L’affaire teapot by Amrita Satapathy

“My love for you is like tea, and I my darling, am your teapot, pour my love and drink me quick”. Thus proposed a friend of mine to his girl friend. Well, I was a trifle amazed at the expression, but what really geared my dormant brain cells into action was the ‘Teapot’. It took me down the memory lane to those years of infantile activities when I had enacted the part of a tea-pot in a kindergarten school play reciting with much enthusiasm the teapot rhyme- “I am a teapot, short and stout/ this is my handle and this is my spout!” That was my first and last stint with acting, but it sure led to my enduring infatuation with teapots. I was presented with my first little teapot as a birthday present from my mother. Since then teapots have captivated my aesthetic sensibility. Apart from being the mundane apparatus for pouring tea into a cup, teapots ooze a sense of style and are extremely classy much like a Victorian dame. They can be used for haute décor, as collectors’ item, as a centrepiece, as child’s play thing and anything else that your wild imagination can convert them into. Teapots come in a constellation of shapes and sizes and have been fashioned from every possible raw-material in this world - be it glass, earthen ware, enamel ware, tin, copper, steel, ceramic. Hand painted to ornamental, printed to plain, one can espy an array of designs on the shelves of supermarkets and picturesque antique shops. Interestingly, every part of the teapot - the handle, the lid, the body or the spout, has the flexibility of being artistically fashioned. From a common household utensil, the teapot has gradually evolved into a glamourized lifestyle product. It has literally poured its way, from the kitchen to the quicksilver world of advertising and the bizarre realm of animation.....
Full article by Amrita Satapathy Ph. D. Scholar Utkal University Orissa, India