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

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.

Because cool is an urban phenomenon. It lives in the lower reaches of the city; because it is born on the underbelly. Black style, ghetto wear, the phenomenon in which baggy jeans and ripped tops slowly work their way upwards into the white world, has its equivalent in Mumbai. In much the same way, tapori bhaasha has worked its way into mainstream consciousness. When the ad world of Mumbai, stuffed with suits, chuckles at ‘Garmi mein kya bhatak rahela?’ they’re bowing to the cool of the PUU (People Unlike Us). What was infra dig is now very hep though hep is now uncool. Hip was cool for a bit but word’s out, it won’t last the summer.

Nothing lasts the summer of cool. By the time, anyone who isn’t cool has recognised what is cool, the truly cool have moved on. Jorge Luis Borges, (still cool), once said: “It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.” Irrational and magical is very cool.

That’s how kitsch became cool. See, kitsch by its nature is uncool. You look head-on at kitsch and it isn’t very pretty, it isn’t very elevating, it isn’t very thought provoking. Now, you divorce kitsch from its proper surroundings (uncool) and look at it through the prism of irony (cool) and you see that the photo of the gods or the chart of good habits is really radically chic.

Another aspect of cool is implicated here. That you must know you are cool in order that other people should think you cool. Your cool will rub off on to what you possess. If everyone knows that you know what kitsch is (and how it differs from high art), if everyone accepts this, then your treatment of kitsch as high art makes you cool. Sure you love Govinda in Aankhen; but only tell them that, once they know about your visceral response to Last Year in Marienbad. Cool has no shelf life.

This brings us to a very important aspect of cool: the shelf cool is not bought or sold. Cool carries no brand label. Every brand is a construct. It is built, so we are told, out of the combined efforts of brand managers and spin doctors. Call in the experts, they sing, when a brand is to be built. This is completely against the nature of real cool. Any attempt to construct cool is doomed to failure because cool is about not trying. Cool can never be pinned down in a PowerPoint presentation. It can never be about earnest men in earnest suits because no one who is earnest was ever cool.

This means there are certain places where cool won’t work. Cool won’t sit well in boardrooms because boardrooms are status quoists. Witness the happiness in all the boardrooms when the dotcom revolution went phut. Those guys thought they were really cool, didn’t they? They thought they could flatten the pyramid, rewrite the corporate rule of managed unhappiness, invent the worker-owned company, fashion a world in which 20 somethings pushed the buttons? Pull the plug. Call in the bankers. Rewrite the contract. Bring on the bears.

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.]