Skip to main content

Pineapple’s Divinity

From an earlier Pineapple Fest - Image from Outlook


I live in Pineapple City. It is a small town which officially is a village. The tang of ripe pineapple suffuses the very air of the town whose real name is Vazhakulam. Trucks filled with pineapples leave Vazhakulam market every day to different parts of India. The annual Pineapple Fest, which used to be a grand affair, was thwarted by Covid this summer. But pineapples have remained ubiquitously visible in Vazhakulam like in the past many decades. You can see hundreds of acres of land cultivated with pineapple if you travel in the neighbourhood of this place. The local people will tell you proudly that the particular variety of pineapple which grows here has a unique succulence.

The boast is not an empty one, I think. I am not a connoisseur of any food though I can distinguish good taste from the bad like normal people. I think the Vazhakulam pineapples do have a difference. No wonder they have been given a Geographical Indication Number too, No. 130.
 
Part of Pineapple Market, Vazhakulam - Image from Malayala Manorama
The pineapple never fascinated me particularly whether of Vazhakulam or any place. Mangoes have remained my favourite fruit for long, followed by the humble oranges. But when I read in a book yesterday that the pineapple was a rare royal fruit in the old days and that a single fruit of that species was sold in the 17th century for today’s equivalent of 5000 pounds [INR 475,000], the pineapple – my next-door fruit – rose in eminence in the list of my desirable fruits.

The pineapple belonged originally to South America, this book informs me. It had reached the Caribbean by the time Christopher Columbus landed there. Soon the fruit migrated to Europe following the example of all other good things from many other parts of the world. But transporting pineapples was not quite easy in those days. Cultivating it was even tougher a job. So it remained very expensive.

Russia’s Catherine the Great and England’s Charles II were huge fans of the pineapple. The fruit became such a status symbol that people displayed it instead of eating it when they got hold of one. Poems were composed in honour of the pineapple. The guests of aristocratic evenings boasted about the taste of the tiny slice they managed to get with some difficulty.
 
Dunmore Pineapple - Image from National Trust for Scotland
The 4th Earl of Dunmore built a temple on his Scottish estate in honour of the pineapple in 1761. Christopher Wren, acclaimed architect among other things, crowned the south tower of St Paul’s Cathedral in London with this divine fruit.
 
St Paul's Cathedral, South Tower
The close of 19th century altered the fortune of the pineapple, however. Hawaii mass-produced the fruit and steamships carried them everywhere. The fruit became ubiquitous. What is common can no more be royal. Thus the pineapple became a humble, ordinary person’s fruit. It doesn’t occupy any significant place in elite evening parties. Nor will any architect think of giving the dome of his classical construction the shape of the pineapple.

The book in which I read these things – The School of Life written by a group of some 20 writers – says that “The pineapple itself has not changed; it is our attitude to it that has.” We considered the pineapple as the queen of fruits when it remained beyond the reach of the ordinary people. Economics has the dirty habit of controlling our loves!
 
Pineapples on sale at a shop in Vazhakulam
Industrialisation, say the authors, was supposed to give us good quality products at cheaper prices. Everybody would be able to afford quality now. But in the process a tragedy happened too: industrialisation has robbed “certain experiences of their loveliness, interest and worth”.

This has added to the superficiality of our attitudes and loves. We take things for granted now because they are relatively cheap. That attitude passes into our dealings with people too. Alas, into our dealings with our gods too. Into anything and everything.

As a result, sanctity has all but vanished from our world. Is there anything sacred anymore? That is the ultimate question raised by the pineapple. [Metaphorically, of course.]

I shall bite into the next slice of my pineapple with the renewed wonder of a little child and savour its divinity anew.



Comments

  1. This reminds me that aluminium was once valued more than gold too, before its mass production leading to its easy availability. Industrialisation does change our view of a product. Atleast their history can remind us of their worth. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That precisely is the point. I digressed just for the fun of it.

      Delete
  2. Wow I had no idea pineapple carried so much importance once upon a time. As you said in your post sir, once anything becomes easily available to everyone it loses it's sheen and this undervaluing attitude percolates into everything... That's what has happened and is continuing to... Everything is a commodity these days and therefore people have forgotten their erstwhile value!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Precisely. One of the curses of industrialisation is precisely this commodification and consequent devaluation.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

Dark Fantasy

An old friend of mine was with me in my kitchen when Amazon’s delivery man rang to know the location of my residence. He was the same person who delivered all my cat food subscriptions regularly. “The location shown is confusing,” he explained. “I haven’t ordered anything,” I said having checked my profile on Amazon. He delivered the pack promptly enough and I was curious to see what it was. X, my friend, was in the kitchen cooking the prawns he had brought all the way from Kochi, his own city which reeks of seafoods naturally. “Dark Fantasy,” he mused when he saw the content of the package. Someone had sent me a box of Dark Fantasy cookies. I’m sure there isn’t any person on earth who keeps dark fantasies about me in their (her, as alleged by X) conscious/subconscious/unconscious mind. I wasn’t ever such a charming person at any time in my life. “Dark fantasy,” X said refusing to believe my deprecatory self-assessment though he knew it was quite true. “You never know where ...