OF SILHOUETTE AND TAXES

'Silhouette' (pronounced sɪlʊˈɛt) was the answer to a word puzzle posed in a WhatsApp group that I am a member of. As you know, it is the image of a person (animal, object or scene) represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject.

The word looked to be of French origin and I was intrigued. The findings of my 'research' were fascinating. First of all, it is an eponymous word, that is, derived from the name of a person (as in Boswellian biography or Dickensian character) or thing (as in Himalayan blunder). It comes from the name of Etienne de Silhouette who the minister for finance in the 18th century France.

De Silhouette, born in 1709 was a scholar in finance and economics. He had spent a year in London learning about the economy of Britain. When appointed France's Controller-General of Finance in 1759, he had the unviable task cut out for him: of balancing a precarious economy. He had to curb France's spiralling deficit and strengthen the finances for the Seven Years' War against Britain.

In the Ancien Régime, the nobility and the church were exempt from taxes. In his attempt to restore the kingdom's finances, he took a leaf out of the English method of taxing the rich and privileged. He devised the "general subvention," i.e., taxes on external signs of wealth (doors and windows, farms, luxury goods, servants, profits). He also managed to curtail Royal household expenditure. De Silhouette introduced new taxes and reduced state pensions. He took the war measure of ordering the melting down of goldware and silverware.

These steps made him hugely unpopular. He was criticized by the nobility including Voltaire, who thought his measures, though theoretically beneficial, were not suitable for wartime and the French political situation.

Suffice it to say that nobody - the royalty, the clergy, the nobility or the commoner - was happy with the the steps he took for setting the economy right. It was therefore hardly surprising that his term was very short: a mere eight months.

But what does all this have to do with the style of pictures named after him? Good question. The draconian steps that De Silhouette took caused him to become the subject of hostility. His penny-pinching manner led to the expression à la Silhouette (like Silhouette) to be applied to things perceived as cheap or austere.

An art form that gained popularity during this period was a shadow profile cut from black paper. It provided a simple and inexpensive alternative for those who could not afford more decorative and expensive forms of portraiture, such as painting or sculpture. Those who considered it cheap attached the word "silhouette" to it.

That is how this art-form, still popular, came to acquire the name silhouette.

 A HAIR OF THE DOG THAT BIT ME

In one of my recent posts, I had used the expression 'a hair of the dog that bit me' which intrigued some friends. I was surprised because I had thought it was a popular phrase.

So I tested it on five other persons; only two knew what it stood for. That was a revelation to me. Therefore I thought that this expression (and a few others) could be the subject of a post.

"Hair of the dog that bit you", or "Hair of the dog" for short is a colloquial expression for the cure of a hangover from the over-indulgence of the previous night. It is actually a small measure of the same drink, consumed with the aim of lessening the effects of a hangover. Something like homeopathy (Similia similibus curantur) or vaccines.

But where do the dog and its hair come from? The expression originally referred to the popular belief that a few hairs from the tail of the dog that bit you applied to the wound will prevent evil consequences!

By rights, the exclamation "What the Dickens!" to express surprise, shock of befuddlement should be an open-and-shut case: a tribute to Charles Dickens, right? The master story-teller whose plots have suspense-filled twists and this expression of real-life shock and surprise must surely be related, one concludes.

Except that they are not connected! Well, it is quoted by William Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Mrs. Page says , "I cannot tell what the dickens his name is ..." And that great wordsmith had walked this earth centuries before Charles Dickens came with his stories of Victorian London.

Suppose I am struggling with a puzzle: In what ratio should coffee beans costing Rs 360 per kg and chicory costing Rs 200 a kg mixed to produce a mixture costing Rs 300 a kg? As I juggle with algebra: x kg of coffee, y kg of chicory and x + y kg of the mixture, you tell me that "You can work it out in your mind, it is 5 : 3!" When I ask you how, you tell me: (300 - 200) : (360 - 300) or 100 : 60 or 5 : 3 and add, "Bob's your uncle!" That is the same as "Voila!" or "Hey presto!"

That reminds me of my classmate Habibullah who used to say that the letters "q e d" that one writes with a flourish after proving a rider in geometry stand for "quite easily done"! (Of course, the abbreviation actually stands for "quod erat demonstrandum" meaning "which was required to be proved".) "Quite easily done" is the same as "And Bob's your uncle!"

Euphemism is a great breeding ground for expressions like "spending a penny" - for going to the toilet. The phrase goes back to Victorian public toilets, which required users to insert a single penny in order to operate the lock. Historically, only women's public toilets required a penny to lock; the ones for men were free of charge! Of course, there are other expressions for the same thing: "going to the little girl's room", "going to powder the nose" and "going to a man about the dog" and the like.

The reference in "Oh my Gideon!", I had thought, was to the copy of the Bible you see in hotel rooms. In a moment of stress, you may like to exclaim "Oh my God!" but it would be sacrilege, as God has, vide the Third Commandment, made his feelings plain on the subject of taking his name in vain. So one looks for alternatives like "Gosh" and "Golly" but there is hardly any fun in that. We need something more colourful, descriptive and dramatic. We’re all creative people, and language is our playground. "Sainted aunt" is more like it. Or "Oh my giddy aunt!" Which, in course of time, transmogrified into "Oh my Gideon!"

When you hear "Alice has a bun in the oven", it is easy to guess that what is meant is that she is expecting a child. If someone has "a few sandwiches short of a picnic", the suggestion is that he is not too intelligent.

There is one more that I want to write about. Someone who is boorish and loud, and a little too full of himself is described as "a stuffed shirt" or "all mouth and trousers". This windbag is boastful about being the most astonishing person around.

Meanwhile, there’s “all mouth and NO trousers,” referring to someone who cannot deliver what he boastfully promises. Apparently when it originated, the claim referred to sexual prowess!

 AVOSKA

My father had started his career in the 1940s as a telegraphist. In those pre-war days, a bicycle was a luxury. The proud owner of a Hercules bicycle, he would go to work riding it. He always had a cloth bag on the carrier of the bicycle. On days he forgot the bag, he would call out to one of us to fetch it.

On many days, when he returned from work, there would be nothing in the bag, but he insisted on carrying one whenever he ventured out, wherever he went. One day when going to work, he realised he didn't have the bag and asked me to get it. While handing it over, I asked him why he needed the bag if it had to come  back empty. He said, "Just in case."

Now I know what he meant. Those were the early years after India had attained independence and shortages were rampant. Forget victuals, even old newspaper to wrap groceries in was in short supply. (The present generation may not believe, but coarse cloth used to be distributed through ration shops. When I try recycling or upcycling stuff - like using the 'other side' of the cash memos from shops for noting down things to buy, my children comment "Hangover of scarcity") So keep a bag handy because if you found something (and had the money to purchase it), you could carry home the trophy! 

Why am I speaking of this today? Because I came across the word "avoska". Yes, you guessed it right: it is a Russian word. The literal meaning of the word is "perhaps" but is used for referring to a light and transparent shopping bag made of closely-knit cords. Think of it as a basketball net with its bottom closed. Sometimes they have a cloth base.

It would easily fit in a lady’s handbag and could be unfolded in a grocery store. When most things were hard to come by and there were shortages of essentials, the avoska was a kind of scoop-net. People took it with them in the morning just in case, they might catch a certain goody by the end of the day. Just in case.

MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS AND INDIA IN THE BRITISH RAJ

                                     

                Thoda roti, thoda cha
                Queen Victoria bahut achha
                 Thoda roti, thoda jam
                 Queen Victoria very fine man!

Have you heard this doggerel? Perhaps yes, perhaps not. This is from the repertoire of my friend Prem Bhasin (all of 87 years in 1994) during my five-year stint in Patiala. Bhasin was the most colourful personality that I can remember. More of him later.

This ditty is supposed to be one of the nursery rhymes that the Indian nannies of the British Sahebs used to sing to their charges. Like our very own Little Miss Muffet in

                  Muffety Mai dahi malaai
                  ghaas pe baith ke khaai
                  ek badaa saa makraa
                  kapraa ko pakraa
                  aur bhaag gayi Muffety Mai

But I must not digress.

Obviously, the versifier of the first belonged to the pre-Independence era. Equally obvious it is that he had a pragmatic approach to life and, sure, his priorities were right. He was perhaps the pioneering proponent of the concept of mai-baap sarkaar. The inspiration behind the slogan "roti, kapda aur makaan" flogged to death several times over by the politicians of India in the past three score and twelve years could have been none other.

Poetic merits apart, the attempt to curry favour with the presiding officer of the Empire where the sun never sets is transparent. Nevertheless, the Queen, after whom the orthodoxy of tight-corseted primness and prudery is named, I am sure, must have raised her royal eyebrows in a frown at the confusion that caused her to be described as a man. She must have, in her characteristic style, exclaimed, "We are not amused!"

 

WODEHOUSIANA

Noticing the resemblance some Wodehousean characters bore to each other, a critic once ventured to comment that most of Plum's characters are the same people disguised under different names in different novels. Rather indiscreetly, I should add.

How do you think the irrepressible humorist would have reacted?

This was his response: "A certain critic - for, such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

That was typical of Wodehouse: comical and light-hearted humour, sparkling wit and humourous levity most of his books are suffused with.

His novels frequently featured the dandified and somewhat woolly-headed Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet Jeeves who could be banked upon for sound advice, as well as an enormous pig named the Empress of Blandings. His comic prose was carefully styled with puns, similes and metaphors. They were eloquent novels with literary allusions and epic laugh-out-loud moments.

Here are some of his quotes from his books which will leave you chuckling.

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

To find a man's true character, play golf with him.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!”

I always advise people never to give advice.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.

And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.

I always advise people never to give advice.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

The least thing upset him on the (golf) links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

Golf, like measles, should be caught young.

Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.

Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character.

He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.

Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact.

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.

THE PLUM-CAKE

People living on this planet can be divided into two: those who swear by Wodehouse and those who do not care much for his writing. I am an unabashed fan of his and have read probably more than two dozen of his books of fiction. Having said that, I must confess that it is just a sampling of the Wodehouse smorgasbord: the prolific story-teller had authored nearly a hundred novels while pursuing his buzzing career as playwright and lyricist on Broadway and penning innumerable poems.

Rather than pick up new titles, I would‌ prefer to go back to old favorites of mine. I am fond of Mulliner, the boozy old bore who refuses to shut up, Rupert Psmith (The 'P' is silent, 'as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan') and the unforgettable, but forgetful, Lord Elmsworth. But it is the timeless tales of Bertie and his valet, Jeeves that I regularly return to. Blame it on the resistance to try something new, though you know that Wodehouse just cannot let you down.

It was in short stories that Bertie and Jeeves made their debut. Soon, like Laurel and Hardy or Holmes and Watson or Dennis and Joey or Tintin and Snowy, they became indissolubly and lastingly linked in the public imagination. The two characters coalesced and the pair became touchstones and reference points.

In addition to their appearance in over thirty short stories, there are nearly a dozen full-length Bertie and Jeeves novels. Whether one takes the first of the novels (Thank You, Jeeves - 1934) or the last (Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen - 1974) or any in between, one can perceive a striking consistency of tone and outlook, a reassuring immutability. They are full of appealing redundancies and there are far too many expedient repeats, too many hand-me-down plot devices and overlong one-liners. Like, we are reminded over and over again about the sole professional accomplishment of Bertie ('When Aunt Dahlia was running that ‘Milady’s Boudoir’ paper of hers, I contributed to it an article, or piece as we writers call it, on What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing.')

Did I say immutability? Yes, I did! I hasten to correct myself. In 'Right Ho, Jeeves', Bertie was once bold enough to declare that Jeeves had 'lost his form' and wanted his 'plugs decarbonised'. Over time, their relationship becomes subtler: the quiet Jeeves becomes more imposing and Bertie more reverent towards him. And then Jeeves is able to wield overarching influence even over the questionable sartorial preferences of his master, having disapproved of 'purple socks, pink silk ties, white dinner jacket, yellow shirt, green trousers and straw hat'.

In the Bertie-and-Jeeves stories, we are caught up in an inexhaustible cycle: Bertie (Bertram Wilberforce Wooster) 'lands in the soup', which is just another way of saying that this rich, insouciant bachelor feels that he is being railroaded into marriage or forced to do something that she feels will enhance the prestige of the family. It is a gag that never spoils.

Though Bertie is not financially dependent on Aunt Agatha, he feels compelled, particularly in the early stories, to obey her wishes, as he has been intimidated by her since he was young. She has never liked Jeeves, whom she calls Bertie's keeper, for she thinks that Bertie is too dependent on him. She disapproves of Bertie talking to Jeeves about private matters. On one occasion when she hears Bertie ask Jeeves for advice, she tells Jeeves to leave and then scolds Bertie, making remarks to him about 'what she thought of a Wooster who could lower the prestige of the clan by allowing menials to get above themselves.'

It is the impeccable Jeeves - in fact, he barely has a first name (revealed after more than 50 years to be Reginald) - who rescues his feckless master, all without tearing, or even crumpling, leave alone tearing, the social fabric. The brain of the 'gentleman's gentleman' is so massive that it bulges the back of his head. He is so discreet that he 'moves from point to point with as little uproar as a jelly-fish'. He is unflappable and the totem of imperturbability ('I shot a glance at Jeeves. He allowed his right eyebrow to flicker slightly, which is as near as he ever gets to a display of the emotions.')

The idle Bertie is fond of a post-lunch cocktail. And a pre-lunch cocktail. Eye-openers and nightcaps, pick-me-ups and settle-me-downs - he quaffs them all. He spends his evenings in the Drones Club sipping b-and-s with friends with nicknames like Pongo and Oofy and Catsmeat. Their world is, by and large, insulated and the outside hardly impinges. Political, social and economic upheavals like the Great Depression and the World War hardly penetrate the walls of their world though some unwelcome global news item does at time creep into the narrative.

Wodehouse served up a remarkably smooth verbal stew of rather lumpy elements: English slang, American slang, literary allusions, needless abbreviations, mixed metaphors and fussily precise details about trivialities. But much of his appeal lies in the outlandish similes, particularly those drawn from the natural world: 'She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression'; 'Uncle Tom, who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow'; 'She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest'.

'This insidious but good-humoured subversion of the language, conducted with straight-faced aplomb,' Shashi Tharoor says, 'appeals most of all to a people who have acquired English, but rebel against its heritage.' One could not agree with him more.

The tongue-in-cheek digs of Wodehouse at the British nobility with double-barrelled surnames like Fotheringay-Phipps (pronounced 'Funghy Fipps') and Fink-Nottle, and nicknames like Chuffy and Tuppy are so delectable. How dull life would have been without Plum!

BLONDIE, PEANTS, ASTERIX AND OTHERS

A few years back I had written about Ramu Salivati, my roommate in the YMCA Hostel on Chowrighree Road, Calcutta in the early 1970s. It was his copy of The Lexicon of Comicana by Mort Walker that I borrowed and read with abiding interest. Till I read it, the only words I knew about the grammar of cartoons was balloons – the bubble in which the words spoken by a character are written. A slender volume – just about 100 pages, give or take ten – with several cartoons occupying a major part of many pages, it familiarized me with terms like plewds, sphericasia, grawlixes and squeans. 

The other day I chanced upon a pdf version of the charming little book. It brought all those words back – and many more that I had forgotten.

The author is no mean person: he is the creator of popular comic strips Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. In this book, he attempts taxonomy of cartoons and the symbols used in comic strips around the world. I would not say that these are sophisticated examples of evolved cartoons. But after reading The Lexicon, one tends to appreciate his comic strips more.

For a lay reader like me, The Lexicon of Comicana‘s principal charm is that it lays out a series of cartooning phenomena that you’ve probably never thought too hard about, gives them funny, onomatopoeic names, and then lays out examples of how your favorite comic strip might use them.

For example, take emanata. These are symbols that emanate outwards from cartoon characters to show their internal state. Then there are plewds, the drops of sweat that spray outwards from a cartoon character under emotional distress. Squeans are what you see above the heads of inebriated characters. If that squean is accompanied by a spurl, it means he has drunk himself silly.

When Sarge punches Beetle Bailey, it is made up of three elements: briffit (the little cloud of dust to show where the punch started), swalloop (the arc of the fist as it smashes across Beetle’s jaw) and whitope (the point where the fist lands). Briffits are most often accompanied by hites: horizontal lines representing speed. There are also uphites and downhites, which come out of a character when he is jumping or falling. Agitrons indicate the movement caused by shaking something hard. The general term for all these lines drawn to show movement is a sphericasia.

There is also the indotherm, a squiggly line that might drift out of a cup of coffee to show that it is hot. And the waftatron, the wisp of stream that comes from a lip-smacking pie to show that it smells good.

Going back to balloons, Walker refers to them as fumetti (which is Italian for “balloon”). Soliloquies and thoughts are represented cumulus fumetti while conversation from the other end of a phone are called “AT&T fumetti“ suggesting that the voice is being relayed electronically. For yelling, you use the ‘Boom!’ fumetti, where the contours of the balloon are drawn in spikes.

When a character has this irrepressible urge to say cusswords, he is expected to self-censor and use the bizarre iconography of maladicta. It is made up of jarns, quimps, nittles, and grawlixes. Quimps are  astrological symbols, jarns are different types of spirals, nittles are bursting stars, and grawlixes are squiggly lines that represent ostensibly obliterated epithets. The cartoonist often mixes them to reflect the level of profanity he wants.

This is all a lot of fun, of course, and at the end of the day, the grammar, taxonomy, and classification of cartoon symbols with which The Lexicon of Comicana concerns itself might seem like a bunch of tongue-in-cheek silliness. That’s because it really is!

WHO OWNS 'FARRAGO'?

There are expressions like 'blood, sweat and tears' ascribed to Sir Winston Churchill, 'terminological inexactitude' (meaning bluff) - again a Churchill coinage - used by Richard Nixon and 'wardrobe malfunction' used by singer Janet Jackson to explain away her (deliberate) indecent exposure as accidental or 'We knocked the bastard off' exclaimed by Sir Edmund Hillary on conquering the Everest. The expression 'farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies' has been catapulted into the big league.

I first came across the word 'farrago' in 'Lucknow Boy', the autobiography of the inimitable Vinod Mehta who, in his illustrious career, has edited several publications ranging from Debonair to Outlook. The word suddenly became popular all over the country when Shashi Tharoor used it a couple of days back while referring to the audio tapes released by Arnab Goswami of Republic TV. (Frankly, Tharoor often does send me scurrying to my Oxford Dictionary!)

Tharoor's detractors lost no time in ensuring that he did not score any brownie points for his vocabulary. They researched and came to the earth-shaking conclusion that Tharoor is not the first to use the word. (It was as though Tharoor had made such a claim!) It had been, they claimed, used by journalist Mehdi Hasan (implying, indirectly, but incorrectly, that he was the first to use it.)

Why don't we just to learn to accept that 'farrago' is an English word which neither Mehdi Hasan nor Shashi Tharoor coined and that neither has a copyright over it? You want to put a man down ; so you use all tricks in your bag to run him down!

THE NEGOTIABLE COW

No, gentle reader, this is not about what you think it is. I do not know whether the ban on sale of cattle for slaughter is a negotiable issue or not. In any case, that topic is not on my mind as I write this.

This is about one of the sixty-six stories in the anthology 'Uncommon Law' by A P Herbert. Titled 'Board of Inland Revenue v Haddock', this hilarious story was originally written in the late 1920's for 'Punch' by the humorist as part of his series of Misleading Cases in the Common Law. The fictitious case has evolved, over time, into an urban legend.

The hero of the story is Mr Albert Haddock assessed to income tax by the government office. Haddock considers the sum excessive, particularly in view of the limited range of services taxpayers get from the government. Eventually, the Collector demands £57.

Haddock appears at the offices of the Collector of Taxes and delivers a white cow "of malevolent aspect". On the cow is stencilled in red ink: "To the London and Literary Bank Limited. Pay the Collector of Taxes, who is no gentleman, or Order, the sum of fifty seven pounds £57 (and may he rot!)" and his signature is affixed below it.

Haddock tenders the cow in payment of the tax dues and demands a receipt. The collector refuses to accept the cow, objecting that it would be impossible to pay it into a bank account. Haddock suggests that he may endorse the cow to a third party to whom he might owe money, adding that "there must be many persons in that position". The collector tries to endorse the cheque on the bovine back, in this case on the abdomen. However, the cow does not co-operate.

The collector abandons the attempt. Declining to take the 'cheque', he demands payment in cash. Haddock leads the cow away and causes an obstruction in Trafalgar Square. He gets arrested, leading to the co-joined criminal case, R. v Haddock.

During the hearing, Haddock testifies that he had tendered a 'cheque' in payment of income tax. A cheque is only an order to a bank to pay money to the person named on the cheque or having a legal title to the cheque. There is nothing in law to say it must be on paper of specified dimensions. A cheque, he argues, can be written on notepaper. He says he had "drawn cheques on the backs of menus, on napkins, on handkerchiefs, on the labels of wine bottles; all these cheques had been duly honoured by his bank and passed through the Bankers’ Clearing House". He argues that there is no distinction in law between a cheque on a napkin and a cheque on a cow.

The judge, Sir Basil String, enquires whether stamp duty had been paid. (In English law, as it existed then, negotiable instruments attracted stamp duty.) The prosecutor, Sir Joshua Hoot KC confirms that a two-penny stamp had been affixed to the dexter horn of the cow.

Sir Joshua informs the court that the collector did try to endorse the cheque on its back, in this case on the abdomen. However, Sir Joshua explains: "the cow ... appeared to resent endorsement and adopted a menacing posture."

When asked as to motive, Haddock says he had not a piece of paper to hand. Horses and other animals used to be seen frequently in the streets of London. He admits on cross-examination that he may have had in his mind an idea to ridicule the taxman. "But why not? There is no law against ridiculing the income tax."

In relation to the criminal prosecution, Haddock says it was a nice thing if in the heart of the commercial capital of the world a man could not convey a negotiable instrument down the street without being arrested. If a disturbance was caused by a crowd, the policeman should arrest the crowd, not him.

The judge, sympathetic to Haddock, rules in his favour on the tax payment and against the prosecution for causing a disturbance. By tendering the cow and refusing it, the other parties were estopped from demanding it later.

WHAT'S YOUR BEEF?

Do I eat beef? Yes.

Do I enjoy eating beef? Not particularly. In fact, I prefer vegetarian food to any non-vegetarian recipe.

Do I mind others eating beef? Not at all.

Do I approve of killing animals for food? Yes, because there is no other way non-vegetarians can get meat.

Do I approve of killing animals in public and/or hanging raw flesh in butchers' shops and/or displaying the meat in public view? No to all three.

Do I believe that sale of beef should be banned? No.

Is the status of beef different from that of, say, mutton, pork, venison, fowl or fish? No, all of them are derived from animal life. And therefore they all merit equal treatment.

Does the government have any role in prescribing what its people should eat and drink? No.

Do people have the right to protest when the government prescribes what they should eat and drink? Yes.

Is holding of beef festivals and butchering animals in public an acceptable form of protest? No, it is as reprehensible as the act of proscribing beef.

Whose responsibility is it to ensure that the food that its people consume (And that includes alcohol, eggs, mutton, fish, wheat, tomatoes and salads, not just beef) is hygienic and safe? The government's.

Are the present arrangements to ensure this adequate? No, they are woefully meagre.

So, what is my beef?

That instead of enforcing the laws that ensure that rotting meat, artificially ripened fruits and pesticide-ridden vegetables - and gut-scalding hooch - do not reach the market, the government is barking up the wrong tree.

That the protest against the inaction of the government in this area and the move to proscribe beef has been reduced to a farce of holding of beef festivals and butchering animals in public.

BEEFEATERS OF A DIFFERENT KIND

At a time when the nation seems have been vertically split into two - beef-eaters and the rest - let us digress a bit and talk of another set of beefeaters. Bacchus-worshippers would, of course, be reminded of the renowned Beefeater Gin, and foodies of the Beefeater Steak Restaurants of the UK.

The beefeaters that I refer to are the ceremonial guardians of the Tower of London. Formally called the Yeomen Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, they are Members of the Sovereign's Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary. They are responsible for safeguarding the jewels of the British Crown and looking after the prisoners in the Tower. They also conduct guided tours as they have been doing since the Victorian era.

All warders are former warrant officers retired after at least 22 years' service from the Armed Forces of the Commonwealth. They are distinct from the Yeomen of the Guard, which is actually a distinct corps of Royal Bodyguards of the British monarch.

The name Beefeater is of uncertain origin, with various proposed derivations. The most-cited origin says that a very large ration of beef is given to them daily at the court, which is why they are called Beef-eaters.

While the Corps themselves believe this source, some etymologists have noted the similarity of the term beefeater to hláf-æta, the Old English term for a menial servant, literally 'loaf-eater', the counterpart of hláford (loaf-warden) and hlaefdige, which became 'lord' and 'lady' and respectively. Conjectures that the name derives from buffetier (an Old French term meaning 'a waiter or servant') too exist.

One of the Yeomen Warders has the responsibility to maintain the welfare of the ravens of the Tower of London. He is known as the Ravenmaster. It is not known how long the ravens have been living in the Tower of London, but legend has it that should the ravens ever leave the Tower, disaster will befall the kingdom. In order to prevent the ravens from flying away, their flight feathers are trimmed so that they cannot fly in a straight line for any appreciable distance. The ravens are free, however, to roam the Tower grounds.

The warders comment that the real beefeaters at the Tower are the ravens, as they are fed raw beef by the Ravenmaster who lets the birds out of their cages and prepares breakfast for them at dawn each day.

(This post is based on information culled out from different sources.)

TANSTAAFL

The open air café in the IIM Ahmedabad opened in 2004 has a funky and intriguing name: TANSTAAFL. It was christened so by Prof Deodhar, who was inspired by the aphorism 'There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch' and used the acronym formed by its initial letters. (Does it serve as a warning to students that spending too much leisurely time at the 24-hour café may come at the cost of poor grades in classes?)

Till recently, I was under the impression that this famous line was coined by the the Nobel-laureate and economist Milton Friedman, for, that is the title of his 1975 best-seller. It transpires that he was impressed by the veracity of a statement which appeared in a 1966 sci-fi work by Robert Heinlein that he enshrined it as its title.

In the novel 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', Manuel, a computer engineer and protagonist of the story, tells fellow Loonies (people on the Moon, a colony of the earth, who are exploited by the people on the Earth) that unless they sacrifice something, they cannot achieve freedom. In this context, he utters his now-popular expression that TANSTAAFL is derived from.

It is said that the expression 'free lunches' originated in the 19th century in the US bars which laid out lunches free of cost to regulars. These lunches are now a thing of the past, but the package of most hotels these days includes a free breakfast buffet that guests hardly pass up. I know many who, on their way out after a sumptuous repast, snaffle an apple or a muffin. Their logic is simple: the cost of the breakfast is anyway built into the room tariff. Which means TANSTAAFB!

Coming to think of it, is there anything in this world that comes free?

HAPPENSTANCE? OR VENGEANCE?

Having worked in a public sector bank for over three decades, half of which was in the area of corporate credit in a fairly senior position, I have come across companies and companies. Based on this experience, I can say with conviction that no businessman is in business for public weal or philanthropy.

If a pharmaceutical company procures a molecule and manufactures and markets a drug for a dreaded disease, it is not the intense desire to bring relief to the ailing millions that is the only (or the principal) force that drives them. Equally, they are inspired by Mammon.

In their relentless pursuit of profits and pelf, most, if not all, businesses go overboard. It is only a question of degree: some break break the rules, some bend the rules, some exploit the loopholes in the rules. They evade taxes, they bribe those who grant permissions and funds and gratify those who allow concessions and compromises. They propitiate those who are in a position to influence decisions and those who look the other way.

Over the time-span from the licence-raj of the 1950's to the LPG regime of the 1990's, the scourge spread to all spheres - ministries, customs, excise, ESI, PF, taxes, banks, politicos, judiciary, watchdogs and regulators, anything and anyone you can think of. Not that exceptions were not there in small pockets in these domains.

The new millennium brought in its wake the all-pervasive spread of the malaise: petty businessmen committed petty crimes and the not-so-small ones committed not-so-small crimes. The biggies were into real big rackets - over-invoicing of imports, under-invoicing of exports, setting up trading outfits abroad, establishing shell companies in tax havens and stashing away their ill-gotten wealth in numbered accounts in Switzerland. And corruption among businessmen and bureaucrats thrived.

In the rare instances when the long arm of law was long enough to catch the offenders, regulatory authorities did step in, but the influence the accused wielded saw to it that the process was delayed and action thwarted. I recall that when banks sought the help of CBI to recover the loans involving frauds on the part of borrowers, they would decline: 'Our brief is investigation of the misfeasance on the part of public servants.'

Media is also business. When Samir Jain brought down the cover price of the Times of India daily to Rs 1.50 (or was it just Re 1?), he triggered a price-war all right, but he also signalled that the Times House is as much a business house as the Bombay House of the Tatas. What is true of Times of India is true of Times Now and Zee and Jaya and Asianet and NDTV.

Which is why I would not consider NDTV to be pure as driven snow. I would not put it past NDTV to have committed the offences that Madhu Kishwar, Subramaniam Swamy and S Gurumurthy allege they have. These are all tricks in the bag of any businessman.

The charges against them include creating twenty 'letter-pad' companies - seven of them in Mauritius - and raising $ 417 million from undisclosed investors, making fictitious exports to Star TV, Hong Kong and claiming benefits under section 80HHF of Income Tax Act, thus defrauding the government of Rs 300 crore, employing Abhisar Sharma, husband of Sumana Sharma IRS who was the Assessing Officer for the income tax returns of NDTV and its promoters, paying for the expensive foreign junket and shopping of the Sharmas and accounting it as a perquisite of Abhisar Sharma (NDTV had paid for such trips of no other employee) and a host others. Only detailed investigations by an independent body can bring out the truth.

These are times when there is no grey. In a world that swears by the famous 2001 statement of US President George Bush 'If you are not with us, you are against us,' anything that is not black is white and vice versa. Which is why the reaction to the CBI raid on NDTV was predictable, with those who see NDTV as partisan (Read anti-establishment) perceiving the CBI action as 'Just desserts' while those think of NDTV as a fierce defender of freedom of speech consider it a witch hunt.

What is, however, inescapable, is the timing of the action and the alacrity with which CBI has pounced on the channel. This is even more pronounced when viewed in the backdrop of the fact that CBI had always complained of being overburdened and declined to help even public sector banks in recovering the loans obtained by clients through fraudulent means, pleading that their role was confined to investigating misfeasance of public servants. Note that here both the lender and the borrower are private entities.

Is not there no correlation between the over-zealousness of the CBI and the editorial stance of NDTV? The jury is still out on this, but, as a layman, my take is that NDTV may have committed serious financial improprieties which call for investigation but the timing - that it comes close on the heels of the vociferous Dr Sambit Patra who speaks for the ruling party being shown the door by the NDTV anchor Nidhi Razdan - makes it look sinister. It does not quite look like 'law taking its own course'.

An afterthought: My post 'What's Your Beef?' proved to be the proverbial the curate's egg: good in parts to a group of readers who believe in the freedom to eat what one likes and to their protagonists who do not favour protests in the form of beef festivals and public slaughter of animals. This post too might meet with the same fate and I might fall between two stools!

ALL THOSE CUTLERISMS

Most of those who read this piece would know what a spoonerism is. This eponym is commonly understood to refer to a switch of the first syllables of two adjacent words, often resulting in a hilarious expression. Like 'a blushing crow' instead of 'a crushing blow'.

Spoonerisms are named after Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to this mistake. (My scrapbook says it is also called 'marrowsky' after a Polish gentleman whose tongue used to get twisted, resulting in a similar speech impediment.)

Spooner himself admits to only one such lapse: 'The Kinquering Congs Their Titles Take' (in reference to a hymn). This would imply that the other scores of spoonerisms that we hear (our queer dean, hissed the mystery lectures, tasted the whole worm, leave town drain, etc) are all fabricated. That, however, seems very unlikely, for, just one slip of the tongue (or tip of the slung, if you will) cannot result in the christening of a genre of lapses.

One of the more popular spoonerisms believed to have genuinely been mouthed by the ordained minister is 'The Lord is a shoving leopard' instead of 'The Lord is a loving shepherd'. As a practitioner of religion and a preacher, this is most certainly his.

That said, just one substantiated spoonerism has been listed in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: 'The weight of rages (instead of 'rate of wages') will press hard upon the employer.'

Human ingenuity, however did one better than the Oxford don could, and soon enough, colleagues and students 'constructed' spoonerisms as a pastime. Thus contrived expressions were passed off as spoonerisms, apocryphal though they are. 'Is it kisstomary to cuss the bride?' for instance.

Thus, today a spoonerism signifies an error in speech or a deliberate play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels or morphemes of two words in a phrase are swapped.

But then ingenuity hath no boundaries. If spoonerisms strike roots, can forkerisms and kniferisms be far behind? It was Donald Hoefstadter, the patron-saint of 'perverted' thinkers, who introduced these complements to spoonerisms, to complete the cutlery, as it were. In kniferisms, the vowels or the final consonants of two syllables would be interchanged, giving them a new meaning as in 'the Duck and Doochess of Windsor'; or, more often, two meaningless words, as in 'hypodeemic nerdle'. I have read somewhere that Sir Stafford Cripps was once referred to by a BBC newscaster as Sir Stifford Crapps. Some other instances are 'Self-constricted ruddles', 'terrific striggles' and 'deloberately rib me'.

Usage of these new terms has been limited, perhaps because it is quite difficult even to 'construct' good forkerisms and kniferisms.

Post script: There is this friend of mine who wrote to me that he loves my posts. I hope he is not being spooneric when the smart alec that he is exlaimed what a shining wit I was in his opinion. Shining wit or whining ....?

ADDICTED FOR LIFE

In what an amazing manner the way I read newspapers has changed!

At first, I used to read the news, the editorial, letters to the editor and articles, that order. In my scheme of things, sports pages were worth a mere glance, if at all. And I’d ignore the crossword. Nowadays I barely glance at the headlines before I fold the paper to the crossword page and charge at it! News can wait.

It is all due to a person called Madhusoodan Rao. He introduced me to the charming world of crosswords which I was always apprehensive of.

Rao and I were inmates of the YMCA Hostel on Chowringhee Road, Calcutta in the early 1970’s. He used to work in shifts for a multinational and I for a bank. The only time we’d meet each other was at when dining bell chimed on Sundays.

Sundays were meant for lazing around. One such forenoon, after a late breakfast, I ambled into Rao’s room and found him engrossed in an instalment of The Times crossword in The Statesman. I thought I’d let him be and explore other rooms. That was when he asked me: ‘You’d know: St Francis of … … what? Six letters.’

This is one question I had the answer to. The exercise books I used in my school used to be made at the Francis of Assisi Press. I supplied the answer. Mumbling a quick ‘Thanks’, Rao went back to his puzzle.

I looked at the corresponding clue: ‘St Francis confesses to stupidity (6)’ How do you link Assisi to ‘confession of stupidity’? I asked.

Eyeing me with a hint of disdain, but grateful that I had supplied him the answer, he condescended to explain, ‘Ass is I. Got it?’

It now clicked. And I was intrigued.

He showed me the next clue: ‘Vehicle races to pink flowers (10)’ and confidently, he put down: carnations.

How did you get that? I was curious.

‘A car is a vehicle; nations are races; and carnations are pink flowers.’

I was floored. Sensing that he had ignited my interest, Rao said, ‘Here is another clue with a flower in it: Ash met a flower (6)’ I was lost.

Help was at hand. ‘Look beyond the obvious,’ Rao advised. ‘It is not always a bloom that is a flower; it can be something that flows … like a river... like the Rhine or the Ganges… or like Thames which is an anagram of ‘ASH MET’.

Now I was hooked. Hooked for life.

Rao taught me the nuances – cryptic clues, anagrams, codes, run-ons, envelopes, kangaroo words, abbreviations, the works.

When I first tried to make sense of cryptic clues, it used to take me a whole forenoon of grappling with synonyms to solve about half the grid. Even that was an accomplishment worth a minor celebration: a bottle of chilled beer at Rallis.

In my infancy as a solver, anagram tries would be scrawled around the crossword grid and all over the white space in large advertisements. Armed with a pencil, an eraser and an enormous amount of determination, I’d sit there, dictionary and thesaurus at hand, wrestling with the compiler’s intellect, as it were.

After three decades of dedicated puzzling, anagrams jump out at you, and it becomes easier to figure out the definition, sort out the elements of the clue, and you learn the indicators: as in algebra, k is the constant, x and y are unknowns. The possibilities of some are endless. Fir instance, C can be carbon, Celsius, Centigrade, century, a musical note or 100! The capital of England is not London, but E which may also be 2.7182818284 …..!

When I started cutting out puzzles to keep me supplied while waiting for the bus or my turn at the ophthalmologist, I realised that I had become an addict. I needed my daily fix of crosswords. A healthy addiction.