colors, and chaos, and cacophony. It can be exhausting, to say the least.
But today is not about making sense of India. Better men than me have tried. No, today is about trying to make sense out of something even more crazy and unbelievable than India: the insanity of product packaging.
On the flight from Delhi to Hyderabad I was a mite peckish, and decided to pay 100 rupees (about $2) for some cashews. Not a bad deal for cashews, I thought. What I got in return is the canister you see below – about 6 inches or so tall, roughly the diameter of a Pringles can, with a picture of a mad scientist on the front holding a test tube, which I can only assume holds synthetic cashews… or something.
On opening the canister, I found a plastic cellophane bag filling up about half of it, with the words “Nutty Gritties” (what could sound more appetizing?) inscribed on it. The bag seemed to be mostly full of – inflated to capacity, actually – a large amount of air. Sucker wasn’t east to bust open either. Tough little sumbitch of a bag, that made my fingers feel clumsy and weak. But I got into it all right. Looked inside. Then poured the cashews that were in it, back into the canister, so that I could see the proportion of nuts to the size of the package, like this:
There’s so few nuts that it’s not that hard to count them. About 15 or so nut pieces I reckon. That is literally all the nuts that were in there. Enough to provide scant cover to the bottom of the 6 inch canister, and still leave the reflective silver showing through over sufficient surface area to catch your reflection and fix your make-up in it.
If you’re the sort to wear make-up, of course. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. A man can wear a little blush from time to time if it brings out the highlights in his eyes, am I right guys? And when a man does, this little canister here will come in right handy, and you don’t even need to pour out the nuts to get double use out of it. That’s fine product design, that is.
Seriously, though… what the hell?
We’re all familiar enough with buying potato chips and finding they’ve settled into the bottom of the bag and the package is maybe half full of product, at best. That’s life. But this seems like that phenomenon taken to sadistic extremes. I mean, OK, I get it… you’re going to screw one of your passengers, not so much out of money (the nuts were cheap, remember), but by thwarting their expectations. That’s fun for everyone. We can all take a joke, and we all understand what it’s like to work in that dank cubicle in the Snack Division of JetKonnekt Airways day in and day out. We all need to blow off a little steam once in a while and have a bit of fun. But wouldn’t it be enough just to put together a plain white canister with “Cashews” in plain black lettering on it, with a small bag inside, to achieve this hilarious fake out? Is it really necessary to jazz up the canister with a robin’s egg blue label, and mysterious mathematical formulae scribbled on it, and a paper airplane flying through the background apropos of nothing, and a cartoon guy with a lab coat and a bubbling beaker, as if this can is holding some kind of blue ribbon prize science experiment? And then you get that open, and inside you find a bag pumped taut as a snare drum with compressed air, held together at the seams by superglue, and decorated with a clashing logo and that “Nutty Gritties” tagline?
The best part, in my opinion, isn’t even readily apparent in the photo. But on the canister, above the nutty professor (see what I did there?), above the purple “NUTS” label, is a strange phrase in yellow lettering that reads “Dr. Nutman KA Test.”
Well played, JetKonnekt cubicle flunky… well played. A veritable triumph of packaging. I am pwned.
Unfortunately, that moment of realization was only the beginning of this item’s meaning for me. I got to thinking about how it’s not every day that you get on a plane and come across the world’s most perfect metaphor for the end of civilization as we know it. Why, if we packaged everything this way, we could exhaust the whole world’s resources in a matter of weeks! We’ve already set a torrid pace of global consumption, but why settle for hitting the crisis moment in 2052, when with a little cubicle-inspired ingenuity, we could get there by the end of this year?
And then – and this tells you more than you want to know about my mental condition – I get to thinking about how the canister is a metaphor for me… about how I got this jazzy gig running programs in Asia, and country hopping all over, and living in China, and setting work plans for a couple dozen people, and spending a bunch of project money, and I’m thinking to myself in the way, way back of my head, um… are they really buying this? Because I am as insubstantial as a disposable snack wrapper, when you get right down to it. With as little inside as this canister. Who am I trying to kid? I guess I talk a good game and apparently I got a whole bunch of people duped into thinking they’re going to get a whole bunch of cashews out of me, or whatever the equivalent is in my professional life, and maybe if I keep pretending hard enough, they won’t notice the lack of payoff until they’ve grown tired of trying to get the package open and wandered off to look for a shinier package of circus peanuts.
And I get to ruminating on how fake I feel sometimes, like how it’s all the biggest game of make believe in the world, and we’re all playing it, and most of us have forgotten we’re playing and just got used to believing in it like as if it was real, and then somebody pulls back the curtain and it’s over, just like that. Because we’re all just making it up as we go along, with smoke and mirrors and a lot of fast talking and sleight of hand.
A veritable triumph of packaging. We’re talking Leonardo da Vinci territory, it’s all Metropolitan Museum of Art up in here, you dig? Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.
Let’s see, where was I? Did I mention that Naomi and Townes started school this week? They did. They were nervous. But they are having a good time. Uniforms, though. Got to get the packaging right. At least Townes gets to keep his precious hair.
“Mind Act Upon Mind.” Right you are, Fairy Bathroom Tissues. I think we can all get behind that sentiment. Mind act upon mind. And now I’ve got to go.
Surreal in several directions. This would have been a big hit in the Prophylactery in St. Petes.
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