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What to make of Kylie

Jenner’s life changing

How a person can come so late

to the joys of soggy cornflakes,
I can’t say. Still, better late than…
never expressing an interest in
almond milk. Someone called that
also life changing. Others preferred
soya and chocolate milk. The entire
thread was a revelation. I want
to know when curdled milk will
be declared the next nutritional
touchstone

Nivriti Butalia all week than the 21-year old make-up queen —
worth $900 million (according to ITALS Forbes)
— saying, “last night i had cereal with milk for the
first time. life changing”. (sic) The full-stop after
the sentence was all her too.
move up from the days of Mohun’s cornflakes and
Mother Dairy milk but I’m off dairy. And milk.
Not Twitter though.
One user, Tatianna wrote: “Now watch and ce-
real gonna start flying off the shelves. She gunna
makeup the better”.
Then, I watched the embedded video, 10 min-
utes 47 seconds long. Very helpful. She allowed
ITALS Vogue to film her doing her make up. I
thought it was brave of her to appear bare-faced.

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Thank god for Kylie Jenner.
It’s been a newsy week. Amid all the memes
on Twitter about — where to start? — Anup Jalo-
tia, devotional singer and his student of the year,
singer, 28-year-old Jasleen Matharu; Woody Al-
len’s wife of 20 years, Soon-Yi Previn, finally
“breaking her silence”; Trump’s guy, dodgy Brett
Kavanaugh going on saying ‘I didn’t do it’; India
making triple talaq a crime; the India-Pak match
here in Dubai… Kylie Jenner offered respite that I
am grateful for. This barrage of serious news can
really make your shoulders stoop.
Tell me if you heard anything more entertaining
Jenner has 114 million followers on Instagram,
the 8th highest. Even Lionel Messi comes in after
her on that list at 12, with 97 million followers.
And I hadn’t realised, but of course, Instagram
has the most followers on Instagram. Silly me.
But back to Twitter. So, everyone on Twitter,
reliably, went nuts after this cereal and milk tweet
broke midweek. That statement of hers generated
98k likes, 13k retweets, and 4.2k comments.
When other people on Twitter asked her if she
had lost the plot, or, as one person put it, “Is this a
rich thing?”, Jenner explained, “i always liked ce-
real dry i never bothered to put milk” (sic).
I cannot grudge her this. In boarding schools
across India, kids would tear open packets of
Maggie and Wai Wai and munch those plastic
slabs of noodles dry. Nobody added water. Why
expect kylie to add milk? We’re so full of double
standards – ‘people like us’ and ‘those vapid ce-
lebrities’. All we need is love.
Then, there were curious kittys most taken in
with whether she put milk first or cereal. Appar-
ently, there are people who splash in milk first
in the bowl and then float cereal on top. I don’t
know these people. In the coming years, though,
there is bound to be a business school study on
the effect Jenner’s endorsement would have had
on the sales of Cinammon Toast Crunch, some-
thing that in a follow up tweet she called “amaz-
ing.” I would look for it myself, which would be a
start a cereal line with some designer leche girl
bye” (sic).” Someone else chimed in to Jenner’s
tweet: “Have you tried butter on bread?”
How a person can come so late to the joys of
soggy cornflakes, I can’t say. Still, better late
than… never expressing an interest in almond
milk. Someone called that also life changing.
Others preferred soya and chocolate milk. The
entire thread was a revelation. I want to know
when curdled milk will be declared the next nu-
tritional touchstone. It should at the very least be
life changing.
That one tweet of Jenner’s sent me down a rab-
bit hole of all her other tweets. I realised I had
been living in darkness. I needed to follow this
woman. There is much to learn. For one, I want
to learn why her kid is called Stormi with an ‘i’ in-
stead of the letter you would think it might end
with.
I also learnt from her the term BOGO — buy
one, get one. And that Jenner believes she her
cousin Kim, maybe you’ve heard of her, are into
“completely different products”—both makeup
lines, however.
Kim Kardashian West’s line is called KKW. In
that ITALS Vogue article (with video embedded),
Jenner purred her heart out, “Me and Kim do
not compete. A lot of people think we might, but
we really like making completely different prod-
ucts and both enjoy each other’s stuff. The more
She said lipstick made her feel confident. At one
point, she used the phrase “all my glam people”
which I can’t wait to use, but I have no one to use
it on.
Still. I wasn’t bored. What did I learn? That
she loves blush; can fill in her lip liner with eyes
closed; that her mother, Kris Jenner, once used
black eyeliner on her lips at Disney Land or Dis-
ney World, whatever; that mommy Kris also let
her go to 6th grade wearing purple eye shadow.
It was her dad — the retired Olympic gold medal-
winning decathlete Caitlyn Marie Jenner (born
William Bruce Jenner) — who was the spoilsport,
a bit anti–make up, back then. I also learnt that
she thought it would be cool if her kid, Stormi, 7
months, wants to take over her make-up empire.
I found myself touched that Kylie added “if she
wants to”. I like that. A heart, along with fine taste
buds in breakfast food.
Far be it from me to decry the pop culture idols
of our time. And I do mean when I say I have no
idea what this one cynic, Lewis Maxwell, meant
when he groaned, on Twitter, naturally: (sic) “Out
of all the crazy shit happening in the world, why
is “Kylie Jenner tried cereal with milk” trending?
The worlds backwards man.”
nivriti@khaleejtimes.com
Nivriti likes ‘human-interest’ stories and has a
thing for the quirky, oddball stuff