A fetish for the foot

Priyanka Vadra adores her mother. Sonia Gandhi, she says, can be "completely surrounded by praise and sycophancy and be untouched by it". Sycophancy isn't an adorable word. It comes from sykon (fig) and phanein (to show) in Greek. Showing the fig was a gesture of insult in Grecian courts. One made the gesture by sticking the thumb between two fingers. A split fig looks like female genitals-sykon means vulva as well. Politicians rarely made the gesture themselves. Instead, they goaded their toadies to taunt their opponents with it. The toadies came to be known as sycophants.

The Indian fig tree is called banyan. It sprouted from the Sanskrit word vanija, which evolved into bania, meaning merchant. Indian merchants on Persian shores built wayside temples under fig trees. So the Persians called them vanija trees. The infant god Krishna floated on a fig leaf in the primeval flood, contemplating the next cycle of creation. He lay sucking his toes.

Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, author of Phantoms in the Brain, explains "why we like to have our toes sucked". The part of the brain controlling the foot lies right next to the part controlling the genitals. This proximity makes the foot erogenous. People who have lost a limb can still feel sensations in the nonexistent limb because of overlapping neural wiring. Ramachandran calls it the phantom limb.

An engineer from Arkansas, who lost a leg, telephoned him for advice: "Doctor, every time I have sexual intercourse, I experience sensations in my phantom foot. How do you explain that?" The scientist told him about the wiring. "All that's fine, doctor," said the engineer. "But you still don't understand. You see, I actually experience my orgasm in my foot. And therefore it's much bigger than it used to be because it's no longer just confined to my genitals."

Prakash Karat plays footsie with the Congress though he says, "We don't want to be its palanquin bearers." Litter is a more common word for palanquin. Litter also means offspring of an animal at one birth. The smallest pig of a litter is called tantony pig, a corruption of St Anthony's pig. Anthony is the patron saint of swineherds, not the defence minister. The latter spells his name without the 'h', but the press often forgets it.

The press cares more for the pig. It is not just because of the swine flu. Two little pigs ran away while being taken to a slaughterhouse in England in 1998. Someone claimed they had swum across a river and escaped into a thicket. Newspapers put dozens of journalists on the pigs' trail. They lionised the pigs, and named them Butch and Sundance, comparing them to the famous fugitives.

Television crews surveyed the thicket from a news helicopter, with a camera mounted on its nose. One juicy story was about how a female pig, at her oestrous best, was unleashed to tempt Sundance back into his sty. "The seductress did not succeed," the journalist reported. When the pigs were finally captured, the Daily Mail hogged the show: it bought the pigs for 15,000 pounds and sent them to an animal care home for life.

Breathless journalism has no full stops. Cardiologist Bernard Lown, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, missed a full stop for five years. He writes in his book The Lost Art of Healing:

When I questioned one man about sex, he promptly responded, "Sex no problem." At each yearly visit, we went through the same exchange. "Sex?" I would ask. "Sex no problem," he replied instantly.After he had been my patient for about five years, his wife came along for the first time. During interval history-taking, when I posed the same old question about sex, he gave the same answer. His wife appeared startled and looked quizzically at him.I asked, "How, exactly, do you punctuate the sentence?" He answered with some embarrassment, "Sex, no. Problem."

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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in May 2009.