Going for the jugular

Elizabeth Blackburn was asleep when she got the Nobel Prize call on October 5. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said, full of joy. That was natural—the Old English word dream meant joy. The Old English word for dream was swefn, which is the same as Sanskrit swapna. Their root, swep-no, meant sleep. Greeks pronounced swep-no as hypnos, just as Iranians pronounced the Sanskrit soma as homa.

The Scottish surgeon James Braid coined the word hypnotism in 1843, long after Franz Mesmer died. Mesmerism was considered black magic until an Indian monk in Paris, Abbe Faria, published a book on lucid sleep in 1819. His native Goa has an arresting bronze sculpture of him mesmerising a woman.

Faria led a battalion in the French Revolution and spent years in jail. He used yoga in his psychological research. His father was a master of yoga and mind control. Yoga means union or yoke. Veins in the neck are called jugular because they pass under jugulum, the yoke-shaped collarbone. Yoga gets under covers in conjugal, but if you listen hard you won’t miss the “jug jug to dirty ears”.

The tele-yoga teacher Baba Ramdev boasts he will cure mankind of all diseases in 20 years. His disciples bought a Scottish island last month to build a yoga centre. Scotsmen in kilts doing the headstand will make a pretty picture. Looking up, they could go bananas. A true Scotsman wears nothing under the kilt. Sergeants in Scottish regiments enforced the no-undies rule, and checked under kilts with a long-handled mirror. Guards at hotel gates use such mirrors to check under vehicles for bombs. Terrorism can spell the end of miniskirts.

Ramdev swears by the vedas. Veda is related to the Latin videre (to see, to know). So are wit, vision, video, visa and voyeur. After a conquest in 47 BC, Julius Caesar wrote: veni, vidi, vici—I came, I saw, I conquered. Young men plagued by premature release change the word order and lament, “I saw, I came….”

The Chinese on the border are going for the jugular, but India takes reporters to task. It has denied reports of incursions with a rare vehemence. But don’t fault China for giving Kashmiris paper visa, ignoring Indian passports. Visa was originally known as charta (paper) visa (seen). America is eager to shoehorn itself into Kashmir. Bill Clinton failed to become US special envoy to Kashmir, but count on the pants dropper to use his good orifices. The Organisation of Islamic Countries has appointed a special envoy for Kashmir. In literature, envoy is a message at the end of a poem. In the envoy to ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, Chaucer advises women: “Ever wag your tongues like the windmill.” Envoys are good at it.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, Abbe Faria helps the hero discover a treasure. Alexandre Dumas did not mention his Indian origins in the novel. Dumas did odd things. One winter evening, he allowed the novelist Roger de Beauvoir to join him and his wife, Ida, in bed, just to keep warm. Writes a literary historian: “In the morning Alexandre woke up first, looked at the two traitors, and then addressed de Beauvoir, ‘Shall two old friends quarrel about a woman, even when she’s a lawful wife? That would be stupid,’ and seizing his friend’s hand across Ida’s sleeping form, he added: ‘Let us become reconciled like the ancient Romans—on this public square.’”

Sharing a bed was a fine way of courtship in Scotland. No young Scot took his girlfriend out for a date. He simply asked her parents to let him share her bed at night. They went to bed fully clothed. Parents tucked the girl in a sack, leaving only the hands and face free for exploration. This was known as bundling, which should gladden modern marketing strategists. But keep an eye on the border—the Americans and the Chinese might do some bundling to turn up the heat on Pakistan.

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