Great Genie

In the comic hit, Vicky Donor, Anu Kapoor presents a pitchperfect portrayal as the bumbling infertility expert, Dr Baldev Chaddha. He waves a plastic spoon-like wand of sperm as a prop. But there’s nothing plastic about his heart, which is as pure Punjab da puttar’s as Rabba made it! Vicky Arora, Chaddha’s happy-go-lucky donor, on the other hand, is a direct throwback to the sperm count of Alexander the Great himself! That’s “pure Aryan or Aryaputtar (expletive deleted)!” as Chaddha proclaims in a hilarious sequence.

Guffaws apart, claiming direct descent from Alexander’s loins has other contenders in real life. As Frank Conlon explains in his history of Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmins, Caste in a Changing World, members of the community called Bhanaps — to which your columnist belongs — allude to ‘Greek genes’ in their collective genome. These ostensibly came via the doughty Macedonian ‘donor’ and his band of promiscuous soldiers! So, is that the real ‘secret’ of your columnist’s ‘Grecian’ profile? Again, sniggers apart, as Conlon concedes, “the story (however apocryphal) may be a source of legitimate pride, for it is in many ways a chronicle of a progressive and adaptive community whose ancestors often made great sacrifices to accommodate changing circumstances”.

Ditto for Punjabis; not to forget the game-hearted folks from “Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravid, Utkal, Banga” , to cite the epiphany immortalised by Gurudev Tagore in the National Anthem. Hail to the manysplendoured matrix collectively called India or Bharat!