Rebellious, retro, radical chiclet: How chewing gum may just sum up our times

Economic Times

24-05-2025

Watching IPL , I noticed that no one quite chews as much gum as cricketers. In other sports - swimming, hockey, tennis, squash, football - gum gets in the way of playing. Not so in cricket. So, why doesn't IPL have an official gum? Just like Amul is the official ice-cream partner? Suryakumar Yadav a.k.a. SKY would make the perfect poster boy for a gum brand. The man's jaws are constantly working away at it.The last time we had an official gum partner was in 2009, when Wrigley 's tied up with all IPL teams. Last year, Mentos was the exclusive chewing gum sponsor for Esports World Cup, the global gaming festival - 'to keep gamers fresh and de-stressed.'I am a gum chewer. There are some people who one can never imagine chewing gum - like Manmohan Singh, Narendra Modi, my folks. Back in the day, we didn't have Hubba Bubba in all its variety. Bubble Yum was the big one in North India in the 1980s. Wrigley's came via the phoren aunt.For gum chewers, there was a ladder to climb. One started with chewing gum, then graduated to the big boys' club: bubblegum. It was a bit like learning how to blow smoke rings. Initially, one would get cock-eyed with concentration. It took some learning to pull the thin film of gum over one's tongue, then blow it out seemingly effortlessly with just the right amount of nonchalance.The unassuming gum also had a touch of rebellion, a kind of insouciance to it. If you popped one in the school classroom, it was a minor offence. One was made to spit it out. Madonna went a step further and made bubble gum sexy. There are any number of images of her blowing big ones.In countries like Singapore, gum could potentially be dangerous. It was banned in 1992 due to its nuisance value. Extant stocks of gum were confiscated, and fines - even jail terms - announced. Reasons given were to do with littering, jammed lift doors, and disruptions caused to the mass rapid transport system by gum chewers sticking gum on door sensors.People would travel to Johor Bahru in Malaysia to pick up gum and bring it in illegally. When a BBC reporter argued that such laws would stifle creativity, Lee Kuan Yew said, 'If you can't think because you can't chew, try a banana.'In India, classic chewing gum commercials have vanished from TV screens. Ask any copywriter/visualiser and they will tell you that gum TV ads allowed for wacky freedom. Popping a gum was akin to swallowing an LSD tab. Crazy things happened to the chewee.Centre Shock went with the tagline: 'Hila ke rakh de'. In one ad, a man goes to his barber and gives him a picture of a spiky punk haircut that he wants. The barber puts a piece of Centre Shock in his mouth, blowing up his hair.Mentos - 'Dimag ki batti jala de' - had a TV commercial featuring the evolution of man, which ends with a homo sapien turning tables on a donkey. People Tree in Delhi's Connaught Place subverted the Polo mint (not strictly gum) commercial by printing t-shirts which declared, 'There's a hole in my ass, so why shouldn't there be one in my mint?' It featured a donkey with a hole punched into its belly.How can we forget the Chiclets commercials? A memorable one had a couple seeking each other out inside a darkened cinema - by shaking their packets of Chiclets and following the sounds.Gum is also a metaphor for the times we live in, what with bubble gum social media, bubble gum politics and religion, bubble gum cricket, and bubble gum attention spans. Even more reason to put bubble gum ads back on TV.