Time for introspection

Illustration: Bhaskaran

WICKED WORD
By V.S. Jayaschandran

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. The 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 the Old Norse nafi, which is the same as Sanskrit 'nabhi'. 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 instilled 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
(The Week)
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