Angels, warts and all

The clerics at Deoband who banned Vande Mataram and television missed The Lost Symbol. The book opens with the villain, Mal’akh, drinking wine from a skull. He is tattooed all over, even on his massive sex organ. Dan Brown says Mal’akh is named after the fallen angel Moloch, whom Milton mentions in Paradise Lost. In Arabic and Hebrew, all angels are called mal’akh. The word means God’s messenger.

Another Dan Brown baddie also has an Arab name: the Hassassin is the assassin in Angels and Demons. Hassassin were followers of Hassan, the Nizari Ismaili leader. The Crusaders who fought them attributed their ferocity to hashish. The Arabic word for hashish eaters was hashishiyyin. The word assassin came out of the confusion. Hassan was no hashish eater. He was a learned man who led an austere life.

Puritan Christians emulated Islamic austerity in Cromwell’s England. Cromwell banned all merrymaking. He shut the inns where liquor flowed and the theatres where bawdy bards warbled. Black burqa was thrust upon women, and makeup went out the window.

When Cromwell died, fun returned with knobs on. The king Charles II wrote naughty verse, like his Restoration poets. One of them, John Wilmot, lampooned the royal organ. Here is a printable part of the poem: “This you’d believe, had I but time to tell ye/ The pains it cost to poor, laborious Nellie/ Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth and thighs/ Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.”

In austerity, Cromwell had Indian mind. He broke his own rules, and made merry at his daughter’s wedding. But he was not vain, and told Sir Peter Lely, the portrait artist: “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.” Lely painted him as ordered, warts and all. The expression warts and all, meaning ‘even with all faults’, is now a cliché. But Mayawati, who is building a Stonehenge in Uttar Pradesh, could still use it.

Ancient Romans accepted General Fabius Maximus warts and all. They elected him consul while fighting Hannibal. Fabius had a wart on his upper lip, so they called him Warty (Verrucosus). But he was better known as the Cunctator (delayer) as he preferred attrition, slowly rubbing away, to full frontal attack. Cunctation in bed can prolong pleasure. The Fabian Society is named after him. Fabians like Bernard Shaw influenced Nehru, who chose the slow socialist path for India.

Pratibha Patil prefers supersonic speed. The President plans to fly on a Sukhoi-30 fighter jet. Her spunk should shame the Services into playing Ranji cricket in Kashmir. She was seen as a supermom when her son became an MLA. Flying Sukhoi in the G-suit, she would look like the Supergirl.

Shaw would have been thrilled to meet her. He coined the word superman in 1903 to translate ubermensch from German. Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, had defined ubermensch as a “highly evolved human being that transcends good and evil”. Before Shaw wrote the play Man and Superman, others had translated ubermensch as ‘overman’ and ‘beyond-man’. Both these words found few takers. But uber has flourished as a vogue word for ‘superlative’.

The German uber means 'above', like the Urdu uper. The Latin uber is altogether different. It means udder or breast. This uber is seen in exuberance, which originally meant copious flow of milk from the udder (ex uber). An exuberant person is effusive and full of sap. When the stock market is exuberant, the bulls slurp. Indians are exuberant after the Reserve Bank bought 200 tonnes of gold for $6.7 billion in November. But the economy, up against the wall, may not be getting the golden showers. The liking for such showers is called urolagnia.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week in November 2009.