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Base Instinct

I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, your friendly psychopath has decided to halt this column since she feels terribly ennuyé of weekly scribbling and horribly cynical about politics in general. The bad news is, she can't. For that would be taken as giving in to hate males. What a dilemma for you and me. So here I am, another week, another day, another spree of self-indulging away...

You know, I hate February-March more than I detest December-January. The latter obliges mediapersons to put out inane round-ups of the-year-that-was and the-year-that will-be -- still quite manageable by yr. corresp. But this is Budget time. Economics. Which branch of science, your adorable columnist knows less than zero about. (Which is not to say that she flees from economists; indeed, she encourages males of that species to urgently contact her to, er... help expand her horizons.)

Came Sunday, and my dear tormented brother (who, if I'd kept on at him with my blank but inquiring stare, would soon have become my dear departed brother), went through the plethora of deposit schemes and gold trade and tax amnesties, protective tariffs, bhagidari sectors and what-have-you, and finally got around to what I really wanted to know: It seems, Yashwant Sinha (still hirsute, even with the RSS tugging on), hasn't quite yielded to the Swadeshi Jokers Manch. I sighed with relief; 'twas good enough for me. For try as I may, I can't reconcile myself to protectionist ideals.

Which is a one-line opinion -- and didn't solve my problem of how to do a 1,500-words during a Budget week...

So I did what I usually do when stuck for ideas: I opened The Asian Age... As you may have guessed, your correspondent is a highly reactive writer, and TAA is a virtual minefield for those out on a com-div-fundie stroll. It doesn't take more than five to six inches of its newsprint for this maniac to begin jumping up and down with some real or imagined Hindu grievance ravaging her innards, and voilà -- an article is born. But that's not what happened. I flipped to editor M J Akbar's column on why Sonia did well to oppose the President's rule and immediately went into a fugue over good writers and bad, mavericks and wimps, and thence to humour and solemnity and decency and outrage...

Just recently, I'd bared my soul to a cyberpal, spamming him with my observations of a certain characteristic of Indians, and what made Bhosle furious. The poor chap went through the long, unsolicited rave-and-rant and then expressed his amazement at what he construed to be my peeve at personal hate mail. Which was missing the bus totally. For I'd been musing on the apparent lack of the funny bone in more than most desis.

To illustrate via pop culture: Why is it that The Party -- featuring Peter Sellers as the hilarious but entirely believable 'Rhundi V Baxi' -- was banned in India? Why couldn't we laugh at ourselves, when the French could with 'Inspector Clousseau' of The Pink Panther series? Why are our successful movies boosted by the worst sort of slapstick, while good comedies like, say, Gulzar's Angoor, instantly get flushed down the loo? Why can't we discern when the speaker's tongue's firmly in cheek...?

No, I haven't veered from the subject of M J Akbar. Now that is one good political analyser -- independent of a reader's own bias. And if you're a BJP-bashing type, I suppose he's god. But what sets him (and Vir Sanghvi) apart is his lethal sense of humour; my Sundays aren't quite complete without a dose of him. OK, later on, I may fume and fret over why he brickbatted this or lambasted that, but while I read him, he holds me in thrall. And he does it, not by his views or counsels, but by his style and his ability to make me giggle at those whom I advance... Shobha De once quoted MJ as saying that to be a successful editor one had to have balls made of iron. A peep at his baby amply illustrates that. And that, me likee.

So does that mean that I think I have a better sense of humour than the Louts out there? OF COURSE NOT!! It means, I have an average sense of humour whereas they have none. In the words of James Stephens: "If a person desires to be a humorist, it is necessary that the people around him shall be at least as wise as he is, otherwise his humour will not be comprehended." Which isn't to say that I set out to be, or see myself as a humorist and all, but... well... Indian politics can make a satirist out of the staidest scribe.

OTOH, it could well be argued that, as George Bernard Shaw said, "There is no more dangerous a literary symptom than a temptation to write a book about wit and humour. It indicates the total loss of both." Now what to do...? Well, do what the secularists do: Carry on shamelessly...

So as I was saying about TAA, which other paper would have the pluck to carry, in bold, on the front page, an item on "Delhi Man Held For Sex With A Buffalo"? (I checked, none did.) One Dharamvir Singh, 35, went to stay at his friend Randhir Singh's house. Randhir caught him in the act, called his neighbours, who handed Dharamvir over to the police, who charged him with sexual assault on Randhir's buffalo. Now, I happened to mention it to an acquaintance; SPCA notwithstanding, I'd found the charge funny. Only, my pal embarked on the saga of deteriorating publishing standards. I barely got into my slippers for the speedy retreat.

Uff! I just can't take this politically-correct business: It puts paid to any opportunity of raising a chuckle, and it makes dreary, sanctimonious wonders out of us all. Which is why you often find me forcing on you The Spectator's Taki -- the world's most vitriolic columnist: "Listening to the politicians grovelling for votes, you'd think Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe and Shakespeare were all Puerto Ricans. Never have I seen a ghastlier group -- but then I am never in the Big Bagel during the gay and lesbian parade. Why in hell should the tax-payer carry the load for a bunch of semi-savages to march down Fifth Avenue and turn it into a mini San Juan? Ditto for the perverts?" (...and I'm pulled up for "Mosie." Sigh).

For an undiluted sense of the ridiculous, there's Dave Barry. When the Louts must be trashed, nobody can do it better: "I am getting sick and tired of listening to you members of the public carping about the news media. Every time I turn on the TV or radio, they're interviewing some Typical Heartland Americans -- five or six hard-working, salt-of-the-Earth agricultural guys wearing bib overalls and baseball-style caps imprinted with the name of a pesticide, drinking coffee in a diner in some soybean-infested region. OK, my first question is: If these guys are so hard-working, How come they're always in the diner? You know what I think? I think they don't work at all. I think they get up at the crack of dawn and go to the diner, and then spend their entire day there, waiting for TV news crews to show up. While they're waiting, they watch Jerry Springer and exchange fashion tips ('Elmer, is that a new pesticide cap? It's YOU!')." No, the bibbed guys didn't bomb The Miami Herald. They were probably out laughing.

And *now* we come to my peeve: I've begun to realise that Indians have very unrealistic and anachronistic expectations from only Indian journalists. It's like our watching a deep-kissing shot in movies: Hollywood stars doing it seems natural, but Shah Rukh smooching Kajol gives most of us a queer hem-haw feeling. We can't exactly explain why, we even realise it's illogical, but the feeling's there anyway. Call it Bharatiya sabhyata, if you will; I call it hypocrisy.

It's not as if Indian readers are deaf and blind per se. It's just that they expect from newspersons standards set by what they'd studied in school -- devoid of what's happening around. From people whose job is to keep them abreast of the present! Anything in keeping with one's actual surroundings -- Shocks. Therefore, slang is frowned upon, Americanisms are held in contempt, and cuss words are a HUGE no-no. Basically, desi readers mentally live in the imaginary world of the hallowed PG Wodehouse (maximum book sales: in Madras, always a fertile ground for establishmentarianlings).

Today, even a cursory glance through the columns in Britain's Guardian or The Independent or SF's Examiner shows that their writers take, what is to us, unimaginable liberties: They abound with every phrase and idiom proscribed by "Indian culture" (in quotes since there's no authority on culture, and nobody knows who's done the banning). Not so, here: The world's second-most populous country also happens to be one with all the wilting violets on Earth. Last year, the entire reading janata got on Arun Shourie's case for his having used in an article the word "hymen" -- figuratively! It would seem this nation of rapists honoured womandom... but then they explained that it was against "established standards" of journalism...

Well, WHO set these standards? And WHEN? Why must I follow moronic mores, jealously guarded by Brahminical fogies, in this day and age?

The strange thing is, sex and colloquialism are readily accepted in Indian novels -- which, someday, could well turn up in educational curricula. But a newspaper column, whose life-span is a day, and which Junior-the-budding-genius is not likely to be reading, has to strictly follow PG-8 rules. I cannot come to terms with these asinine strictures -- especially since Indians have no qualms about watching the pelvic thrusts and grinds in movies or listening to vulgar lyrics.

When I mentioned the dichotomy to a wise friend, he said I'd got it all wrong, that it was entirely an adult thing; that Indians don't like language to be "soiled by the mud"; that they probably view the Press as the last bastion of Propriety; that there's no need to bring in a "tabloid cast"; that one should be able to convey outrage with dignity... Trust Bhosle to land up in an arena like this...

I sympathise with the bugger, but I don't agree. And I certainly won't conform (how I loathe that word). For language evolves. Prose mutates. Modes of communication transmute. Terms of propriety alter. Without change, there is no life. Sure, there can be a kind of life -- rigid, immovable, austere, constant. But it's not one I fancy for myself. I want an existence, an idiom, colourful, palpitating, seductive, wicked, reeking of all that which can be scraped off the mean streets I tread. So, no, I won't back down, I will stand my ground. You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down. BALLS! BALLS! BALLS! BALLS! BALLS! So there.

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Varsha Bhosle