English (Core) · Ch 6 — Poets and Pancakes
The Significance of the Title
The Significance of the Title
The title 'Poets and Pancakes' works because it deliberately couples two words that seem to belong to entirely different worlds. 'Poets' points to art, imagination, intellect and lofty ambition; 'Pancake' is the brand name of the thick cosmetic make-up used in the make-up department of the studio. By setting the two side by side, Asokamitran signals from the very first word that his essay is going to be about the odd, comic collision of the artistic and the cosmetic, the grand and the greasepaint, that made up the daily life of Gemini Studios.
'Pancake' is not a food here — it is the trade name of the make-up material bought in truck-loads by Gemini Studios. Understanding this pun is the key to the whole title.
The literal layer — the world of make-up
On its most literal level the title announces the essay's opening subject: the make-up department, where the Pancake was applied by the bucketful and where perfectly good-looking actors were turned, under a battery of fierce, incandescent lights, into oddly grotesque, 'crimson hued' versions of themselves. The department was staffed by a strikingly cosmopolitan crew drawn from many communities and regions of India — a small, unintended emblem of national integration — and its make-up men, arranged in a strict pecking order, worked their trade with an almost surgical seriousness.