Wrong decisions, right places

Sometimes a film, a book, and a bottle of vodka blend in ways so unexpectedly perfect that you feel grateful simply for having been present.

- BY NAVIN J. ANTONY

The blending began on a weekend. I had bought a bottle of Polish vodka whose USP, according to the internet, was that each bottle contained a blade of bison grass from the Bialowieza forest. This was no small thing. Bialowieza is one of the last surviving fragments of the immense primeval forest that once covered most of western Europe. To sip a vodka infused with its bison grass is, in theory, to slip through a tear in time—to be carried back to a continent before maps, borders or even civilisation itself.

But when I opened the bottle at home, I discovered a problem. It contained no grass.

I had chosen the wrong label. The bison grass belonged to a more expensive variant, not the budget bottle I had picked after a cursory Google search. It got worse. The bottle was only 700ml—50ml short of a proper Indian ‘full’—and the alcohol strength a timid 37.5% v/v, well below what any self-respecting Indian brand would offer. By every metric, I had made the wrong choice.

I drank it anyway.

I like to rewatch films when I am tipsy. The emphasis is on ‘re’. New films demand focus and discipline—qualities ill-suited to merriment.

Rewatching is easier, like listening to a familiar song: you know the tune, but there is pleasure in catching notes that you missed earlier.

I wanted to watch the Dev Patel film in which he plays the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, with Jeremy Irons as his mentor, G.H. Hardy. The choice was somewhat deliberate. Earlier that week, I had discovered The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics by George Gheverghese Joseph, described by the publisher as a “pioneering critic of colonial knowledge systems”.