Party going to seed

Rousseau did not read any erotic book until he was 30. "These books can only be read with one hand," he wrote in Confessions. Yashwant Sinha's Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer offered no such one-liners. But he attempted one when he quit as BJP vice-president on June 12. "I am getting a sinking feeling that once again there is a conspiracy of silence," he said in the resignation letter.

'Conspiracy of silence' is vintage Victorian. It entered the English language in 1865. John Stuart Mill introduced it in his book on Auguste Comte, the French philosopher. 'Sinking feeling', though as old, is more colourful. It first appeared in ads for an energy drink called Bovril. One ad showed a boy sitting astride a huge bottle of Bovril bobbing in the sea and saying, "Bovril prevents that sinking feeling." Flaccid old men drank more Bovril than boys willingly did.

Jaswant Singh says the BJP is a "party of yesterday". Its leaders are looking sad and droopy after losing the elections. A swig of Bovril can help them perk up. It is a beef extract, but the cow lovers should look at the brighter side: beef is slang for sex. The name Bovril is a mix of bovine and Vril. Vril comes from The Coming Race, a novel by Edward Bulwer Lytton, who is better known for The Last Days of Pompeii. It is an all-conquering magic fluid. Lytton coined the word from Old French viril, meaning virile.

Vir in Latin means man. The Sanskrit vira has the same root. The Old English word for man was 'wer', which has survived in werewolf. The Sanskrit veerya, meaning semen, is related to virile. Semen has a close kinship with seminary. Don't think that sex-starved Christian priests flooded the place with some sticky fluid. Semen means seed, and seminary was a plot -- a nursery -- where people planted seed. It later became a school for training priests. But the next time you attend a seminar, wipe the seat before you sit.

The BJP president issued a gag order after Sinha sent his letter. Bulwer Lytton's son, the viceroy Lord Lytton, imposed the Vernacular Press Act in 1878 to tame the Indian press. To escape the Act, the Amrita Bazar Patrika of Calcutta became an entirely English paper overnight. It was bilingual until then. Many Indian papers proudly call themselves vernacular. The word vernacular means 'home-born slave'. The press, of course, tells truth.

Men in Kenya are on a month-long sex boycott to protest against fanatic feminism. Their women staged a week-long sex boycott last month, demanding an end to violent political clashes. The prime minister's wife joined the strike. In the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, by Aristophanes, women go on a sex strike to force their men to stop a long war between Athens and Sparta. The leader of the strike tells her friends: "If we sit indoors dressed in our transparent silks, with our pubis nicely plucked, their tools will become so hard that they won't be able to deny us anything." The strategy is to tease, torture and tame.

Aristophanes savaged Socrates in the play The Clouds. He opposed the philosopher's liberal views on youth and women. Sharad Yadav of the Janata Dal says he likes Socrates and is ready to take poison if Parliament passes the women's reservation bill. In The Assembly of Women, another play by Aristophanes, women disguised as men take over the legislature and pass feminist laws. One law grants the ugliest women the right to drag any man to bed. Praxagora, the feminist leader in the play, tells her friends: "It would be a fine thing if one of us, in the midst of discussion, rushed on to the Speaker's platform and, flinging her cloak aside, showed her hairy privates." Were he in ancient Greece, Yadav would have recorded if she wore lipstick and where.
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*This article appeared in the Indian newsmagazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in June 2009.

I am what I am

Hemingway took a ten-dollar bet and wrote a short story in six words: "For sale: Baby shoes, not used." Samuel Beckett wrote a half-minute play, Breath, which was wordless. All it had was two identical cries, one of birth and the other of death. Victor Hugo was on vacation when Les Miserables was published. He sent the publisher a telegram which had just one character, '?'. The publisher cabled back an ecstatic exclamation mark. King Philip of Macedon wrote a threatening letter to Spartans: "If I enter Laconia, I will raze the city of Sparta." The Spartans sent a one-word retort: "If."

Laconic means using very few words. The word comes from Laconia. President Pratibha Patil used half the laconic 'If' to swear in the new ministers. All she had to say was "I". She uttered it 158 times without a stutter. "After us, the deluge," said Madame De Pompadour, a mistress of Louis XV. Likewise, fools thought, after Kalam, calamity. Patil proved them wrong no doubt.

Patil was an infant -- the word infant means one without speech -- when Haile Selassie addressed the League of Nations in June 1936. It was about mustard bombing by Italy. "I, Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, am here today…," he began. The I after the name Selassie is neither a numeral nor an initial. It is Patil's well-practised word, I.

I is central to spiritualists. A spiritualist, Baba Lekhraj, spoke with the Rashtrapati after his death. The Rastafari believe Selassie is alive; he is God's incarnation. The Christian cult, popular in Jamaica, is named after him: he was Ras Tafari (Prince Tafari) before he became emperor. The Rastafari say "I and I" to link the individual I with the cosmic I. Iyaric, their English lingo, is replete with I. Creator is irator in Iyaric; creation is iration. God is Jah, as seen in hallelujah. They swear by ganja, reggae and dreadlocks.

Elvis Presley had pompadour hair. M.S. Dhoni wore long locks like Kalam when he first caught the public eye. "My hair and beard have turned grey" in the last two years, says the cricketer. Hair has the same root as hoary and horror. Hoary means grey with age, hence venerable. Hair stands on end (Latin horrere) when you feel horror. Dhoni can cause horripilation, or goose bumps, when he hits the ball over the top. To go 'over the top' means to take risks. It also means to have an orgasm.

Sir Toby tells Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night that his hair hangs like flax on a distaff; "and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs and spin it off." Dishevelled is hair (French chevel) in disarray. Ophelia tells her father how Hamlet, looking dishevelled, held her hard while she was sewing in her closet, and how she broke free and denied him access. Shakespeare scholars claim the word access here means intercourse. 'Accessory' in the 19th century meant smaller articles of a woman's dress.

Merkin, an old accessory, was the female beard. Prostitutes wore this pubic wig over shaven genitals to hide scars or for aesthetic effect. Fashionable young men in Elizabethan England wore a codpiece over their trousers. This pouch held the genitals and exaggerated the bulge. Like Elvis the Pelvis, young men everywhere like to swagger as Bulgarians.

Many ministers gagged on the word 'conscientiously' while swearing "I will faithfully and conscientiously discharge my duties…" Conscientiously is a mouthful, with a foul link. Like science, it shares its root -- skei -- with the word shit. Doing one's duty is a euphemism for defecation. Pistol, a character in Henry IV, is quick to discharge. Sir John Falstaff tells him: "Here, Pistol, I charge you with a cup of sack: do you discharge upon mine hostess." Pistol replies: "I will discharge upon her, Sir John, with two bullets." His bullets are his testicles. Discharge your duty, by all means, but keep the oath of secrecy.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in June 2009.

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.
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*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."

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

A bend and a scent

Narendra Modi says, "The Congress is like an old woman, a burden on the country." He would sound more abusive if he used anus, the Latin word for old woman. But the word has no link with any ass, the seat or the beast of burden. It comes from annosa, which means many years old.

Old man is senex in Latin, but can be penis in English. Senior and senate are related to senex. The senate was for the elders. So is the Rajya Sabha, though the senile run for it. The more penile aim for the lower house.

The Old Man and the Sea is the best of Hemingway. He pruned its length by half. The length of a penis in Paris figures in his memoirs, A Moveable Feast. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote The Great Gatsby, felt inadequate after his wife said that the way he was built, he could "never make any woman happy". He consulted Hemingway, his friend and literary rival. First they went to the loo and then to the Louvre, for comparisons.

Hemingway recalls: "Still he was doubtful about himself. 'It is not basically a question of the size in repose,' I said. 'It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.'"

Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times. This novel gave English the Italian word ciao (pronounced chau). Ciao serves as both hello and farewell, but it actually means 'I am your slave'. Sonia Gandhi says Advani is an RSS slave who panders to its wishes. Can he take a step without touching its feet, she asks. To pander is to pimp. English procured the word from Pandarus, who bent over backwards to hook his niece Cressida for his friend Troilus, the prince of Troy.

"Asked to bend, they crawled," Advani said of the press during the Emergency. Election Commission observer P.L. Darbar is in a bind after ordering a bend. A polling officer in Kerala interrupted him during a pre-election briefing. Irritated, Darbar made him bow, holding his ears and bending his knees. The press called the act a half-squat. The right word is genuflection. Half-squat is for bodybuilders. Genuflection involves submission.

Knights genuflected before kings, with one knee bent. Believers bent both knees before bishops to kiss the ring. Arabs sat on bended knees and touched the floor with their foreheads. The sight of elevated bottoms perhaps inspired the invention of domes -- a roofing revolution in an age of steeples and spires. Hindus genuflect best: they prostrate, with not a care about the prostate.

To genuflect is to bend (flect) the knee (genu). The word genuine is born of genu. Romans had a knee ceremony at birth. The father placed the newborn upon his knee if he felt the baby was genuinely his. A knee-trembler is more exciting: it is intercourse in the standing position.

Hemingway wrote standing up. Truman Capote did it lying down. "I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I am lying down," he said. He wrote In Cold Blood. His novella Breakfast at Tiffany's explores a woman, Holiday Golightly. She talks about a vacation: "We had an irresistible guide, most of him Negro and the rest of him Chinese, and while I don't go much for one or the other, the combination was fairly riveting; so I let him play kneesie under the table." Kneesie takes footsie to another level.

Ingenuity drives politics. Mulayam Singh professes a dislike of English and computers. English is also a question of angle, Hemingway would remind him. The verb English means to angle, or spin, the ball in billiards. Mulayam would like the French, who no longer use the word computer. They call it ordinateur. Con-puteur, a French pun on computer, alludes to not-so-fragrant female genitals. God bless Mulayam. He means well: the scent might blunt the urge to french.

wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in April 2009.

Pleasures of pollution

Harry Mathews is a literary oddball. People in Laos mistook the American novelist for a CIA agent. Later, in Paris, he pretended to be a spy. He ran a travel agency for imaginary cloak-and-dagger intrigue, and wrote the 'autobiographical' book My Life In CIA. One of his novels is mysteriously titled Tlooth. Another, Singular Pleasures, is a book of hand-jobs. It describes 61 variations of solitary sex.

Solitary sex is known as onanism, even though Onan had no such obsession. He was the second son of Judah in the Old Testament. When God killed his first-born, Judah said to Onan: "Lie with your brother's wife, and fulfil your duty to her as a brother-in-law to produce offspring for your brother." Onan knew his onions: he didn't want his kids to be credited to his brother. He lay with her, but spilled the seed on the ground. God killed the strategic spill-joy.

The Election Commission loves to play God. It has issued ironclad commandments to candidates, and banned the use of loudspeakers at night. The commission dislikes noise pollution. Its order wouldn't have worked in the distant past, when pollution meant emission of seed in ways other than sexual intercourse. Nocturnal emission was a clear case of pollution, but pardonable. Self-pollution was sinful, an act of onanism.

Linguists pleasure themselves in singular ways. They erupt with joy when they sight frequently abused words correctly used. Offspring, progeny and issue serve as singular as well as plural. Offsprings, progenies and issues - meaning descendants - are for the ignorant. Biceps, kudos and summons are singular nouns that look like plural. Aircrafts and equipments often stray into the papers; these words don't exist. Be mighty pleased if your partner compliments you on your equipment.

People confuse criteria and phenomena with the singular criterion and phenomenon. No such problem with penis. The plural is penes in Latin and penises in English: this vital knowledge remains etched in stone. The plural of the female organ resembling it is clitorides in Latin; the English are content adding -es. Cristoforo Colombo discovered America; another Italian, Renaldo Colombo, discovered the hidden tickler 67 years later. He was an anatomy professor in Padua, a city of plural pleasures. The bachelor Petruchio sings in The Taming of the Shrew: "I have come to wive it wealthily in Padua/ If wealthily, then happily in Padua."

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter of Italian stock, translated François Villon, a French felon who wrote poetry by day and thieved at night. Villon, who served time for murder, was brilliant. He wrote, "But where are the snows of yesteryear?" Yesteryear is time past; 'yesteryears' is illiteracy. Those who write 'heydays' deserve a life sentence. Heyday was a celebratory shout like hurrah or a cry for attention, 'hey there'. It has nothing do with any day, but means the stage of greatest vigour.

IIT and IIM alumni dance with democracy during poll time. A number of them have entered the elections, hoping to expand freedoms. That is a natural urge: alumni in ancient Rome were foster children born of slaves. Alumnus is the male singular. Mallika Sarabhai, a candidate in Gandhinagar, is an IIM-A alumna. The female plural is alumnae.

Don't for a moment think enemy's plural is enema, though their common intention is invasion. That reminds me of terminus, whose Latin plural is termini. Terminus was the Roman god of boundaries, and termini were stones marking the limits. Romans worshipped the stones during Terminalia, a festival in February. For Persians, Terminus was the god Baga, who, like the early Hindu god Bhaga, was a distributor of good fortune. Bhagwan is related to Bhaga, a Sanskrit word that also means vagina. Baghdad was baga-data, meaning god-given. The world has seen what American terminators have done to the god-given land. And the world waits to see what they will do to the land of Bhagwan.

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in April 2009.
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Stroke for a holy alliance

Pranab Mukherjee says the Third Front is like the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Though political hot air, the quip is vintage Voltaire.

The philosopher was a philanderer: he wrote satire and played the satyr. One of his amorous alliances was with his niece. Her first name, Marie, was his middle name, too, so either could pant, "Marie, Marie, hold on tight," as Eliot chanted in The Waste Land.

Voltaire flirted with Catherine the Great, who knew his works by heart. "Every writer in Europe ought to be at your feet," he flattered the holy Romanov empress. They never met, but kept up an intellectual discourse. For physical intercourse, the empress had an impressive number of lovers in St Petersburg. She bore their brats before and after dethroning her husband, Peter, who was no saint. The liberated woman denied that her son Paul, who resembled Peter, sprang from his loins. There was never a stranger alliance.

Paul ordered his army to march on India in 1801. Luckily, his courtiers killed him in no time. His son Alexander had an alliance with Napoleon, who suggested a joint invasion of India in 1808. Alexander was keener on impregnation of his mistresses while his wife, the tsarina, produced babies of her paramours. After Napoleon's fall, Alexander signed an agreement with Prussia and Austria to save Europe from revolution. It is called the Holy Alliance.

Modern politicians prefer unholy alliance. Theodore Roosevelt mentioned an "unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics" during the presidential election in 1912. He lost. A folded copy of a 50-page election speech in his pocket saved his life when a bartender, John Schrank, shot him in the chest. Schrank knew how to mix a tipple, but he missed the former presidential nipple. The speech cushioned the bullet, which settled in a rib.

The Communist Manifesto opens with an unholy ghost and a holy alliance: "A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre." Marx and Engels wrote their first book, The Holy Family, four years earlier. The words 'communism' and 'communist' appear only half a dozen times in it.

These words were coined by John Barmby at age 20 in 1841. He founded the Communist Church in London, mixing Christianity with pantheism. Another 'communist', John Humphrey Noyes, coined the term 'free love'. In 1848, he founded the Oneida commune in New York, where any woman could mate with any man, and vice versa. For birth control, his Central Committee enforced coitus reservatus -- intercourse without ejaculation.

Stalin, the man of steel, frowned on rubber and founded motherhood medals -- a mighty stroke for the proletariat. This word comes from Latin proletarius, meaning the lowest class, who served the state only by producing children. 'Proles' means progeny. If you produce a lot, you are prolific.

Stalin controlled population by other means. He purged thousands to kingdom come. As Khrushchev confessed, Stalin killed 98 of 139 Central Committee members who were elected at the 17th party congress. The word congress once meant 'to walk together'. Later it signified sitting together for a meeting. Then it acquired the additional meaning 'sexual union', which is to lie together.

Voltaire inspired French revolutionaries. The handsome poet Byron fought alongside Greek revolutionaries in 1821. He worked on Don Juan while in alliance with Contessa Teresa Guiccioli in Venice. It was Italian custom for a young woman to take a lover with her husband's knowledge. The lover was called cavaliere servente, or cicisbeo. He escorted the lady to the theatre, read books to her and made love to her, to free the husband for his more pressing concerns. It was delightful division of labour. Byron, who bedded numerous women, was the contessa's cicisbeo for two years. May God guide our politicians to make holier alliances.

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