Pretty girls get looked at a lot,especially when they're wearing clothes apparently made from handkerchief-sizedbits of fabric. But late one night at Climax, Delhi's hip new night club, no-onewas looking at my gorgeous companions. A group of very young men walked past usto the bar, which had just stopped serving alcohol. "Dhik-chik boys," Imuttered to my friends. They nodded, instantly identifying the demographic:young men cruising the streets in Daddy's Skoda, pumping out music of muchvolume and trifling taste.
"What d'you mean you're not serving us, huh? B**** C***, I want my drinksnow!" Even by Delhi's rough standards of address, this was extreme. We'd heardtoo many stories of gun-happy drunks and fled, shamelessly. Back in my car, Ihad my own alcohol-fuelled epiphany. I have come back to live in Delhi severaltimes, after longish stints in Bombay and Calcutta. Each time, I was struck bytwo things. Getting served in a Delhi bar still requires the sort ofslavering-pigs-at-the-trough aggression that most other cultures would label associopathic. And when you arrive in Delhi from any other Indian metro, there isthe singular salience of people noses. People in Delhi are far better endowed inthe snout department than anyone from, say, Bangalore or Madras.
Surely the snoutiness and the aggro were related. The guys at the bar werecertainly equipped to Hoover their drinks, had they been served. Pseudoscience,science and literature seem to come out in my favour. Face readers have longcorrelated large noses with potent abilities, both sexual and financial.
Big noses in the animal kingdom evolved as hereditary traits. A massive honkeron a male proboscis monkey helps him score with the females, as it does withelephant seals. Likewise, long-nosed human parents are more likely to producesnouty sprogs.
Some scientists reckon that big human noses evolved because long nasal passageswere needed to suitably filter, warm and moisten air as it is inhaled. Equally,warm and wet conditions wouldn't reward a long nose, so schnozzy southies arerare.
Studies show that a prominent nose, along with other "masculine" featureslike a square jaw, is linked to high testosterone levels, which also influenceaggression, and this may explain why small-nosed people like me find a stoutsniffer intimidating. The philosopher Pierre Bourdieu was probably not thinkingof Delhi's general beakiness when he introduced his concept of symbolicviolence, which describes the power exercised on a social agent like me—withmy complicity, but he may well have done so under suitably absurdist conditions.
In Delhi, this essentially means that my social interactions are foreverafflicted by a mild case of terror by nose-envy. Luckily there is a savinggrace. As cartoonists have always known, the nose is the one body part that cansimultaneously communicate power and invite mirth. Hence my midget-muzzledMadrasi submission to snouty Delhi: "You're bearable, even great fun. Aslong as I can cock my snook at you."
This article originally appeared in Delhi City Limits, February 15,2006
