Roses are red, cacti blue…

Mitali Saran explains how to enunciate clearly when you’re saying it with flowers:

The Shiv Sena is sending roses to the Varanasi police force; students are sending get-well-soon emails to Arjun Singh, and it is rumoured that even Sushmita Sen sent a cactus to Aishwarya Rai.
I, too, want to send flowers to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, to let it know how badly I feel about whatever infirmity has led to the urban planning catastrophe that is Delhi, and to the devil’s choice between short-term individual livelihoods and collective long-term survival which we are being forced to make today….
Saying it with flowers means finding the right blossoms, so I have composed a pithy bouquet of two very special flowers. The first is a Titan arum, or Amorphophallus titanum, (which roughly translates as “gigantic shapeless penis” for reasons that a brief glimpse makes clear).

I wish she had a blog, but in terms of publicising herself, Mitali’s something of a shrinking violet. Here’s a link to some of her Business Standard columns–go, enjoy.