A hot dog on a leash

A tin trunk held everything Nripen Chakraborty owned. He lived in a single room and was chief minister of Tripura for ten years. George Fernandes washed his own clothes in a bucket even when he was defence minister. A half-naked fakir washes a long piece of white cloth in a river in the film Gandhi. He lets the cloth slip from his fingers and float towards a woman in rags. He looks away so that she can take it without embarrassment. “Her lips almost part in a tiny smile of thanks,” reads the screenplay. Gandhi’s eyes narrow with pain.

S.M. Krishna lived for months in a Maurya Sheraton suite costing the earth. He took the trouble for his love of simplicity—sheraton is a furniture style noted for its simplicity. Pranab Mukherjee, who ejected him, hardly knows the root of austerity. The word austere, meaning dry, was originally used to describe brandy, not ‘Gandy’. Krishna said he would make “private arrangements” to continue living in luxury. He spoke like a stoic, a philosopher with the stiff upper lip. The word stoic comes from Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch in Athens where stoics taught endurance.

The Painted Porch had frescos of the battle of Marathon. More than stoics, ascetics were associated with Marathon. Ascetics were Greek athletes who trained hard for gymnastic competitions. They followed rigorous self-discipline. The word ascetic later came to mean a monk who showed such rigour. Shashi Tharoor, who camped in the Taj Mahal hotel, declined to live in the Kerala House because it offered no privacy or gym. He no doubt knows that ancients who went to gyms trained naked, showing off their privates. Gymnos means naked in Greek.

Gymnosophists were naked philosophers the Greeks sighted in India after Alexander’s invasion. These were mainly Digambara (sky-clad) Jain monks. The invaders would have paid attention to gymnosophists’ danglers. The Greeks knew how to restrain their own privates. Their athletes tied a leather strap to the foreskin to stop the penis from dangling during competitions. The other end of the strap was tied round the base. Baring the glans, even by accident, was considered inelegant.

The foreskin restraint was called kynodesme, meaning dog on a leash. Kynikos means doglike. This word evolved into English cynic. Cynics were a school of philosophers noted for their sneering sarcasm. While sneering, they tended to bare their teeth like snarling dogs. Their gymnasium in Athens was known as the Grey Dog. The anti-Naxalite Greyhounds of Andhra Pradesh are all teeth and no leash.

The cynic Diogenes, who lived in a barrel and slighted Alexander, was an exhibitionist. He fondled himself in public, saying, “If only I could soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.” The Japanese call male masturbation senzui—it means a hundred rubs. They call the female variety manzumi, meaning ten thousand rubs. The arithmetic could be faulty, but women take a longer time than men.

The book Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod, has such words and expressions from different languages. In Japanese, Bakku-shan is a girl who looks good from behind but not so from the front. Zaftig in German is a buxom woman full of juice (zaf means sap). Don’t expect the frau to dote on die toten hosen—the dead trousers—meaning a boring place or an impotent man. She would rather chase Italians adept at carezza. Carezza is marathon sex, coitus prolongatus, avoiding emission.

Fijians call unfaithful husbands vori vori (ball ball). Large corn flour balls swim in this thick soup. Sops that German philanderers offer to pacify their suspicious wives are called dragon fodder. The dragon sniffing at the Arunachal border is itching for trouble. The best way to provoke Chinese brass hats is to send them green hats. If you tell a Chinese that he wears a green hat, you imply that his wife is cheating on him. A hard hat is a helmet. Helmet also means glans, the private red hat.
wickedword09@gmail.com

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

A bone of contention

Tamiflu maker Roche pays Gilead Sciences 18 per cent as royalties. Gilead holds the patent. Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of Gilead before he became US secretary of defence in 2001. He is still its major shareholder. Rumsfeld's assets zoomed when President Bush saw doom in the avian flu in 2005—he falsely predicted 2,00,000 flu cases in the US. India is now the land of opportunity for the flu gang.

Gilead is a biblical name meaning hill of testimony. The word testimony shares its Latin root, testis, with testicle. Not all etymologists agree that witnesses in ancient Rome put their hands on their testicles while testifying in court. But a testicle touch indicated trust. Abraham asked his servant to put his hand “under my thigh” and swear that he would bring a god-fearing bride for Isaac.

Judges in India agonised over their own assets in August. They behaved like bikinis on the beach: ready to reveal, but denying a closer look. Manmohan Singh worried about pendency. It is an old infirmity. He offered to “walk the extra mile” to level the pile of pending cases. The phrase “go the extra mile” is from the Bible. A Roman soldier on the march carried heavy arms and other stuff. Law allowed him to collar a passerby to carry his load for a mile. The carriers hated it. Jesus preached them love: “Whoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” That is the extra mile.

The Swiss Banks Association has lent Indian fat cats an extra smile. It says it will not allow any fishing expedition by India. A fishing expedition is a legal investigation with the idea of discovering something that can be used for later proceedings. A fishing story is an exaggerated account. You lay it thick.

A whaling expedition epic, Moby Dick, has the best opening line in American literature. “Call me Ishmael,” it goes. The Bulwer Lytton Prize, a mock award, is given for worst opening lines. Lytton's novel Paul Clifford opens thus: “It was a dark and stormy night.” The silly prize this year went to a man who wrote a paragraph about a night on a whaler ship.

Arabs trace their roots to the biblical Ishmael. They call him Ismail. He was born when his father, Abraham, was 86 years old. Yet, Abraham fell to the ground, rolling in laughter, when God said he would have another son, Isaac. Abraham was then 99. All God wanted in return was a circumcision treaty. Abraham and Ishmael obliged with their foreskin.

Ishmael is a telepathic gorilla in David Quinn's book Ishmael. Quinn says the rib that God took from Adam to create Eve was actually a bone in the penis. Man lacks this bone, which most other mammals have. Man's evolutionary cousins the gorilla and the chimpanzee are equipped with it. The Hebrew word for rib was a euphemism for the bone. Quinn traces the seam on the scrotum and on the underside of the shaft as telltale proof of the divine surgery.

Scientists call the bone baculum. Arun Shourie, who often quotes from Alice in Wonderland, might hit the roof if told that the rabbit does not have it. But the walrus, which sings of cabbages and kings, has an impressive one. It could be even 2.5 metres long.

Scientist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, is a staunch evolutionist. He says, while evolving from apes, females found baculum-less males healthier, and so more interesting in bed. This sexual selection led to “boneless” babies and eventual extinction of human baculum. Sufferers of erectile dysfunction can forgive neither the women nor God.

Horses and hyenas have no baculum. Nor do whales and dolphins, though the latter have quickies many times a day. They have enormous desire and can romance human beings. Next time a dolphin tries to save you from drowning in the sea, take care to cover your base.
wickedword09@gmail.com

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