Wrong side of the blanket

Humans hunt for a superconducting metallic rock in the movie Avatar. They call it unobtanium. This word mates ‘unobtainable’ and the ‘-nium’ ending of rare elements. Engineers at a warplane workshop in California found it difficult to obtain titanium from Russia in the 1950s. So they dubbed it unobtanium in jest. Today the word means anything essential that is out of reach. Unobtanium entered science fiction before the Sanskrit word avatar did. Neal Stephenson introduced avatar in his novel Snow Crash in 1992. He also coined the word metaverse in the novel. But many readers remember the book for vagina dentata, an anti-rape device worn by the character Yours Truly. Its teeth inject a numbing drug into any invasive object to render it limpdick—another humdinger of a word heard in Avatar. Avatars fascinated the scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who took Indian citizenship in the 1950s. He saw a parallel between Vishnu’s ten avatars and Darwin’s theory of evolution—how life began in water (Matsya avatar) and became amphibian (Kurma), animal on land (Varaha), half-man half-beast (Narasimha), proto human (Vamana), small-brained man (Parasurama) and then fully developed man (Rama, Balarama, Krishna and Kalki). Haldane was Aldous Huxley’s model for Shearwater in the novel Antic Hay. Huxley describes Shearwater as “the biologist too absorbed in his experiments to notice his friends bedding his wife”. Haldane and Huxley were friends. Haldane conceived the idea of test-tube babies in his book Daedalus. Huxley borrowed it for his Brave New World, where children are born without both parents. They are created in hatcheries and conditioned in sleep. Deve Gowda slept through his prime ministership. Now he has woken and spoken. He called B.S. Yeddyurappa a “bloody bastard”. But bastards in politics were not always despised. Even official documents described William the Conqueror as William the Bastard. Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, was also a love child. So was Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers. Australians should rename their country as Hindu Kush. The name of the mountain range means Hindu killer. Numerous Indians died while crossing it in winter. But don’t call Australians bastards for the attacks on Indians. The word has no sting Down Under. An Australian cricketer used it against the Bodyline bowler Harold Larwood. When the English captain Douglas Jardine went to the Aussie camp to complain, the Aussie vice-captain Vic Richardson asked his team mates: “OK, which of you bastards called Larwood a bastard, instead of this bastard?” Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, has a celebrated foul tongue. Obama joked about it at a roast in 2005: “As a young man he had a serious accident with a meat slicing machine. He lost part of his middle finger, and this rendered him practically mute.” Obama harped on it on Mother’s Day last year: “This is a tough holiday for Rahm,” he said. “He’s not used to saying the word ‘day’ after ‘mother’.” Obama loves the word screw-up, which is no profanity. He uses it as mea culpa. He said “screw-up” three times as president. The provocation the second time was the gatecrashing of his first state dinner for Manmohan Singh two months ago. Singh has no such gift of the gab and sticks to safe words. He described India as a slow elephant at the Pravasi Divas. The sluggish elephant needs some gingering up. This was a treatment the horse got in the past. A piece of ginger was pushed up its rear to make it sprightly. The word ginger comes from the Sanskrit sringaveram, meaning horn-shaped body. Sringa is related to sringara—the rasa that makes you horny and tempts you to produce bastards. wickedword09@gmail.com *This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (the-week.com) in January 2010.