It's Chavan versus Paan

Ashok Chavan, the chief minister of Maharashtra, wants railway officials to penalise paan-chewers, who spit on (and inside) our newly-painted 'new age' local trains. Watching this exercise should be fun, considering Asians decided to start chewing dried seeds of the Areca palm a few thousand years before Jesus Christ made his debut at a local temple. If a few hundred reports from the International Agency for Research on Cancer couldn't convince us to chew on something safer, it will be amusing to see how Chavan's deputies rise to the task. Last time I checked, Mantralaya wasn't exactly paan-free either. Having said that, to revile our many chewers is easy, given the irreverence with which they turn our filthy cities into filthier ones. The saddest thing about this state of affairs though, is how a custom once restricted to the aristocracy has regressed into the shameful act we know so well. Back when labour was cheaper, India's royalty would treat the act of paan-chewing with an inordinate amount of respect. Trained attendants would pick ingredients carefully, cover selected betel leaves with a shaal-baaf (the familiar moist red cloth still favoured by paanwallas, only much cleaner), create perfect triangles called gilourees, add beaten silver leaf and place them in intricate metal paan daanis. That done, they would stand by with elaborate spittoons, waiting for their masters to commence chewing. Compare that to our hole-in-the-wall vendors, plastic boxes of condiments, stacks of barely washed leaves and overflowing buckets, and you begin to see why walls, lamp posts, staircases and brand new trains change colour in a hurry. Why we haven't been able to curb this is a mystery, given the ingenuity that has long made a stereotype of us in the West. All we have tried so far is the strategic placement of gods and goddesses ufffd something compulsive paan-chewers ignore with impunity. Why haven't we deployed modified electric fences, guaranteed to give these salivating freaks a mild (but unpleasant) shock? Why haven't the Senas attacked this deliberate insult to the soil of which they claim to be sons? Why haven't our much-eulogised IIT graduates ignored the possibility of a colourless paan? Then again, even if we manage to wean Mumbaikars from the leaf, how will we keep the Assamese from their Tamul or Malayalees from their Murukkan? We've been chewing ufffd and, presumably, spitting out ufffd betel leaves since before Mohenjo-daro rose from the dust. In the battle of Chavan versus Paan, my money is firmly on the leaf for now.