Ah! The whiff of freshly brewed
coffee while lazing in bed.
Hmm…the aroma of oven fresh cake.
Oof! The stink of garbage as you
cross the garbage dump.
Oh no! The odour of leaking gas!
The olfactory sense is not one that gets much attention. It may not even
be considered an important one, in comparison to the rest. Yet, think about
it…lack of the smelling sense could take the fragrance out of our lives,
literally!
We can learn a lot by the smell of things, probably more than by the
visual or textural experience. Smells allow us an experience – both pleasant
and otherwise, before it becomes concrete and tangible. For e.g., a red-coloured
powder could be anything. But a single sniff will warn you that it’s chilli
powder, without having to suffer its sting on your tongue. Colourless toxic
gases that have a smell can be sniffed out even by a layman, in the absence of
scientific tools. It’s not uncommon to have people smell something burning, much
before they spot the source.
Often, we are led by our nose to sniff out danger before we see or feel
it. What a catastrophe it would be, if we couldn’t smell the gas leaking in our
kitchen! Or the bread burning in the oven! Or… (eeew!) the queer smell of food gone
bad before we take a bite! Recent research studies show that fear reactions can
occur at the sensory level, even before the brain has had the opportunity to
interpret that the odour could mean trouble. No wonder that the English
language has an idiom, ‘to smell out danger’.
Let’s think of our childhood. Most of our memories are accompanied by a particular
smell. My first thoughts are full of the light floral fragrance of my mum’s Yardley
talcum powder as I rested my head on her shoulder, the Old Spice cologne when I
snuggled up with my Dad, the peculiar comforting smell of my nanny, the smell
of earth as we entered my mother’s village… Sigh… the sweet scent of memories. On
the flip side, smells can bring back painful, fearful memories too! For
instance, the smell of diesel fumes for a soldier or the smell of smoke for a
burns victim. Would memories be as intense, in the absence of smells?
Kumar chetta, the cook at Chinmaya Heritage Centre in Chennai, knows
just by the aroma, whether the coffee has enough sugar or not! Unbelievable but
true! My favourite Aunt Rekha, was such a skilled cook, she could rattle out the
ingredients of a dish with just a sniff. Knowing whether a dish is ready by the
aroma is one thing, but to guess all the ingredients? Mind-blowing!
Observe shoppers in the marketplace. Many will sniff a fruit to know
whether it is ready for consumption. My Dad knows the variety of a mango and
its ripeness with a whiff. Now that’s one skill I have kind of developed by
sniffing around with him! Does that mean this is a skill that can be refined
with practice? Certainly. In the movie ‘The Hundred-Foot Journey’, it is
interesting to watch how the protagonist’s mother trains him to cook, with much
focus on the olfactory sense, more than any other.
