I've Had Enough Of Bowiemania

So David Bowie died

And the internet

Went wild.

I’m now going to add my bit

And reveal myself a monster.

I hardly knew who Bowie even was

I never knowingly heard anything by him

And I don’t really give a damn

That he’s dead.

There. That had to be said. 

I did not assume that he, or anyone else

Was immortal.

That’s how much of a monster I am.

And I don’t care about all the grief either.

Not when it’s splashed all over the net

On Facebook and cartoons, when the news and the loons

Find nothing else to say

Day after day after day.

No, I don’t give a damn

That’s how much of a monster I am.

And meanwhile

Saudi Barbaria bombs Yemen

Obama drones children
Liberals plan to vote for Killary Klingon

And zionazi vermin cheer as Palestinian kids

Bleed to death in the street.

Where is all the anguish and grief?

 I've had enough of Bowie

Whoever he was

And that is the truth.

That

Is how much of a monster

I

am.

The Leebhar and the Reddio

Back when I was a kid, everyone had a leebhar.

And everyone spent their time constantly taking care of it. The moment a kid was weaned, it would be stuffed full of “medicines” designed to keep its leebhar in proper working order. If anything ever went wrong with anyone’s health, it was because their leebhar wasn’t working properly. Even if nothing went wrong,

What was a leebhar? You have one inside you, but you probably don’t know where it resides or what function it serves. Don’t worry; neither did they.

But they knew, none better, that the leebhar was essential to any and everything. That’s why I, for instance, was forced to swallow capsules of something called Liv 52 every day, and any time I had a stomach ache it would be blamed on said leebhar.

Oh yes, if you haven’t guessed already, the leebhar was what most people call the liver, filtered through the Bunglee inability to manage the v sound.

Bunglee medical knowledge is one of the world’s abiding mysteries. In Bunglistan, as I’ve had reason to mention in the past, there is, to this day, no such thing as a rabid dog. Dogs have poison fangs like snakes, and if they bite you, they (the dog, that is) will die within ten days unless “injected”. Injected with what, that’s a different thing altogether. I presume a distilled water injection would do just fine.

Also, Bunglee illnesses evolve. I haven’t heard of a leebhar since my grandmother died, and even she’d admitted long before that that she hadn’t the faintest idea what a leebhar was or what it was supposed to do; she was just repeating what she’d been told. But long before then, Bunglee illnesses had moved from the leebhar to “acid”. Again, I don’t know whether anyone had the faintest idea what “acid” was, but all you had to do was mention the word to a Bunglee matron and she’d put on a face like a dying duck and regale you with tales of her sufferings from the dread thing.

Not that “acid” is still in vogue, though. It’s infra dig to admit to suffering from “acid” these days. No, today Bunglees one and all suffer from “preshaar”. No self-respecting Bunglee will admit not to suffer from it.

That’s pressure, as in blood pressure, yo.

I wonder what the fashionable disease will be a few years from now. “Haaart,” perhaps. “Or “Bren.”

At least, so far, nobody has claimed that the leebhar, acid or preshaar were deliberately invented to “down” Bunglees. Bunglees are the world’s champion conspiracy theorists, and their conspiracies always revolve around every other ethnic group getting together to “down” them. And also being remarkably insecure people, with an inferiority complex the size of the Burj al Khalifa, the extent to which they’ll go to invent a conspiracy can be mind-boggling at times.

For instance, there was the reddio, er, radio. Back when I was a child, in the mid-1970s, it was an article of faith to deny that Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio – it was invented by the 19^th Century Bunglee scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose. This isn’t the place to argue whether Marconi was actually the first to invent the radio, or merely one of several people who invented it roughly at the same time and the first one to successfully popularise it; in fact, that is a legitimate question, and I’d have given the Bunglees a pass on this if that’s what they were arguing. But not at all.

The Bunglee argument wasn’t that Marconi got lucky in the race to get recognition for something he was among several people to invent; no. It was that Bose had invented the radio, alone and by himself, and that Marconi had stolen the invention. Actually, Bose had done some foundational work on electromagnetic waves which was among the many stepping stones to radio, but such distinctions were unintelligible to Bunglees, and in any case detracted from the theme of Bunglee victimhood.

So this was the tale, as I heard it from my grandmother. Bose had invented the radio, and kept the “formula” – the word “formula” figures hugely in any Bunglee discussion of science – on his table. Marconi was travelling the world and had visited Bose in his laboratory. He saw the “formula”, popped it into his pocket, and walked out of there.

So there you have it. The unappreciated Bunglee scientist (Bose was actually extremely well appreciated), the conspiracy to “down” Bunglees, and the magic word “formula”. What more could you want?

Unlike the leebhar, which became obsolete, and left the scene. Now there’s only preshaar.

And homoeopathy. Bunglees are wild on homoeopathy.

But that’s a stupidity for another day.   

A very, very slightly hopeful article, for a change

In 2002, a wave of religious violence swept across the Indian state of Gujarat.

It wasn’t the first communal violence India has ever faced – very far from that – but it was one of the worst single episodes, simply because it was planned and directed by the state government in all particulars.

Back in 2002, Gujarat was known as the “Hindutva* laboratory”, where the nation’s largest Hindunazi^[1] political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tried out its ideas on turning society into a de facto Hindu theocracy where nobody else would have any rights whatsoever.

*The word, literally meaning “Hinduness”, connotes Hindu radicalism.

In the capital, the ironically named Gandhinagar, sat Narendrabhai Modi, whom I have written about elsewhere^[2]; his government had recently not done well in local elections, and he needed some way of hardening support for his party. One sure way of hardening support, of course, is to get the people behind you in a religious crusade. This is something which rulers have known since the start of recorded history.

The Hindunazis had already been trying their damndest to marginalise the Christian and Muslim minorities in Gujarat. However, merely making it almost impossible to convert away from Hinduism to those religions wasn’t enough; something much more drastic was necessary.

A massive dose of communal bloodletting was an obvious answer. All one had to do was to wait for an opportunity.   

It came on the   27^th of February 2002, when some carriages of a train returning from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh state in North India caught fire in a railway station in Godhra in Gujarat. This Ayodhya was the mythological hometown of the mythical Hindu god-king Ram, and in 1991 had been the site of a Hindunazi aggression in which an ancient Muslim mosque had been demolished on the excuse that it had been built on the site of Ram’s alleged birth. For more information on that, I’ve written about it here^[3].  

Ever since that date, Hindunazis had organised pilgrimages to the makeshift temple they’d set up on the site of the destroyed mosque. The train that was returning from Ayodhya had been loaded with people returning from that “pilgrimage”, and had a substantial complement of Hindunazi stormtroopers as well. According to reports, when the train stopped at Godhra, these stormtroopers had an altercation with Muslim tea sellers on the platform. They may or may not have attempted to abduct a Muslim girl as well, according to whom you believe, but there seems to have been a genuine quarrel.

Soon after leaving the station, the train was stopped, and Muslim mobs from the nearby slums allegedly attacked the carriage in which the Hindunazis were travelling. The carriage was burned, resulting in the deaths of 58 or 59 of the passengers, most of whom were women and children.

[Later, a judicial commission^[4] proved conclusively that the carriages could not have been set on fire from outside, so that the Hindunazi fable of Muslims flinging petrol from buckets could not have happened. The Hindunazis then modified their tale to claim the Muslim mobs slashed the connectors between carriages with “swords”, entered the carriage, splashed petrol on the floor and then set it on fire. The commission, studying all the evidence, concluded that the fire was probably accidental. (In fact accidental fires on Indian trains are quite common and kill people virtually every year.) A citizen’s tribunal reached the same conclusion.]

Whether the fire was accidental or not, the Modi government in the state declared that this was an act of terrorism, and paraded the bodies of the dead to raise communal tensions. Another Hindunazi outfit allied to the BJP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), called a general strike, and though these strike calls are both illegal and invariably incite violence, the BJP did nothing at all to either stop it or take any measures to ensure security. By the end of the day, Hindunazi mobs were going around the state, often openly led by BJP politicians, systematically destroying Muslim properties, killing, looting and raping.

The violence was not just systematic, it was very carefully organised. The Hindunazi stormtroopers had very precise knowledge of just which businesses were owned by Muslims (which were often camouflaged by Hindu-sounding names), where they lived, and so on – knowledge which could only have been supplied by the state government. They were trained and organised, too, in demolition and arson, and armed with swords, explosives, and cylinders of cooking gas with which to carry out their campaign of murder and demolition. According to police officers and politicians from the BJP who later came out in the open, Modi declared that the people should be “allowed to vent their natural anger” and sent ministers to sit in the police control room to make sure the cops did nothing to quell the violence. Actually, the police on the ground not only did nothing, they routinely joined in the looting, destruction, murder and rape, so Modi’s precautions were likely superfluous anyway.

The violence reached surreal dimensions. Ordinary Hindus, not involved in the pogrom, pitched in the looting as well, rushing to snatch goods from vandalised Muslim shops, often on live TV. Entire localities populated by Muslims were cleared out, everyone either murdered or driven into refugee camps. A former member of parliament, Ehsaan Jaafri, begged for help when his locality was attacked. Not only did help not arrive, Jafri was stripped, beheaded, and his corpse thrown into a fire; several members of his family, including two young boys, were burned alive. The stormtroopers displayed an almost perverse tendency to assault women, raping them and then murdering them. If they were pregnant, the foetus was often ripped out of their bodies, impaled on spears, and burned separately. Children were massacred in identical sadistic fashion. Sometimes they were forced to drink petrol and then set on fire, so that they burned from the inside. Even girls as young as eleven were gang raped and murdered by the Hindunazi mobs.

I remember one incident reported by a Hindu peace activist, Teesta Setalvad, who later visited the makeshift Muslim refugee camps. She found Muslim children casually talking of “rape”, and, surprised, asked if they knew what this word “rape” meant. One kid piped up in these words: “Maĩ batāoon, didi, balātkār ka matlab hai jab aurat ko nangha bana dete hai aue uské bad jalā dete haĩ.” (“I’ll tell you, Elder Sister, rape means when they strip a woman naked and then burn her.”) These were kids, you understand, ordinary children.

The looting was accompanied by a systematic demolition of Muslim tombs and mosques; up to 230 of them were known to have been destroyed. In one instance, not only was a mausoleum demolished, but the local council paved over the site the very next day, displaying an alacrity unheard of in India and quite impossible without direct orders from the government.

Nobody knows how many people were actually killed. The “official figure” is about 150000 Muslims displaced and approximately 720 to 1000 killed; most credible estimates cite the dead as about twice that. According to figures, some 200 to 250 Hindus were also killed. How many of them were murdered by Muslims in retaliation is debatable. It’s known that many Hindus went to great personal risk to save their Muslim neighbours and friends, and that a lot of them were afraid of being mistaken for Muslims, so it’s very likely that at least a substantial number of them were killed deliberately or in error by the Hindunazi mobs.

It was only on the evening of the first of March, three days after the pogrom started, that the state government finally allowed the deployment of Central government forces, including the army, to impose a semblance of order. The Central government of the time was also under the BJP, and there are credible reports that the prime minister, the relatively liberal Atal Behari Vajpayee, had wanted to use constitutional provisions to dismiss Modi’s government and impose direct rule, but was dissuaded by his colleagues. The violence continued for many days afterwards, by fits and starts, and it was up to a month before it finally ebbed. What it left was a devastated society, where ordinary middle class Muslims found themselves – even if not personally bereaved – destitute and forced into Muslim ghettoes, where they were then accused of isolating themselves in ghettoes.

Modi’s response to the backlash and revulsion that broke out across the nation, from Hindus as well as others, was absolutely typical of the man. He called it an intolerable assault on Gujarati pride, rejected all criticism, and parlayed this into an “us versus them” mentality which brought him rich electoral rewards. He was helped by the spineless response of the alleged “secular” Congress party, which to this day has never made the slightest move to bring him to book, either at the state or at the centre.

And today, it is this Modi who is all set to become the Prime Minister of the country after the current multi-phase elections are over.

Great, isn’t it?

At this point, the reader is probably recalling the title of this article, and asking, what on earth is hopeful about any of this? Has Bill lost his mind?

No. Bill has not lost his mind.

There were two photos, of many, which defined the Gujarat pogrom in popular consciousness. The first was of a Muslim tailor, Qutubuddin Ansari, his face streaked with tears and dust as he desperately begged for his life.

The second was of a Hindunazi stormtrooper, fist clenched and an iron rod upraised in the other hand, as he shouted slogans at the camera. He belonged to the Hindunazi outfit Bajrang Dal, and his name was Ashok Mochi.

That was in 2002.

Now let’s take a time jump to March, 2014. The place is Kerala, in South India. Two men take the stage at a function, united in reconciliation, and pledge to fight Hindunazism and Modi together^[5]. One of these men is Qutubuddin Ansari. The other is Ashok Mochi.

Mochi (left) and Ansari

And this is what gives me a faint, flickering, glimmer of hope. I don’t know if Mochi personally killed or injured anyone. I don’t know his personal journey over the years. But I do know that instead of retreating into the safe confines of Hindunazi radicalism, he went forth and begged forgiveness from his victims, and turned against the culture of hate which had used him and those like him as a weapon.

Nobody is irredeemable. If they have the faintest, slightest trace of humanity left in them, they can still turn around from the brink of the abyss.

If that isn’t hopeful, I don’t know what is.

Sources:

^[1]  http://www.bill-purkayastha.blogspot.in/2012/07/on-hindunazism.html

^[2]  http://bill-purkayastha.blogspot.in/2013/07/pride-before-fall-narendrabhai-modi-and.html

^[3]  http://subversify.com/2009/12/18/the-demolition-of-the-babri-masjid/?wpmp_switcher=mobile

^[4]  http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Godhra-train-fire-accidental-Banerjee-report/articleshow/1437742.cms

^[5]  http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/12-years-on-faces-of-Gujarat-riots-share-a-room-and-a-dream-of-peace/articleshow/31440200.cms

Further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence

Note: A lot of Hindunazi supporters to this day attempt to deny all the facts of the Gujarat pogrom, even though Modi himself has now distanced himself from his former fellow-conspirators, and has had several of them prosecuted and jailed in an effort to reinvent himself as an innocent.

Long Pig

You know the story, repeated ad nauseam in bad nineteenth-century novels like RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, a whole genre of Italian exploitation films, and cartoons galore: explorer or missionary goes into the jungles of darkest Africa or South America, or ends up being shipwrecked on a Pacific island. Explorer or missionary is captured by savage native peoples and – if not saved at the last moment by the hero – is boiled in a pot and eaten. There’s even a name for it: Long Pig.

Well, did this ever actually happen?

Back when I was in school, I remember reading an article in a science magazine on cannibalism. According to that article, actual verified instances of cannibalism were incredibly rare, if one disregarded instances of starving people resorting to it in extreme situations (or, as a corollary, psychopaths like the German cannibal Armin Meiwes). 

These are not cannibals

This is a cannibal

Specifically, the article considered cultural cannibalism – cannibalism as a cultural practice. What it said was that most instances cited could be put down to one of these factors:

       1.     Missionary and explorer propaganda, designed to impress Europeans with tales of the savage and how valiant white men had to take on the burden of civilising them. One instance would be an account during the voyage of Captain Cook, where

“As Cook examined one of these bones, he realised in consternation that it might be from a human forearm. He asked one of the family members if these were not dog bones, but in answer the man took hold of the flesh of his own forearm and pretended to chew it.

Joseph Bank noted later: Tho we had from the first of our arrival upon the [New Zealand] coast constantly heard the Indians acknowledge the custom of eating their enemies we had never before had a proof of it, but this amounted almost to demonstration: the bones were clearly human, ... and on the grisly ends which were gnawed were evident marks of teeth, and these were accidentally found in a provision basket.” [Source]

However, unless those bones were preserved and can be tested today for toothmarks in a forensic lab, I’d say that without independent confirmation, Captain Cook’s account can be firmly put in that category.

   2.  A lot of tribes told tales of other tribes who ate human flesh. In fact, these tribes used it as a propaganda weapon against their rivals. Missionaries told of how tribes would tell them, “Do not go up river, because the tribes there are fierce, and they eat men.” Whether they actually ate people was moot – the intention was to prejudice the listener. (And this also raises the question of why the listener should be prejudiced by hearing this, which is something we’ll be discussing later in this article.)

In either of these cases, the “evidence”, such as it is, seems anecdotal rather than hard; rather like the “evidence” for the Loch Ness Monster, which only makes sense if one accepts the Monster (or the phenomenon of cannibalism) is real to start off with, rather than keeping an open mind.

This isn’t meant to be confused with headhunting, a practice which most definitely existed, and well into the twentieth century among some peoples like the Shuar (“Jivaro”) of South America who are infamous for creating shrunken heads. In fact, the Shuar practice was actually encouraged by Westerners who bought the shrunken heads as curios and created a market for them.

Also, there’s the curious case of human sacrifice, which occurred all over the world, from the Aztecs (who cut the beating hearts out of their sacrificial victims with obsidian knives) to India, where bandit gangs would sacrifice captives to the goddess Kali. (As a matter of fact, stray incidents of human sacrifice, generally of kidnapped children, still occur in India today. One happened in the western part of this state earlier this year.) The interesting thing is that both taking heads for trophies and sacrificing humans to please the gods stood as stand-alone practices. They were not followed by the general consumption of the flesh of the victim, even though sacrificed goats or chickens are eaten.

Going on that basis, there does seem to be something of a cultural taboo against cannibalism.

I’m not saying there weren’t stray incidents of cannibalism, of course. It’s perfectly possible that some warriors might have eaten, for instance, the hearts of their enemies in the belief that it would give them the enemy’s courage. What I am saying is that this wouldn’t rank as a regular, continuous practice which might be considered to be part of a culture.

Why should this be? Why should humans, who consume caterpillars and whales with equal felicity, have a revulsion against eating their own kind? 

If one can eat this...

I believe we can find an explanation.

If you think about it, cannibalism isn’t all that common in nature. Starving lions and hyaenas, wolves and jackals won’t eat dead members of the group even if in extremis. Spiders, scorpions, sharks and Humboldt squids will, on occasion, but you’ll find that on the whole there are more predators who won’t eat their own sort than those who will – and among mammals, cannibalism is remarkably hard to find.

Yes, there is forced cannibalism, as of cattle being fed the ground up body parts of their fellows along with their fodder. This is a routine practice in factory farming, but hasn’t had very good effects – bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also called “mad cow disease”, is spread when cattle are forced to consume beef products to give them cheap, easily assimilated protein. The cause of this is something called a prion.

What are prions? This isn’t a digression, because I believe prions are an important explanation for the relative rarity of steady cannibalism in human societies and in nature.

A prion is probably the simplest and smallest external disease-causing factor which exists. Unlike bacteria, fungi or protozoa, prions aren’t living organisms. They aren’t even on the border of living and non-living, like viruses. Prions don’t have DNA or RNA; they are simply improperly folded proteins. When introduced into an organism, like a crystal which when put in a saturated solution of a salt causes salt to precipitate out of the solution, the prion causes normal proteins to convert into the prion form, which then goes on to cause cell damage and eventually cell death, to the detriment of the organism as a whole. Cows develop holes in their brains caused by swallowing prions along with beef products meant to fatten them up. That’s bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

And it’s not just cattle, either. There’s the case of human spongiform encephalopathy.  

As far as I know, there’s only one cultural instance of what might be called cannibalism, and that is in the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. Among these people, the bodies of the dead used to be ceremonially consumed by their fellow villagers, in a practice intended to return the deceased person’s “life force” to the village. This was the cause of transmission of a prion causing a disease called Kuru or “laughing sickness”, an incurable degenerative malady of the central nervous system.  One of the features of Kuru is that the majority of victims were women and children; this was because the prions were concentrated in the brain, which was among the body parts left for women and children to consume after the men had taken the choice parts, the muscle and fat.

Considered on this basis, the taboo against cannibalism might make real, evolutionary sense. Some ancient protohumans, like Peking Man, were perhaps cannibals, but the practice doesn't ever seem to have become widespread across protohuman populations. Why not?

If a society – or a species – had a high incidence of cannibalism, the circulation of prions would mean that there would be a high level of debility and mortality among those who did eat their own kind. Those who did not, for whatever reason, would have a higher chance of spreading their genes to the next generation, thus ensuring that their offspring would also be less liable to be eaters of their own dead. Simple evolutionary competition would then mean the non-cannibals would displace the cannibals.

Pretty soon, cannibalism would become a biological threat to the tribe, even though its members wouldn’t consciously verbalise it to themselves in such terms. What they’d do is condemn cannibalism as a forbidden act, like incest, another extremely common taboo worldwide. (If at all it was allowed, only specific categories of people - like priests - would be permitted it, and then only of ritually permissible parts of the body, like the heart, which wouldn't be loaded with prions.)

In general, cannibals would be worthy of disgust and hatred, something less than human.

And that’s why the missionaries and the explorers lied.

The Jarmaan Shefaard

The world’s rarest breed of dog is the Jarmaan Shefaard.

Also known as Elséshiaan or Elsishaan, this breed exists where you find the Bunglee middle class family. Nowhere else can you encounter one. It is simply not possible.

Through the length and breadth of Bunglistan, and by extension anywhere in the world (as far as Bunglees are concerned), there are just three types of dog: three only. These are the aforementioned Jarmaan Shefaard, the Bhutia Kukur, and the Deshi Kukur (or, as some Bunglee dialects have it, the Dishi Kukur or Peti Kukur).

The Bhutia Kukur can be recognised anywhere. It can be as small as a Pekingese or a Lhasa Apso, or as large as an Old English Sheepdog or a Tibetan Mastiff; that doesn’t matter. What matters is the fur.

Fur? What’s fur got to do with it?

Well, a Bhutia Kukur is marked by its fur. Any and all long-haired dogs are Bhutia Kukurs, be they Border Collie or Komondor, Shih Tzu or Pomeranian. They are all, every single one of them, Bhutia Kukurs to the Bunglee. The only exception to the rule is that their own family dog can never be a Bhutia Kukur. What their own dogs are, I’ll get to in a moment.

Above and below: Bhutia Kukurs.

All Bhutia Kukurs are from Bhutan (hence the name Bhutia Kukur, Bhutanese Dog). Even if they are Great Pyrenees Mountain Dogs from Andorra or Newfoundlands from Canada, if they’re Bhutia Kukurs, they’re from Bhutan. And all Bhutia Kukurs are universally delicate and will die on you without warning. If you buy a Bhutia Kukur, you’ll be lucky if it lives five days. Remember this.

The other common type of dog is the Deshi Kukur (Country Dog). This is an exceedingly common breed, in fact, a breed so common that every single dog in Bunglistan which is not a Bhutia Kukur – bar one very, very important exception – is a Deshi Kukur. You know that pure-bred fox terrier down the lane? That’s as much a Deshi Kukur as the piebald mongrel which accompanies you on your morning jog, tongue lolling; as much as the Doberman on guard duty at the police barracks outside town or the whippet racing the tracks on TV. They’re all Deshi Kukur; every single damned one of them. And they’re fit to be looked down on, the whole ill-bred caboodle.

Above and below: Deshi Kukurs

Deshi Kukurs don’t have pedigree. They can’t be trained, they’re promiscuous and have twenty or thirty puppies at one go (Bhutia Kukurs and Jarmaan Shefaards have only three or four; if they have more they aren’t Bhutia Kukurs or Jarmaan Shefaards). One of the worst insults you can offer a Bunglee is to call his dog a Deshi Kukur. How dare you.

Because, you have to remember, the Bunglee’s own dog is always a Jarmaan Shefaard. To each Bunglee, his dog, and only his dog, is a Jarmaan Shefaard. Oh, yes, he’s vaguely aware that other Jarmaan Shefaards must exist – at least the two who bred to give birth to his dog – but every other dog he knows is either a Bhutia Kukur or a Deshi Kukur.

The Jarmaan Shefaard, then, is the world’s rarest dog – because there is only one.

Now be clear about this – the Jarmaan Shefaard is not a German Shepherd. A real German Shepherd is the unattainable dream for the Bunglee, a dog that’s almost mythical, a dog the very idea of which sends shivers down the Bunglee spine, the very name of which is holy. Hence, the Bunglee’s own dog is always a Jarmaan Shefaard or “Elséshiaan” (the closest the Bunglee tongue can get to pronouncing “German Shepherd” or “Alsatian”). Even if it’s a mongrel whose closest brush with German Shepherdhood was that its grandfather once rubbed noses with a German Shepherd through a railing, it’s still a Jarmaan Shefaard. The Bunglee won’t be happy if you inform him that his Elséshiaan simply isn’t one.

This is not a Jarmaan Shefaard

This is a Jarmaan Shefaard

Along with the German Shepherd, a few Bunglees will admit to the existence of some other mythical breeds – the Bulldog, which is as big as a bull, the Bloodhound, which is so ferocious that it drinks blood, and the “hound”, which is the fiercest of the lot. But none of the Bunglees will have seen these animals; they’re in the same universe as mermaids or centaurs.

There are entertaining ways Bunglees squirm out of situations where they have to admit their dog might not be quite the German Shepherd they claim it to be. One common way is to call it, when challenged, a “mixed” Jarmaan Shefaard. Just what the poor animal was mixed with isn’t specified – it’s best left to the imagination. And if asked why the Jarmaan Shefaard is so small – the size of a terrier, say – they’ll claim stiffly that theirs is the real Jarmaan Shefaard and the larger ones are all “mixed.” And so on.

Bunglees are the world’s greatest experts on their Jarmaan Shefaards, too. Such things as “walks” or “brushing” are not necessary for their Jarmaan Shefaards, who are more likely than not chained up all day. The Bunglee knows that if you don’t tie up a dog, it gets “spoilt”, so it’s usually kept on a chain.

There are other things the Bunglee knows. For instance, the reason some dogs have their tails docked is that cutting the tail makes the dog “fierce”. But thankfully the thought of paying a vet to dock the tail will also make the Bunglee blanch, so the tail is always left alone.

But this is actually a two-edged sword. The Bunglee may not have his dog mutilated, but he won’t splurge on such things as anti-rabies shots either. In Bunglee canine mythology, a dog only needs to be inoculated if it bites people, because, you see, dogs have poison glands like snakes, and if they bite people, the poison kills them too in ten days unless you inject them with the “medicine”. No, I am not joking about this blithering idiocy – any of it.

I only wish I was.

I will not tell you the name!

Recently I discovered that my professor of General Human Anatomy back in medical college, KK Bisaria, was dead.

I don’t know when he died; the news reached me indirectly through an alumni group on Fakebook, and nobody specified when or where Bisaria had shuffled off this mortal coil.

I remember Bisaria. Oh, I remember him so well that I named a fictional African country and its capital after him: Bisaria, and Keke.

He used to walk into the auditorium of the anatomy department, a clerk carrying the attendance register behind him because carrying a register wasn’t “his job”. He would start in on his lecture while drawing diagrams on the greenboard: red arteries, blue veins, yellow nerves, brown muscles, all colour coded.

I’d be sitting at my desk, a packet of felt-tipped pens in front of me, copying the diagrams as fast as he drew them, and scribbling down the notes in my own shorthand. He used to go along at a cracking pace, and I developed that shorthand specifically for him. It served me well in later years.

His lectures were, theoretically, an hour long, However, he’d follow a set pattern. He’d teach for about twenty minutes, and then he’d talk about...other things...for about twenty minutes, and then finish off with another bit of teaching.

Now it’s those “other things” that made him memorable.

He was a big, burly man, probably in his late fifties, with a greasy mop of hair and a habit of squinting ferociously as he spoke. He intimidated by his very presence, both in the classroom and later in the dissection hall where he would stalk around in a spotless white coat and a disapproving glare. Once in a while, he’d bend over a cadaver and work away with a Bard Parker knife, and take photographs when he was done. I can still see him doing that now.

Before I go further, I should probably explain that Bisaria wasn’t an anatomist by choice. He’d started out to be an ophthalmologist, but run into certain hurdles (what those hurdles were, we never quite got to know) in the ophthalmology department, quit and took up anatomy instead. And  though he became, as he was fond of loudly proclaiming, “India’s second-greatest neuro-anatomist” (I don’t know who declared him that), he never forgave the ophthalmology department, and the people who had put those “hurdles” in his path.

Again and again he’d talk about those people, giving us all the information we’d need to identify them (“The bugger’s the head of the department, drives a blue car...”) and then, at the end of it, say (with a finger raised) “...I will not give you the name!” That was his signature; “Naam nahin batayenge...I will not tell you the name.”

That became so well known that we even parodied Bisaria in a skit (which the staff didn’t see, of course) where one of my classmates declaimed that he was “the country’s second greatest fucker...would have been the greatest but for so and so...I will not give you the name!”

All that boasting and ophthalmologist-excoriation, along with Bisaria’s incredibly lame jokes (no, you don’t want to hear them. Trust me) and tall stories, would pass the time quite satisfactorily between his bursts of teaching.

He was a misogynist as well. That was true for most of the older members of the staff, who couldn’t quite accept that women wanted to learn medicine or dentistry as a career rather than just to hook more qualified husbands, and would drop snide remarks about why we males allowed the females to score higher marks since they had smaller brains than we did.

The strange thing was that he was actually a good teacher, far and away the best in his department. Afterwards, reviewing my anatomy notes, I realised that he was the only one of them in the Anatomy department who actually taught us rather than just going through the motions. This was especially significant because the Anatomy textbook we had, by one BD Chaurasia, was certainly the worst single piece of medical literature it has ever been my misfortune to lay hands on in my career. I still get angry when I think of it.

At the end of the year, we had the final examinations in Anatomy, and Bisaria set the paper. This was his first time as an examiner, and he decided to ask what he wanted, and not what anyone would think would be important for a lot of dental students.

So, he set a full question on the trochlear nerve. He’d done his thesis on it, so by god he wouldn't let anything come in his way; he asked a full question on it.

Now, the trochlear nerve, which is the fourth cranial nerve, has nothing at all to do with the mouth or jaws or neck. It’s a nerve that supplies the muscles that move the eyeball inside the socket. And, because we had one hell of a lot of stuff to learn, we had to prioritise, and other cranial nerves were much more important than the trochlear. I, for one, ignored it completely. That’s right – I did not study the trochlear nerve at all.

Considering that there were no choices – you had to answer every single question -  and 50% was passing, can you imagine my emotions when I looked at the question paper and saw that I’d got to write all about the damned trochlear nerve? A full 20% of the marks were on it.

For all of a minute, I froze.

Slowly, then, my brain started working. Remember all those diagrams I mentioned? Well, I didn’t know a thing about the trochlear nerve. But I knew the diagram of the middle cranial fossa (the interior of the skull), and the nerves that originated there. So I drew that. Then, I knew the diagram of the orbital fissure (the hole through which nerves pass from the brain to the eye socket) and the relative positions of the nerves. So I drew that. Then I knew the diagram of the muscles that moved the eyeball, so I drew that as well.

You get the point? I drew every single diagram in which the damned trochlear nerve featured, however marginally. I wrote virtually nothing. I just drew diagrams (for two and a half pages) and labelled away.

And, you know what? I got pretty high marks on that test. Higher than a lot of others. Near the top of the class.

I think a certain examiner was so grateful he didn’t have to read an essay that he graded me on the diagrams alone.

But I will not tell you the name!