Of Aubergine and Okra

I recently saw a touching film about food love and dabbawallas But there was a strange vegetable mentioned there by the protagonist who is a Bandra resident aubergine Most Bandra people I know not the expats call this vegetable brinjal So why aubergine A few weeks ago I saw a very emotional advertisement of an airline carrier that had a boy visiting his mother in Kandivli who is preparing his favourite dish She referred to it as okra Okra Whatrsquos that I saw what she was cooking and realised it was the good old bhindi popularly known as the ladyfinger So why okra Illustration Devdutt pattanaik When you think about it you realise you are not the storytellerrsquos audience Your presence is incidental It is meant for someone who understands aubergine and okra a Western audience or maybe an international film jury For whom is a story told The language used by a storyteller reveals who the audience really is Multiplex films use language very differently from singlescreen films I remember an Oscar awardwinning film where the young Indian protagonist in crisis repeatedly screams out to lsquoVishnursquo But in common parlance the boy would say lsquoNarayanarsquo a more popular form of addressing God in the south where the character hails from The film was meant for an international audience who would anyway not know the difference between Vishnu and Narayana And even the urban Indian audiences who would watch the undubbed version would not know the difference So does this matter One can argue that the storyteller was not told by his research team the word preferred by the audience brinjalaubergine ladyfingerokra NarayanaVishnu One can argue that the character actually used the word and I am being presumptuous One can say that such hairsplitting differences do not really matter But it does reveal how sensitive is the storyteller to the audience and how true is heshe about the story itself I have seen a film by an Indian getting rave reviews in America where a Bengali woman is shown with jasmine flowers in her hair She was clearly created to appeal to the Western market which is clueless that the practice of wearing flowers in that fashion is more South Indian than Bengali The same filmmaker showed wedding in monsoon thus capitalising on the Western fascination for all things exotically Indian A great European filmmaker had made a film about the Buddha in which during a funeral scene we hear the chant lsquoRamRamrsquo The film claimed to be historically accurate when it came to sets Yet any historian would tell you that the chant could not have existed 2500 years ago Watching this I began to doubt the authenticity of the filmmakerrsquos earlier film on the last emperor of China Were the costumes there as close to reality as it claimed to be Were the sets and body language realistic or just Orientalist fantasy In ancient Indian storytelling tradition one is gently made vigilant about the gap between the words of the storyteller sauti the story katha and the audience shaunak Would the character in the story actually say what the storyteller claims he did Would the audience understand what is exactly being told by the character in the story Is the story being changed to make it more accessible All these points impact the story that eventually gets transmitted Not surprisingly the root of the word story katha is complex It comes from lsquokarsquo which is the root sound of interrogation whatkya whokaun whenkab where kahan and lsquotharsquo which means lsquoestablishmentrsquo Thatrsquos what stories do they establish reality But is the reality established true Must it be true Whose truth That needs to be interrogated The author is Chief Belief Officer of the Future Group and can be reached at devduttdevduttcom The views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper