KOCHI: There is a sweet fragrance of apples in the air. One, Apple has started making its “flagship” iPhone 14 in Chennai. The company says it is “excited” about its venture in India. Business analysts say Apple is planning a “big shift in its manufacturing strategy”. It is, they believe, likely to reduce dependence on China and route 25 per cent of its global production to India by 2025.
Notably, the iPhone 14 is being manufactured at the same Foxconn unit in Sriperumbudur, where a protest had led to a week-long shutdown. An Intelligence Bureau note had flagged “Chinese aid to the left-leaning workforce inside Foxconn”, and an “international design to destabilise industrial establishments” in India.
It is “no secret that China was aggrieved over these factories, as, earlier, 48 per cent of the components for Apple iPhone were produced in China”, observed the report. Smells like sweet success over sour apples. Sweet apples are, indeed, the flavour of the season. August to October is the apple harvest period across the globe.
According to WorldAtlas, apples are the fourth most popular fruit (in terms of volume), after tomatoes, bananas and watermelons. Remarkable, considering the fact that the poor fruit was misrepresented as the ‘forbidden fruit’, probably, due to a Latin pun. Theologians are unanimous in concluding that the Hebrew Bible had no mention of the apple. It used a generic term for fruit, peri, instead.
In 382 AD, Pope Damasus I asked the scholarly St Jerome to translate the holy text into Latin. According to Prof Robert Appelbaum the author of Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections—St Jerome is said to have translated “peri” into “malum” in Latin.
Malum, a noun in Latin, means apple. Well, apple, until the 17th century, was used as a generic term for any fruit “with a core of seeds in the middle and flesh around it”.
As an adjective, however, malum means “evil” in Latin. So, Appelbaum, who teaches literature at Sweden’s Uppsala University, concludes that “it’s a pun, referring to the fruit associated with humans’ first big mistake with a word that also means essentially that”.
Several researchers zero down on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) for pinning the apple as the ‘forbidden fruit’. “Even in Milton’s time the word had two meanings: either what was our common apple, or, again, any fleshy seed-bearing fruit,” notes Appelbaum.
“Milton probably had in mind an ambiguously named object with a variety of connotations as well as denotations, most but not all of them associating the idea of the apple with a kind of innocence, though also with a kind of intoxication, since hard apple cider was a common English drink.”
Quite heady, eh? Leaving the forbidden mystery behind, let me move on to something as sweet as the apple and heady as the cider. Maria Popova is the apple of many eyes in literary circles these days.
I believe the Bulgarian-origin writer is a blessed soul, for her ‘Brain Pickings’ curation is a sure-shot go-to when one is hit by boredom or the blues. Just beautiful. Do check out her Sunday pick: a recording of Scott Fitzgerald reading Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.
On Monday, she posted ‘A Love Letter to the Apple’. “In the folklore of my native Bulgaria, a woman has reached the apogee of beauty when she can be likened to an apple,” she writes in the introduction.
At the end of her essay, Maria introduces the American naturalist John Burroughs (1837-1921). “No one has written about the sensorial and spiritual splendors of the apple more beautifully, or more passionately,” she writes.
And Maria leaves us with a delectable apple dessert snippets from his 1915 essay collection Sharp Eyes, which, she adds, “gave us his lovely meditation on the art of noticing”.
Savour these:
How pleasing to the touch! I love to stroke its polished rondure with my hand....
You are company, you red-cheeked spitz, or you salmon-fleshed greening! I toy with you; press your face to mine, toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are so alive! You glow like a ruddy flower.
************
How compact; how exquisitely tinted! Stained by the sun and varnished against the rains. An independent vegetable existence, alive and vascular as my own flesh; capable of being wounded, bleeding, wasting away, and almost of repairing damages!
************
I think if I could subsist on you or the like of you, I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never he feverish or despondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute your quality I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmths and contentment around.
Okay, time for me to munch on an apple. Have a rosy, appley week ahead
The apple of (one’s) eye: “A cherished or favoured person.”
Take a bite (out) of the apple: “To take advantage of an opportunity in which one stands to gain, earn, or benefit from a large amount of money.”
Smart apple: “A particularly clever and intelligent person.”
Wise apple: “A smug, sarcastic person who constantly tries to upstage others.”
Apples on the other side of the wall are the sweetest: “Other people’s circumstances or belongings always seem more desirable than one’s own.”
A rotten apple spoils the whole bunch: 1) “It only takes one bad person, thing, element, etc., to ruin the entire group, situation, project, etc.”
2) “The criminal, unethical, corrupt, or otherwise negative behavior of a single person will spread to other people around them.”
Apples and oranges: “Two unlike things or people.”
Upset the applecart: “To ruin or interfere with one’s or somebody’s plans or goals.”
Polish the apple: “To attempt to curry favor through insincere or excessive flattery or praise. An allusion to the clichéd image of a student presenting their teacher with a gift of a shiny red apple to instill a good impression.”
The apple never falls far from the tree: “Said when someone is displaying traits or behaving in the same way as their relatives (especially parents).”
Trade off the orchard for an apple: “To be overly concerned with minor details and ignore the situation as a whole.”