Time for introspection

Voters can be cruel and fickle. They have rejected the hammer and sickle. The communists are aghast at the Trinamool Congress assault. They can't stop saying 'Oh! Kolkata' under their breath. The French will be pleased to hear their whimper.

Oh! Calcutta was a musical comedy of the sexy sixties. A number of people like John Lennon and Samuel Beckett were associated with it. It revelled in frontal nudity, male as well as female. The play opened in New York in 1969 and had 5,959 shows over the next 20 years. It had nothing to do with Calcutta. The title was a pun on the French words o quel cul t'as, meaning "what a nice ass you have".

The voters have knocked the pants off the comrades. But it looks like an act of sacrilege. Hammer is the weapon of the Norse god Thor, who makes thunder. The expression 'to hammer away', however, means to copulate. The Greek god Priapus wields a sickle, but uses his organ as the main weapon. He is the god of erections. Greeks have a god for everything, but elections are godless and secular like the comrades. Priapus watches over flowers and fruits, his meaty member never droops. He tried to possess the nymph Lotis in her sleep, but the braying of an ass halted the assault. Lotis woke and fled, and became a lotus fruit tree. Priapus slew the whistleblower.

The BJP's lotus is a different species, but linguists have tried to link Priapus with Priyapati, also known as Prajapati. The Hindu god lusted after the nubile goddess Ushas and chased her around the world. He lost a head for the audacity. Physicians know Priapus better. They use the word priapism to describe a state of never flagging erection. Priapic men retain elevation even after ejaculation. This may sound like penile paradise, but priapism is painful and tragic. Leukaemia can trigger it. Another trigger is sickle cell disease.

Prakash Karat went into "serious introspection" after the elections. L.K. Advani contemplated retirement and disappointed. "This is the time not for jubilation, but for sober introspection," said Sonia Gandhi. Navel-gazing is one form of introspection. It can yield oracular insights. Greeks considered Delphi the navel of the universe. The word navel comes from Old Norse nafi, which is the same as Sanskrit naphi. The Greek word for it is omphalos. Oomph, meaning sexual energy, is related to it. Oomph girls simply cannot help showing off their navels. That is in their instincts.

To introspect is to look inward. No one allows you to do it better than Annie Sprinkle, a feminist performance artiste who wrote the book Post-Porn Modernist. She claims to be the first porn star to take a Ph.D. Sprinkle demystifies the female genitalia in her one-woman shows in the United States. In a show called 'Public Cervix Announcement', she encourages the spectators to peep into her cervix, using a speculum and a flashlight. Can you see any teeth inside, she asks, mocking old Freud. Freud dealt with a morbid male fear of vagina dentata, the mythical cervical teeth. Men apparently feared that man-eaters would dismember them out of penis envy.

Sprinkle was a grande horizontale, a French term for whore. Whoroscope should make an apt name for her speculum. Beckett started his literary career with a poem titled Whoroscope. The two tramps in his absurdist play Waiting for Godot call each other Didi and Gogo. The Didi in Kolkata has put the fear of God in the communists. But the go-go girls with pom-poms could not elevate the performance of the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Beckett loved cricket. He is the only first class cricketer to win a Nobel Prize. He had a 'fail better' philosophy. He said: "Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better." The Knight Riders can take heart. But comrades, look inside for insights.
wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in May 2009.

A fetish for the foot

Priyanka Vadra adores her mother. Sonia Gandhi, she says, can be "completely surrounded by praise and sycophancy and be untouched by it". Sycophancy isn't an adorable word. It comes from sykon (fig) and phanein (to show) in Greek. Showing the fig was a gesture of insult in Grecian courts. One made the gesture by sticking the thumb between two fingers. A split fig looks like female genitals-sykon means vulva as well. Politicians rarely made the gesture themselves. Instead, they goaded their toadies to taunt their opponents with it. The toadies came to be known as sycophants.

The Indian fig tree is called banyan. It sprouted from the Sanskrit word vanija, which evolved into bania, meaning merchant. Indian merchants on Persian shores built wayside temples under fig trees. So the Persians called them vanija trees. The infant god Krishna floated on a fig leaf in the primeval flood, contemplating the next cycle of creation. He lay sucking his toes.

Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, author of Phantoms in the Brain, explains "why we like to have our toes sucked". The part of the brain controlling the foot lies right next to the part controlling the genitals. This proximity makes the foot erogenous. People who have lost a limb can still feel sensations in the nonexistent limb because of overlapping neural wiring. Ramachandran calls it the phantom limb.

An engineer from Arkansas, who lost a leg, telephoned him for advice: "Doctor, every time I have sexual intercourse, I experience sensations in my phantom foot. How do you explain that?" The scientist told him about the wiring. "All that's fine, doctor," said the engineer. "But you still don't understand. You see, I actually experience my orgasm in my foot. And therefore it's much bigger than it used to be because it's no longer just confined to my genitals."

Prakash Karat plays footsie with the Congress though he says, "We don't want to be its palanquin bearers." Litter is a more common word for palanquin. Litter also means offspring of an animal at one birth. The smallest pig of a litter is called tantony pig, a corruption of St Anthony's pig. Anthony is the patron saint of swineherds, not the defence minister. The latter spells his name without the 'h', but the press often forgets it.

The press cares more for the pig. It is not just because of the swine flu. Two little pigs ran away while being taken to a slaughterhouse in England in 1998. Someone claimed they had swum across a river and escaped into a thicket. Newspapers put dozens of journalists on the pigs' trail. They lionised the pigs, and named them Butch and Sundance, comparing them to the famous fugitives.

Television crews surveyed the thicket from a news helicopter, with a camera mounted on its nose. One juicy story was about how a female pig, at her oestrous best, was unleashed to tempt Sundance back into his sty. "The seductress did not succeed," the journalist reported. When the pigs were finally captured, the Daily Mail hogged the show: it bought the pigs for 15,000 pounds and sent them to an animal care home for life.

Breathless journalism has no full stops. Cardiologist Bernard Lown, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, missed a full stop for five years. He writes in his book The Lost Art of Healing:

When I questioned one man about sex, he promptly responded, "Sex no problem." At each yearly visit, we went through the same exchange. "Sex?" I would ask. "Sex no problem," he replied instantly.After he had been my patient for about five years, his wife came along for the first time. During interval history-taking, when I posed the same old question about sex, he gave the same answer. His wife appeared startled and looked quizzically at him.I asked, "How, exactly, do you punctuate the sentence?" He answered with some embarrassment, "Sex, no. Problem."

wickedword09@gmail.com

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