{"id":2429,"date":"2019-08-21T13:34:29","date_gmt":"2019-08-21T08:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/?p=2429"},"modified":"2019-08-21T13:34:47","modified_gmt":"2019-08-21T08:04:47","slug":"small-aubergining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2019\/08\/21\/small-aubergining\/","title":{"rendered":"Small Aubergining"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Many years ago, before the &#x1f346;\u00a0emoji gave it a double meaning, the brinjal&#8217;s greatest nonculinary achievement was to be in the catchphrase of Meera Syal&#8217;s grandmother character in the BBC&#8217;s British Asian sketch comedy series,\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Goodness_Gracious_Me_(TV_series)\">Goodness Gracious Me<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The sketches aren&#8217;t online, alas, so I&#8217;ll summarise quickly for anybody who hasn&#8217;t seen them. The grandma, in any situation where somebody is buying something &#8211; informs them smugly that she can make it at home for nothing. All she needs is an ingredient, another ingredient, and a small aubergine. The situations range from supermarket shopping to fine dining, to Masterchef, and eventually to a heart transplant.<\/p>\n<p>I now propose that we honour this frugal grandma by using the term &#8216;small aubergining&#8217; to describe a particular sort of shopping. That is, to spot some sort of clothes, jewellery, handicrafted accessories, or similar on an international website; to then roll your eyes at the first world prices, and finally, to take a screenshot or printout of the said product to your local tailor, jeweller, or carpenter and have them duplicate it at Indian prices &#8211; that is, practically nothing. Bonus points, or the term &#8216;advanced small aubergining,&#8217; if you don&#8217;t even take it to a local craftsperson but do it yourself.<\/p>\n<p>For example, a British lady is selling <a href=\"https:\/\/www.etsy.com\/in-en\/listing\/695265969\/book-cover-diary-sleeve-planner-cover?ga_order=most_relevant&amp;ga_search_type=all&amp;ga_view_type=gallery&amp;ga_search_query=journal+sleeve&amp;ref=sr_gallery-1-6&amp;organic_search_click=1\">covers for A5 notebooks on etsy for $17.63 plus shipping<\/a>. They are extremely nice covers, but my mind revolts at paying that much. So I small aubergined these covers by taking an old pair of jeans to a tailor in Hauz Khas market, who turned them into four covers for just 500 rupees. Like so:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Yes, the notebook sticks out a bit, and if the cover could have had a zip or button or other fastener it would have been even better, but I&#8217;m considering this an early prototype. The point is that I found a First World Solution on Etsy, and small aubergined my way into paying Third World Prices. It feels amazing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many years ago, before the &#x1f346;\u00a0emoji gave it a double meaning, the brinjal&#8217;s greatest nonculinary achievement was to be in the catchphrase of Meera Syal&#8217;s grandmother character in the BBC&#8217;s British Asian sketch comedy series,\u00a0Goodness Gracious Me. The sketches aren&#8217;t online, alas, so I&#8217;ll summarise quickly for anybody who hasn&#8217;t seen them. The grandma, in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[56,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumerism","category-language"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-Db","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2430,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2429\/revisions\/2430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}