Do you have Shrek's ear?

I was strolling along 18th June Road in Panjim yesterday, in between paying overdue house tax and a cup of monsoon coffee, when I saw a motor scooter zoom past with a load of what looked like bits of green turd.

People stared, while I smirked smugly. I knew what they were. They were Shrek ears.

You see, I took my daughter and her mother to see Shrek 3 this past Sunday for a special show at the local multiplex. It was built by the Government of Goa at taxpayers’ expense to please the people of Goa and also the concessionaires of the multiplex who just run the darned place for a modest fee and immodest profit. It’s a sweet deal. But that’s another story.

Anyway, the multiplex had advertised it would offer a pair of Shrek ears to every ticket group of three. We qualified. But they ran out of the darned things.

‘But you advertised…’ I spluttered at the box office, trying to be a good father, laying on the war veteran look with a broad plaster covering my scalp wound. ‘My daughter will be so disappointed…’ I pointed at her. My daughter catches on quick. She looked woebegone.

‘We’re sold out sir,’ said the young man at the box office, frankly embarrassed. ‘House full,’ he added, in case I was a regular Indian bumpkin, bereft of American idiom.

‘I’m sure you can organize one set of your Shrek headsets.’ That’s what they had called it in the advertisement. Then I noticed his ears were green, and they stuck out two inches on either side. His colleagues displayed similar disease.

The young man pulled off his diseased green ears and offered them to me. ‘You can have mine,’ he offered, handing the green thermocol ogre-turd ears joined by a flat black wire.

My daughter declined. She wanted to see Shrek 3—grandly called Shrek the Third--but she didn’t want ogre turd around her head. She’s nearly nine.

She enjoyed the movie. Her mother laughed now and then. As for me, I was quite tired of the green ogre with the Scottish accent, though I love single malts, and saw Braveheart twice.

By Shrek 4 (Quadro Shrek, the ageing rock-star episode) and Shrek 5 (Sheikh Shrek, in which Shrek, his children, Donkey and Dragon’s children, and Puss in Boots and the transvestite’s children solve the Mid-East, Iraq and Afghanistan crises), I will be ready to take a bazooka to the screen.

There are some, I believe, who might join me.

Not just my animator friends Sonny and Isa, who don’t care for set-piece Hollywood animation features.

But even my neighbour Desmond, his friend Kannan, and their friend Ranjit Lal (author of that little gem, Crow Chronicles ) who put together a lovely animation feature screenplay called Monkey King, which by now much of the world has read but tragically, has declined to fund. It’s built around the old legend. It even has Hollywood timing (every scene is of X seconds), it has song breaks and jokes. There's a scene at the end where everyone gathers for a neat chorus. When I read it, I loved it, but said it may be too intelligent for Hollywood.

A producer of Shrek evidently thought the same of Monkey King. I believe he said there weren’t any “fart jokes”.

This is integral, you see. In Shrek, Shrek farts. In Shrek 2, both Shrek and his wife Fiona fart. In Shrek the Third, their children fart.

This is supposed to be a good thing. Imagine the future.

Before it gets that far, an army of Shrek malcontents will gather to do battle. When injustice is done, they will replace a beloved four-letter word with an emphatic five-letter one, by way of battle cry:

“Shrek you!”