Mallika Sherawat was cool for a few seconds before Khwahish came out because she was a small-town girl in the big bad city and then she went cold because she was a big-town girl pretending to be a small-town girl. How uncool is that?

By the time anyone who isn’t cool has recognised what is, the truly cool have moved on, perceives Jerry Pinto, who offers his own milestones of cool

Body Cool is one of those doughty words, a survivor. It is one of the few words that have remained in currency, despite the manic speed with which slang changes. Take good. Good became boring. Good, in North India, meant homosexual.

Even bad couldn’t manage to stay the course. Bad became good and baaaaad became very good. Then it went back to being bad and slipped out of favour. Bad is currently logy but who knows how long that will last?

Cool did have a moment when things became dicey. When a word seems to need reinvention, things look grim. When cool became ‘kewl’ and then ‘coo-uhl’, it seemed as if its time had come. But it survived, perhaps because what constituted cool changed so quickly that no one could pin it down.

For a few moments there, it was also ‘yes’ and ‘no problem’. (As in Q: “Can I borrow your chillum?” A: “Cool, man.”) But otherwise cool has remained cool. Not very cool. Etymologically speaking, very cool is cold. Cold is the opposite of hot. And hot is not an opposition to cool; it’s a waystation. Here’s how: Short sentences and small paragraphs are very uncool. But then again…some of cool is doing uncool stuff to point up one’s cool quotient. See also: kitsch.

Let us assume for a moment that hot is sexy. Now sexy works but only for a very small moment. So Justin Timberlake was cool for a microsecond and so was Britney Spears and then they went so cold that no one could resurrect them. And Mallika Sherawat was cool for a few seconds before Khwahish came out because she was a small-town girl in the big bad city and then she went cold because she was a big-town girl pretending to be a small-town girl. How uncool is that?

Cool needs to be backed by something other than cool.

B B King is cool because he can play. Dolly Parton is cool because she is so uncool and she knows she is uncool and she sings well in an uncool medium. Country? Doesn’t get uncooler than that.

Are you cool? The world will hate thee and despise thee because thou hast rejected its values and thou livest by thy own values in a constant negotiation with what thou perceivest. However, be of good cheer. The world will also follow in thy footsteps reluctantly and by the time it catches up, thou willst be some place else.

Are you cool? You won’t be very much longer. Very few senior citizens are cool.

Enjoy it while it lasts. It’s getting warmer already.

[Jerry Pinto is executive editor of Man’s World magazine. This, he claims, is the public version. In his own description of himself, he is a poet. His first book of poems, Asylum (Allied Publishers) has been released this year. His first book was Surviving Women (Penguin) a manual for confused Indian men, which has gone into several reprints. Bombay Meri Jaan, which he co-edited with Naresh Fernandes, is also up for a reprint.]