Off with his head -

Illustration: Hadimani

WICKED WORD

By V.S. Jayaschandran

Woman Hitler is an anagram of mother-in-law. But there is a little Hitler in every male. The little Hitler in Praful Patel burst forth in a television interview on July 7. “Heads will roll,” he roared, announcing his ambition to straighten out Air India within 30 days. The murderous expression is a Hitlerism. Germans screamed ‘Vote Ja’ when Hitler said during an election in 1930, “If our movement is victorious, there will be a revolutionary tribunal which will punish the crimes of 1918. The decapitated heads will roll in the sand.”
A roll in the sand is far less pleasurable than a roll in the hay, which means to make love. Lovemaking can be more satisfying, especially for the female, if you give head. Civilisation is on your side. The sexologist Havelock Ellis says the act of going down on a woman “was a very familiar manifestation in classical times; …it tends to be especially prevalent at all periods of high civilisation.” Such scholarship is lost on Ghulam Nabi Azad. He wants Indians to make love less often and make babies only in their thirties. Recreation, he believes, can prevent procreation.

Ancient Greeks would have applauded Azad. They segregated men from women till men reached age 30. Boys left home for military camps at age seven, and men courted them in their adolescence with the consent of their fathers. The state controlled population by encouraging men to take boys as lovers, but sodomy was taboo. Those who did not have a boy lover ran the risk of being called eccentric or even unpatriotic. Many men never married. But if they felt the temptation to pass on their genes, they could borrow a friend’s wife who already had produced children for him.

Socrates had pederastic relationships with several of his students, who trained naked in gymnasiums. The word gymnast comes from gymnos, meaning naked. One of his favourites, Alcibiades, became a great Athenian general. The historian Xenophon says Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe, was jealous of Alcibiades. The jealousy might have aggravated her ill temper. Her name means yellow mare; a grey mare is a woman who governs her husband. Socrates said he married the shrew to practise his patience. A student sought his advice on marriage. “Marry, by all means,” Socrates said. “If you get a good wife, you will be happy. If you get a bad wife, you will become a philosopher.”

Socrates never wrote any book. He followed the oral tradition. Oscar Wilde restricted the tradition to his sexuality. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and gays may love Ur-anus. Wilde swore that he never loved it. He sued the Marquis of Queensberry for calling him a sodomite. In court he argued that his love for the marquis’s son, Arthur Douglas, was pure and sublime in the Greek pederastic tradition. Douglas in a poem had described it as “the love that dare not speak its name”.

Wilde lost the case and was sent to Reading Prison. Apparently he lost no time seducing the jailor. He became a number, C 3.3., which stood for his jail block, floor and cell. The number three, like thirty, has become hot. Pranab Mukherjee heads the latest GoM, on 3G spectrum. The Supreme Court is examining the rights of the third gender. Hillary Clinton says India and the US are “at the beginning of a third era. I’ll call it US-India 3.0.” The real American intention is to upgrade Af-Pak to a more terrifying threesome, Af-Pak-In.
Elizabethan dramatists loved to pun on the number three. It meant the male genitals. Curtis, a minor character in The Taming of the Shrew, tells Grumio, the hero’s attendant: “Away, you three-inch fool! I am no beast.” Grumio retorts, calling him a cuckold: “Am I but three inches? Why thy horn is a foot; and so long am I at the least.”
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(The Week)
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