It’s a ridiculously simple-looking piece of cutlery — a half-tube of metal, about four inches long, curved length-wise with rounded ends to make a double scoop, one half slightly broader than the other.
In Hindustani it’s called a vassi silai and it’s used for extracting bone marrow from cooked meat. You no longer find it in most (obviously non-veg and well-to-do) homes, people now employing the tap-on-plate method or the one that involves holding the bone in the right hand and hitting the wrist against the wrist of the left hand to force out the precious little gelatinous globules.
One wild guess is that the angrez never actually used it themselves, though one of them may have invented it for Indian royalty. The Maharajas and Nawabs would of course have had their vassi silai made in silver or whatever other obscene precious metal, maybe even with tiny monograms on the back. The one I deployed recently was made of steel and had clearly seen decades of use.
As time passes, other ways will be found of extracting marrow, and this little instrument will pass completely into obsolescence, but working it into the hollow of a mutton bone was a hugely satisfying act.
As we know, it’s not just tools that pass into history but also the skills developed to work those tools. For instance, weavers losing their traditional foot-driven looms to mechanised ones directly contributed to football developing and spreading as a largely working class sport in 19th century Europe — working people needed to have something meaningful to do with their legs and feet.
A couple of years ago, speaking to an Israeli friend not far from me in age, I found myself complaining about how boring it was to drive cars with automatic gears or even the new generation of gear-shifts. “Yes, oh yes,” he said wistfully, “the lost art of double-declutching… we used to have competitions on the kibbutz when driving our old tractor.” Moving on from the joys an unsynchronised manual transmission used to provide, again to feet that needed to be employed, one can come to the hands.
Billions of people still use pens and pencils to write on paper, but the days of the classic fountain pen seem to be numbered. Perhaps, the fountain pen will go the way of the quill, perhaps not, but soon, generations will have grown up around the world without any idea of how to pull ink into a pen from an inkpot, without any concept of penmanship, without any notion of beautiful handwriting.
You could choose to mourn this as a loss or celebrate it as a democratic freeing of the act of writing, and therefore the act of gaining or disseminating knowledge and information, from the clutches (pun intended) of the elite.
Rule of thumb
One great loss that might seem completely frivolous to many people, certainly to most people who didn’t do serious photography between 1955 and 1995, is the demise of the thumb lever for advancing film in 35mm still cameras. Earlier, you had some variation of a knob which you turned to advance the film. In larger format cameras, the knob came attached to a lever, in the smaller ones it was a textured thing that stuck out of the top of the camera.
At some point in the mid-50s, an extension was added to this knob, which allowed it to be moved by an anti-clockwise movement of the thumb. In the films from the relevant decades, you can see characters playing photographers carrying out this small dance move of the hand — press shutter, move camera slightly away from eye, crank the lever, bring camera back to the eye, repeat.
By the late 60s, professionals had motor-drives attached to their cameras, a big slab of metal that screwed on to the bottom and advanced your film for you at high speed; by the late 80s, most decent 35mm cameras had the drives in-built, and the thumb lever was history. So what? You might ask. Well, one argument is that while the old twisting knob actually got in the way of taking pictures quickly, the motor-drive forced you to shoot almost mindlessly, with the thumb lever being a kind of optimum, allowing you to shoot frames at a reasonable speed but also forcing you to pause and have a mini-think between each picture.
Of course, all this becomes ludicrously academic once the digital camera comes into its own and then doubly so once phone cameras improve in quality as they have.
If there are advances made in still photography that centrally change how pictures are now made, in film-making certain important technical changes took a bit longer to hit. One of the funniest images one has of film school is of first-year cinematography students learning how to pan a camera smoothly. The prescribed exercise involves holding a frying pan filled to the brim with water and panning it slowly, trying not to spill a drop. From this basic start, the camera student had to move up to learning the complex finger-arts of pulling focus and zoom, often simultaneously, gently massaging the lens as an assistant, while the chief operator panned and tilted the camera for a shot.
The end shot
In the meantime, directors in the old days always shot ‘blind’, i.e they could only see the result of a shot once it came back from the processing laboratory. This changed with advent of the video-assist, again in the 80s.
For cinematographers and their assistants, computerised help took longer to arrive, but now all focus-pulling and zooming are done via remote control, with the physical skill taken out of the equation and replaced by roughly the same set of skills required by a drone operator sitting in Virginia controlling a killing machine hovering over Afghanistan. Again, the jury will perpetually be out, but the question stands: does all this technological ease aid or hinder the thought that goes into creating a moving image?
Labour ban
New technologies are clearly a boon, especially when you need to bypass large dreary bits of data-crunching in say medical research, to take just one example. On the flip side, removing the need for all sorts of back-breaking physical labour is also, unarguably, a good thing. The question we have to ask ourselves, though, is to what extent are newer technologies making us divorced from our own bodies? If we take the mind-body divide to be false, if we accept that what we think and how we think directly affects our entire bodies brain-downwards, if we also accept the reverse, that certain kinds of physical activity are highly beneficial, not just to our bodies but also to our brains then we need to both think and act.
Different cultures in India have varied ways of getting out bone marrow from bone. Even the name vassi silai invokes the act of sewing, the movement of which the hand mimics, while using the mini-scoop.
But then, there is also another delicate skill used by some butchers when cutting the meat — they will put a half cut along each bone, just deep enough to hold the bone together while it’s being cooked but making it easy to crack open once it’s on your plate. What will replace this once our meat is all machine cut? What will replace the missing thumb lever? What will replace the way the mind wires up and remembers when you write something down on paper, which is very different from when you tap it on a keyboard or into a phone? What kind of new skills can we generate for our feet, our legs?
With computerisation and micro-robotics expanding at the speed they are, how will we keep remembering how to be humans?
Columnist and filmmaker, Ruchir Joshi is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary . He edited Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and was featured in Granta .
