Skip to main content

'Meat in the room'

A friend of mine gave me a DVD of In The Loop to watch recently.

It's a modern British political satire. The twenty first century inheritor of the legacy of the Yes Prime Minister and the Yes Minster series. It is cutting and irreverent as only the British can be. I guess there is something for being a race that swears by the stiff upper lip. My friend said that the film has been described as 'the Sistine Chapel of profanity'.

The film is set in the context of British and American polity and the build up to an Iraq like invasion.

I found an interesting concept there, that of 'meat in the room'. Apparently the Americans don't feel that a meeting is a meeting unless there are at least twenty people in the room. So Simon Foster, bumbling British minister, is asked to attend a joint US UK meeting. He is there to make up the number. Or as the British apparently say, to be 'meat in the room'. He is given strict instructions to remain mum and to not draw attention to himself.

Problem is that no one has told Simon he is meat in the room. He feels compelled to say something as he is in the room. He believes that the Americans who called for the meeting would expect that.

He opens his mouth. And sparks off a series of event which lead to the Americans and Brits deciding to invade an unnamed country.

Sounds familiar? Have you even come across meat in the room? Have you ever been meat in the room?

Have a happy and fulfilling Sunday.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The importance of being 'Nyaka'

'Nyaka' is a Bengali term which beats translation. It could mean coy, coquettish, scheming, la di da. There is no one word which captures it. The term is used in a pejorative context and has a sarcastic tone to it. Used a bit more for women than for men. Has a feminine context when used for men. I posed the challenge of translating 'nyaka' into English to fellow Bengalis in Facebook. Here's a sample of the answers that I got. I have removed the names and kept the statuese as is, hope it's not too difficult to read Bong man 1 Coy.....but that does capture the essence 14 December at 14:37 · Me No ...not entirely. A colleague just suggested precocious. Maybe its too intrinsic a Bong trait to be translated :) 14 December at 14:50 · Bong woman 1 kol-lan, difficult to get a english / hindi word for nyaka. 14 December at 15:11 · me that's the point 14 December at 15:15 · Bong woman 2 oh, i think the essence of the word 'nyaka' will be lost in translation. ...
12 comments
Read more

The impotence of middle class morality

We studied George Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion' in school. I remember a character, Mr Dolittle (not sure of the spelling), who made a compelling argument against what he called middle class morality . The crux was that the rich can do whatever they want, the poor are desperate and therefore have no standards to match up to. It is the middle class who get screwed (I am paraphrasing heavily here) because they have to live up to certain norms of morality without the means to do so. Closer home was this serial called ' Wagle ki duniya ' which used to come on telly in the eighties . This was about a middle aged, middle class man, Mr Wagle , and his struggle for existence. There was an episode where he had to give a bribe to a government official. Nothing new about that. But the twist was that straight laced Mr Wagle had no idea about how to give a bribe! I remember our then school principal, Mrs Kapper , gave that as an example of how all of us should be good, honest,...
16 comments
Read more

Just another day in India

I went to Hearsch Bakery near Holy Family Hospital after ages to pick up a burger for breakfast this morning. I saw an elderly gentleman, possibly in his mid sixties, standing opposite Holy Family in the alley. He was simply dressed like middle class folks of his genre, white bush shirt tucked out, grey trouser. He had a red and white jhola , the sling bag favoured by folks of his generation. He had round glasses, was slim and probably looked the way my grandfather would have looked twenty years back. A typical, middle class gent in the early years of his retirement. And he had his hand stretched out asking for alms. I remembered seeing him when I had come to Hearsch's months back. I was very puzzled even then. I wondered what his story would be. Was he abandoned by his children? Was he laid off? He did look in good health. Didn't look particularly poor. Yet, there was a strange mix of serene desperation on his face. What would have driven him to beg? Should I offer him some ...
11 comments
Read more