Never upset an elephant in the room

“Do you find this logo for my health blog offensive?” I asked my wife with a tremor in my voice, as people today are very quick to take offence.

“What is this?” she asked, jabbing with her finger at the zigzag lines crossing a red, robust heart that also had a needle piercing it.

I said the zigzag lines symbolically replicate an ECG graph that shows the healthy beating and rhythm of a heart. The needle is a syringe, I said.

“Where’s the mask? asked my wife abruptly. “Your logo should keep up with the times.”

“You want the heart to wear a mask? That’s not very logical. Anyway, people get offended when they see a mask, or when someone asks them to wear one. Did you hear about the municipal marshals who were checking motorists to see if they were wearing masks, and got beaten up at a red light.”

“So, you are saying a syringe piercing a heart is logical?” she said. “And when I look at the logo from the side, the heart looks like a liver. That’s disgusting. A liver never symbolises health. It signifies over indulgence and bad health.

“Why do you need a logo, anyway,” said my wife. “Can’t you see how companies are pushing disgusting logos on to the innocent public?”

“I know what you are talking about,” I said. “Not a single person saw that particular logo as demeaning to womanhood, until this woman who had a lot of time on her hands, pointed it out to the police.

Now, people are seeing things in every logo and some have gone on to mock even the Amazon logo,” I said.

When someone said, ‘Hello’, to me in English the other day, I got offended. Wonder what he means by that. I said to myself,” I told my wife. “Why did he not greet me with the local greeting, ‘Namaskara’ ”.

“Maybe there is something in the water, or because of the polluted spices we eat that is making people crabby and so easy to offend. We can’t even take jokes anymore. We have comedians in jail due to some ‘offensive’ jibe at someone or something,” I said.

Even Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pointed out the other day that there is an international conspiracy to malign India’s tea. “Can you imagine, ” he said in the North-Eastern state of Assam, where elections are coming up soon. “They want to malign our tea,” he said.

When a British professor tried to malign ‘idli’ (the rice cake that Indians love) calling it boring, everyone stood as one (even member of parliament, Shashi Tharoor, who walks around with an English dictionary in his hand) and ticked him off and got everything from culture to oppression and lack of taste into the fierce debate.

Getting offended has seeped into every fabric of our societies. The other day, PETA, the animal rights activists, campaigned that using animal names as an insult, is insulting to animals and it demeans them.

Using animals as insults perpetuates speciesism,” it said. “Instead of chicken, say coward. Instead of rat, say snitch, PETA advised.

I am now worried that if I call my neighbour’s dog, a dog, it may take offence.

There is something strange going. Is the human race being controlled by bad-tempered aliens and we have acquired their characteristics? It is time that someone addressed the elephant in the room.

Oops, I meant the fat animal in the room. No, no, I didn’t say that either.

Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. Twitter: @mahmood_saberi