The three-fold path

Karunanidhi is most merciful. He has demanded Indian citizenship for Sri Lankan refugees in Tamil Nadu. Jayalalithaa says he is thereby “trivialising” the Tamil struggle in Lanka. But trivia is good for Alzheimer’s. It can irrigate brain cells.

Intellectuals feign contempt for trivia. Gossips love it. In modern politics, nothing can rival Churchill trivia. The prime minister walked about naked in his room and dictated letters in his bathtub. Franklin Roosevelt invited him to the White House in 1941. Churchill was dictating to his stenographer Patrick Kinna when the president knocked on the door. Churchill said, “Come in,” and Roosevelt entered and was dazzled by the pink pendant. “As you can see, Mr President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide from you.”

In a cartoon, Abu Abraham lampooned President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing away ordinances in his bathtub during the Emergency. If Churchill were alive, he might have sued the cartoonist for copyright. Kinna died this year at age 95.

Sri Lankans, too, treasure their political trivia. Sir John Kotelawala was the prime minister when Queen Elizabeth II visited Colombo in 1954. At a reception, her skirt flew up and mushroomed in a sudden gust, and the prime minister shouted in Sinhala to the official photographer: “Ganing, yokko, ganing (Shoot, you beggar, shoot.)” The loyal photographer did not miss Her Thighness.

Trivia wasn’t always trivial. Trivia was a junction of three paths—tri is three and via means way. It became associated with titbits because people who met at crossroads exchanged gossip. Hecate Trivia, the Greek goddess of three paths, was the protector of newborns, women and households. Male chauvinists reduced her to the patron of witches. Panchsheel was based on the Buddhist eight-fold path. It became Hindi-Chini border trivia.

Scholars in the Middle Ages were called trivialists. They studied trivium, the lower division of a university course comprising grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the basics of the seven liberal arts. The higher division, quadrivium, had mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy.

Kotelawala lost the election in 1956 to Solomon Bandaranaike thanks to Buddhist bhikkhus who supported the ‘Sinhala Only’ campaign. Bhikkhu is a Pali word related to the Sanskrit bhikshu. A bhikshu begs food (bhiksha). The Russian word for food is pischa, which is related to bhiksha and possibly to the Tamil pichai and pichaikkaran (beggar).

The Russian word for brother (Sanskrit bhrata) is brat. That is apt. Bog, the Russian word for God, could be related to Bhagwan. God help Bengal’s Buddha. He might face another Mamata-Maoist kolahal if he acquires land for a Russian nuclear plant at Haripur. He should watch Kolokol Chernobylya, the first film on the nuclear accident. Kolokol means warning bell in Russian.

Indians are suckers for nuclear deals. Sugar in Moscow is sakhar. Sanskrit sharkara khanda and Persian shakar kand became French sucre candi and English sugar candy. Actor Pia Glenn, jilted by sugar daddy Salman Rushdie, says she isn’t the kind of woman who would be his “arm candy”. She all but called him midnight baby, a euphemism for bastard. The title Midnight’s Children is subversive.

Karl Marx, the communist god, had a midnight baby. The boy’s mother, Helen Demuth, had joined Marx’s wife as a maidservant at age 8. Marx never paid the proletarian for a lifetime of slavery in his house. Helen became pregnant in 1850, two years after Marx and Engels gave the call, “Workers of the world, unite.” She gave the child—Henry Frederick Demuth—the first and middle names of Marx and Engels, and her surname. It was perhaps a three-way thing. Marx forced Engels to own up the kid, but Engels in deathbed blew the lid. “Freddy is Marx’s son,” he told Eleanor, a daughter of Marx. Labour problems never go away.

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

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.

Count your cash cows

Goblins in Harry Potter speak gobbledygook. Others cannot understand their lingo. India’s nuclear mandarins speak in tongues about the “failure” of Pokhran II. Nobody can make sense of their glossolalia. Bombay-born British educator Frederic Farrar coined the word glossolalia in 1879. American legislator Maury Maverick coined gobbledygook to twit bureaucratese. He did it in a wartime memo in 1944, threatening in jest to shoot anyone using words like activation and implementation.

His grandfather Samuel Maverick was more famous. His name yielded the word maverick. This Texas engineer did not brand the calves in his cattle ranch. So other ranchers called unbranded calves maverick. Later, maverick came to mean ‘masterless’ and then ‘unconventional person’.

Shashi Tharoor is a maverick calf in politics. He tweeted in jest about the government’s austerity drive. He said he would travel “cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows”. The prattle class was pleased, but hidebound Congressmen demanded his head. ‘Hidebound’ originally indicated skinny cattle with the ribs and backbones sticking out.

Cattle class is economy class for the British and coach class for Americans. Sailors called it steerage—the lowest deck, full of foul air. It was slightly better than the cargo hold. Steerage got its name from rudder ropes that veined the deck. Almost half the 2,566 passengers of the Titanic travelled cattle class.

James Cameron writes in Titanic film script: “Steerage passengers, in their coarse wool and tweeds, queue up in moveable barriers like cattle in a chute. A health officer examines their heads one by one, checking the scalp and eyelashes for lice.” Two unruly boys and their uncouth father shove past Rose’s fiancé, the uber-rich Cal. “Steerage swine!” says Cal, iceberg-cold. “Apparently he missed his annual bath.”

Manmohan Singh saw no sting in Tharoor’s tweet. The capitalist economist knows the value of cattle. The word cattle comes from Latin capitale, meaning property. As cattle moved, it was moveable property. This meaning survives in the legal term ‘goods and chattels’. Chattel was cattle in French.

Cattle represented the wealth of ancient migrants. Romans called their domestic animals pecu. Indians called theirs pasu. Pecu produced the words pecuniary (relating to money) and peculiar. Peculiar meant private property in the form of cattle. The Jews were known as Peculiar People—God’s chosen people, who owned private property and had money. For many Jews, money-lending was heaven.

The government has asked IIMs and IITs to increase fees. This should make cattle burp in satisfaction. The word fee comes from the Old German fihu, meaning cattle. Some Harvard professors had a cattle perk—they could graze their cows on the university campus. Professor Harvey Cox, author of The Secular City, took that privilege on September 10. He took a cow to his retirement party in Harvard. The English cow is a clone of the Sanskrit gau, though gau sounds hoarse like deep-throated Tharoor.

Sonia Gandhi knows that Italy (Viteliu) means land of cattle. The Latin word for calf is vitulus. Sonia flew cattle class from Delhi to Mumbai on September 14. Don’t connect her with Tharoor’s “holy cows”—unless he had ‘sacred cows’ in mind. Holy Cow is just an interjection, a swearword like Holy Mackerel. A sacred cow is something or someone you can’t question.

The Sacred Band was an elite unit in the Theban army. Alexander annihilated them. The Sacred Band consisted of 150 pairs of gay lovers. Thebans theorised that lovers would stick by each other in crunch time and battle hard. It was like the commando buddy system. Buddy has a queer past. The word originated as butty (workmate) in coalmines, where miners worked in close proximity, butt to butt.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in September 2009.