Off with his head

Woman Hitler is an anagram of mother-in-law. But there is a little Hitler in every male. The little Hitler in Praful Patel burst forth in a television interview on July 7. “Heads will roll,” he roared, announcing his ambition to straighten out Air India within 30 days. The murderous expression is a Hitlerism. Germans screamed ‘Vote Ja’ when Hitler said during an election in 1930, “If our movement is victorious, there will be a revolutionary tribunal which will punish the crimes of 1918. The decapitated heads will roll in the sand.”

A roll in the sand is far less pleasurable than a roll in the hay, which means to make love. Lovemaking can be more satisfying, especially for the female, if you give head. Civilisation is on your side. The sexologist Havelock Ellis says the act of going down on a woman “was a very familiar manifestation in classical times; …it tends to be especially prevalent at all periods of high civilisation.” Such scholarship is lost on Ghulam Nabi Azad. He wants Indians to make love less often and make babies only in their thirties. Recreation, he believes, can prevent procreation.

Ancient Greeks would have applauded Azad. They segregated men from women till men reached age 30. Boys left home for military camps at age seven, and men courted them in their adolescence with the consent of their fathers. The state controlled population by encouraging men to take boys as lovers, but sodomy was taboo. Those who did not have a boy lover ran the risk of being called eccentric or even unpatriotic. Many men never married. But if they felt the temptation to pass on their genes, they could borrow a friend’s wife who already had produced children for him.

Socrates had pederastic relationships with several of his students, who trained naked in gymnasiums. The word gymnast comes from gymnos, meaning naked. One of his favourites, Alcibiades, became a great Athenian general. The historian Xenophon says Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe, was jealous of Alcibiades. The jealousy might have aggravated her ill temper. Her name means yellow mare; a grey mare is a woman who governs her husband. Socrates said he married the shrew to practise his patience. A student sought his advice on marriage. “Marry, by all means,” Socrates said. “If you get a good wife, you will be happy. If you get a bad wife, you will become a philosopher.”

Socrates never wrote any book. He followed the oral tradition. Oscar Wilde restricted the tradition to his sexuality. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and gays may love Uranus. Wilde swore that he never loved it. He sued the Marquis of Queensberry for calling him a sodomite. In court he argued that his love for the marquis’s son, Arthur Douglas, was pure and sublime in the Greek pederastic tradition. Douglas in a poem had described it as “the love that dare not speak its name”.

Wilde lost the case and was sent to Reading Prison. Apparently he lost no time seducing the jailor. He became a number, C 3.3., which stood for his jail block, floor and cell. The number three, like thirty, has become hot. Pranab Mukherjee heads the latest GoM, on 3G spectrum. The Supreme Court is examining the rights of the third gender. Hillary Clinton says India and the US are “at the beginning of a third era. I’ll call it US-India 3.0.” The real American intention is to upgrade Af-Pak to a more terrifying threesome, Af-Pak-In.

Elizabethan dramatists loved to pun on the number three. It meant the male genitals. Curtis, a minor character in The Taming of the Shrew, tells Grumio, the hero’s attendant: “Away, you three-inch fool! I am no beast.” Grumio retorts, calling him a cuckold: “Am I but three inches? Why thy horn is a foot; and so long am I at the least.”
wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in July 2009

Gone with the wind

Columbus gave the Caniba a bad name. He called them canibales, invented stories of their eating human flesh and hunted them without compunction. Carib, another name of the Caniba, yielded the word Caribbean. They were a seafaring tribe, with slanted eyes and yellowish skin, and both names meant 'valiant warriors'. But white men fatted the cannibal myth. They said the Carib tasted all nationalities, and found Frenchmen the most delicious and Spaniards the hardest to digest.

A more authentic Caribbean delicacy, cou-cou soup, is a magic potion that women ladle out to make men fall in love with them. Girls lace it with their own intimate juices and feed their boyfriends. Ganga channa, another West Indian preparation, serves the same purpose. While cooking it, the woman squats naked over the steaming pot of chickpeas to infuse it with her enchanting pheromones.

West Indians call a new boyfriend juvi. Girls at Sabina Park cheered Yuvi as he scored a century on June 26. It was a breezy knock all right, but cricket writers went overboard. A Caribbean paper online ran this headline: "Yuvraj ton too much for feisty Windies."'Feisty Windies' is a curious combination. Feisty means aggressive, but the word has a troublesome wind behind it. Feisty comes from Middle English fisten, meaning to fart without sound. Though not noisy, it can be noisome. Feist was "a small wind, escaping backward, more obvious to the nose than ears." Fizzle is another word for this strong, silent type. Fizzle blows no whistle, nor sounds any trumpet.

Feisty old ladies in the 17th century, on emitting foul smells, blamed it on their lapdogs. "These feisting curs!" they cursed, to save face. Before long, feist came to mean the innocent beast itself. The smell became dog. The Old French noun 'pet' meant fart. Its verb, peter, is still intact. Shakespeare punned on petar (a small bomb) and peter (penis). Hamlet tells his mother: "For it is the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petar."

Some say Shakespeare is a pen name. They name Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as the real author. John Aubrey celebrated the earl in Brief Lives: "This Earle of Oxford, making his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to travel, 7 years. On his returne, the Queen welcomed him home and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the fart."

This anecdote could have inspired Mark Twain's 1601 -- a fireside conversation in the time of the Tudors. Someone breaks wind while the Queen is chatting with luminaries like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and Walter Raleigh. Investigating the blast, the Queen says: "Prithee, let the author confess the offspring. Will my Lady Alice testify?"

Lady Alice protests there is "no room for such a thundergust within my ancient bowels." The kind Queen absolves the young Helen saying she would have to tickle her "tender maidenhedde with many a mousie-squeak" before she learnt "to blow a hurricane like this. Was it you, my learned and ingenious Jonson?"

Jonson disowns it, and so do Bacon and Shakespeare, in their distinct literary styles. All look towards Raleigh, who then rises and says: "Most gracious maisty, it was I that did it, but indeed it was so poor and frail a note, compared with such as I am wont to furnish, that in sooth I was ashamed to call the weakling mine."

The move to amend Section 377 of the IPC had fizzled out, before the Delhi High Court struck a blow for the gays on July 2. The judgment encourages Indians to go back from Jai ho to Jai 'hind'. And cannibals -- gay or not -- can now perform 69 without fear of arrest. But Othello did not mean it when he tempted Desdemona with tales of hair-breadth escapes and "Cannibals that each other eat".
wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in July 2009.