PACKAGED!!
To my nail-biting suspense about her getting the job or not, my daughter yawns loudly and says ‘it is through mummy. I only have to discuss the package’.
Package?
A package to me had a rectangular shape; the best one came by registered post carrying goodies from my parents. The thrill of acknowledging a package and of seeing it with all the proof of its long journey-stamps, seal, twines…and daddy’s handwritten to and from addresses. I would leave it unopened for a while to savour these and the suspenseful contents.
Packaging has come of age since then. From old newspapers carefully uncrumpled to ‘ polythene covers’ to thermocol to bubblewraps…from packing in bottles and tea chests with straw, nails and pokey metal strips to stronger cardboard boxes, polypropylene, thermocol, tetrapack. A recent report spoke of a man who uses ‘negative spaces’ to make sculptures. The negative spaces are provided by the nooks and crannies of packaging materials…..
In the process the term packaging itself has metamorphosed into a wholesome package. Perhaps from merely adding things and closing, packaging has acquired a more algebraic connotation. A few plusses here, a few minuses there to make an equation acceptable to all. Perhaps more sterile too.
This is the era of package tours. Minimize expenses, maximize destinations and add it all to your CV. You can have the 3 nights 4 days package or the 6 nights 7 days one and visit al the iconic cities of Europe in one breath. As I haven’t been on either, I wouldn’t know the feel of being in a package tour. Perhaps one would feel as jumpy as a jack in a box or as tickled as a tinned tuna.
But what about the ‘now in a new pack’ tooth paste and tea? Get 20% extra in the new package-of the same. Why would a 100 gm toothpaste tube contain 120 gms? …A shampoo sachet piggy backing on a Nescafe 50 gm pack would then be an ‘out of package’ deal. Either the shampoo will remain just a useless freebie or it will evolve its own value.
A recent cartoon showed ‘Tsunami II’-bringing pre-election gifts to the electorate. Rival leaders turn more fiercely competitive with their offers-cheap rice, partially free rice, more free rice...jobs, television sets. This packaging is the interactive kind-you take this this and this and you give us this…the catch being of course that the package is the ‘fragile-handle with care’ kind and crumbles as soon as the election results come.
Packagers span another related domain too. Besides the various packs, facial and others, which contribute to a more appealing personality package, these packagers are much a part of the limelighted persona. Or of the want-to-be-in-limelight ones. They are there to change your hairdo, your accent, your utterances…package you neatly in a portfolio.
Remixing and repackaging is a whole wholesome industry by itself. Old wine in new bottles, old songs in renewed tunes, old promises in new forms, old wisdom in new voices, old fashions on new models. One cant invent infinitely isn’t it?
On another plane, Nature would be the primal or the ultimate packager. Take the human body: two of some organs, one of some, some organs two- timing, multi-tasking…some self-healing, some as good as disposable instruments…all neatly packaged. Symbiosis would be nature’s own showcase of effective packaging: the ant-tree and the ant, buffaloes and birds, predators and preys, the ‘messers’ and the scavengers, the questions, the answers…. biomimicry is the latest, happening science. Ravage nature’s packaging, hurt her, get hurt, then try to imitate her to redo it.
No wonder…in this age of packaged everything, from water to holidays, people would find it easier and perhaps safer to feel packaged themselves, rather than to feel let loose on a more and more threatening world. So a package today would also be a person’s present and future-and perhaps past- neatly defined, or a person redefined with each package constantly undone and redone. So I did understand that discussing the package isn’t about it or placing it on a weighing machine-it is all about the Self: appraisal, evaluation, and the effective expression thereof to a potential employer, a prospective life partner, parents-in-law, prospective care-takers, and perhaps our kids’ friends? Let us then not forget to condense our past like the packaged tour and add the ‘free 200 gms’ of ourselves at the right moment perhaps by a deft remix of our old thinking or why not the remodeled version of our grandmother’s?
Package?
A package to me had a rectangular shape; the best one came by registered post carrying goodies from my parents. The thrill of acknowledging a package and of seeing it with all the proof of its long journey-stamps, seal, twines…and daddy’s handwritten to and from addresses. I would leave it unopened for a while to savour these and the suspenseful contents.
Packaging has come of age since then. From old newspapers carefully uncrumpled to ‘ polythene covers’ to thermocol to bubblewraps…from packing in bottles and tea chests with straw, nails and pokey metal strips to stronger cardboard boxes, polypropylene, thermocol, tetrapack. A recent report spoke of a man who uses ‘negative spaces’ to make sculptures. The negative spaces are provided by the nooks and crannies of packaging materials…..
In the process the term packaging itself has metamorphosed into a wholesome package. Perhaps from merely adding things and closing, packaging has acquired a more algebraic connotation. A few plusses here, a few minuses there to make an equation acceptable to all. Perhaps more sterile too.
This is the era of package tours. Minimize expenses, maximize destinations and add it all to your CV. You can have the 3 nights 4 days package or the 6 nights 7 days one and visit al the iconic cities of Europe in one breath. As I haven’t been on either, I wouldn’t know the feel of being in a package tour. Perhaps one would feel as jumpy as a jack in a box or as tickled as a tinned tuna.
But what about the ‘now in a new pack’ tooth paste and tea? Get 20% extra in the new package-of the same. Why would a 100 gm toothpaste tube contain 120 gms? …A shampoo sachet piggy backing on a Nescafe 50 gm pack would then be an ‘out of package’ deal. Either the shampoo will remain just a useless freebie or it will evolve its own value.
A recent cartoon showed ‘Tsunami II’-bringing pre-election gifts to the electorate. Rival leaders turn more fiercely competitive with their offers-cheap rice, partially free rice, more free rice...jobs, television sets. This packaging is the interactive kind-you take this this and this and you give us this…the catch being of course that the package is the ‘fragile-handle with care’ kind and crumbles as soon as the election results come.
Packagers span another related domain too. Besides the various packs, facial and others, which contribute to a more appealing personality package, these packagers are much a part of the limelighted persona. Or of the want-to-be-in-limelight ones. They are there to change your hairdo, your accent, your utterances…package you neatly in a portfolio.
Remixing and repackaging is a whole wholesome industry by itself. Old wine in new bottles, old songs in renewed tunes, old promises in new forms, old wisdom in new voices, old fashions on new models. One cant invent infinitely isn’t it?
On another plane, Nature would be the primal or the ultimate packager. Take the human body: two of some organs, one of some, some organs two- timing, multi-tasking…some self-healing, some as good as disposable instruments…all neatly packaged. Symbiosis would be nature’s own showcase of effective packaging: the ant-tree and the ant, buffaloes and birds, predators and preys, the ‘messers’ and the scavengers, the questions, the answers…. biomimicry is the latest, happening science. Ravage nature’s packaging, hurt her, get hurt, then try to imitate her to redo it.
No wonder…in this age of packaged everything, from water to holidays, people would find it easier and perhaps safer to feel packaged themselves, rather than to feel let loose on a more and more threatening world. So a package today would also be a person’s present and future-and perhaps past- neatly defined, or a person redefined with each package constantly undone and redone. So I did understand that discussing the package isn’t about it or placing it on a weighing machine-it is all about the Self: appraisal, evaluation, and the effective expression thereof to a potential employer, a prospective life partner, parents-in-law, prospective care-takers, and perhaps our kids’ friends? Let us then not forget to condense our past like the packaged tour and add the ‘free 200 gms’ of ourselves at the right moment perhaps by a deft remix of our old thinking or why not the remodeled version of our grandmother’s?
posted by meera @ 12:30 AM
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