Liar, liar, pants on fire. Hanging on a telephone wire.

That I shall leave this world unsung is, truth to tell, a blessing in disguise. Haven’t you noticed how Indian obit writers unabashedly indulge themselves in flights of fancy and plumb the depth of obsequity – apart from vandalizing the English language mercilessly − when it comes to doing their job without fear or favour? (In their midst, not even a single Saadat Hasan Manto, eh?) Their unspoken excuse is that hypocrisy as a tenet of (politically?) correct behaviour is allegedly a part and parcel of Indian “culture”. It stipulates that no evil shall be spoken of the dearly departed never mind even if the truth has to be bent backwards or stood on its head as the situation requires. Little white lies are to be preferred to the beam of white light the poor man or woman may be facing in the hereafter.

Before you point your accusatory finger at me for blithely following their exemplary example in titling this post, let me confess to a weakness for children’s ditties (simple words, uncomplicated rhyming, easy-to-memorize) over the more obfuscatingly worded verses of the idiosyncratic 19^th-century poet. Mind you, this worthy was shunned by his envious and contemptuous contemporaries but posthumously hailed by latter-day critics as no less than a mystical visionary of the Romantic Age. I am thinking of the late and latterly lamented William Blake (1757-1827), Esquire, to wit. 

To put the records straight, this impudent versifier must have somehow got privy to the likelihood of his impending canonization in the annals of literature in the not too faraway future. To make sure it would come about, he cunningly decided to take recourse to an imagined version of Peter Roget’s “classed catalogue of words … of much use in literary composition” and launched his much celebrated poem, “The Liar” (1810), with a double-barreled fusillade of synonyms http://yhoo.it/1kFVsdE:

“Deceiver, dissembler 

Your trousers are alight 

From what pole or gallows 

Shall they dangle in the night?”

Ah, the infinite riches of the English language! A word for every shade of meaning yielding a surfeit of synonyms in most cases. But what we think is its strength could well be harbouring the seeds of its weakness, making it an easy tool of deceit when wielded by deceivers, dissemblers, fibbers, fabulists, perjurers, fabricators, story tellers, tale weavers, poets, dissimulators, falsifiers, con artists, deluders, imposters, false witnesses, fablers, misleaders, equivocators, tricksters, conjurors, quacks, pretenders, swindlers, statisticians and assorted liars of every ilk.

The celebrated American humourist and author, Mark Twain (1835-1910), is credited with this oft-quoted witticism: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."  He, however, modestly declined authorship and pointed the finger at Disraeli (1804-1881). That itself turned out to be a posture. An essay on The University of York website on a Department of Mathematics page http://bit.ly/1sh70cv dealing with the various occurrences of “lies, damned …” avers, though not confidently, that its most likely source was Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911), a Liberal MP of the Victorian era, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Gladstone's second government and a Privy Council member whose extra-marital affairs ruined his political career. The Dilke wordings differ slightly, though: “fibs, lies, and statistics” in press reportage and “a fib, a lie, and statistics” in a verbal citing. Can you tell the truth from the lie?

Dr Samuel Johnson, the pioneer English lexicographer, once remarked: "Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement." The two swindlers in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” faithfully followed that dictum to spread the word that they wove the finest cloth with colours as delicate as the butterflies’ and the cloth itself as light as gossamer with patterns beautiful and unusually intricate. Moreover, they claimed a magical quality for their cloth: stupid or incompetent people could not see it. The reigning Emperor who was quite a vain fob and nearly everyone else in the kingdom was taken in by the “large promise”, i.e., the enormous lie. Finally, it took a child’s innocence to pierce the veil of the falsehood.

Lying, come to think of it, is more often than not a work-in-progress. Once you have started your career as a liar, you have got to keep at it telling more lies to cover up the original lie. A soap ad on the idiot box, for instance, makes the claim that the product can deal the new strains of virus “ordinary” soaps cannot tackle. To further enhance the credibility of this claim, accreditation by a London organization connected with public health awarded for the brand’s hygiene-education initiative about hand washing http://bit.ly/1pGXL3r is touted as recognition of its improved wide-spectrum anti-virus action against newer strains.

Equally amusing are the truth-bending antics of toothpaste advertisers. Even if you brush your teeth twice a day, I am reasonably certain you gargle away nearly every trace of it from your mouth and teeth afterwards. So, unless the just brushed toothpaste’s foam defies the force of the gargle and resolutely clings to the teeth’s enamel or, better still, impregnates it and thus becomes a part of it, how can anyone in his right mind − and his tongue not firmly tucked in his cheek − claim with a straight face that the toothpaste keeps doing its good work in your mouth for 12 hours?

All this reminds me of Edgar Wallace’s Educated Evans stories about the exploits of a racing tout in the early part of the last century. Evans was apparently a character based on Wallace’s own experience as a tout before he turned a journalist. This irrepressible yarn-spinner laid claims to “inside information straight from the horse’s mouth” about fixed races. Many of these scams were quite bizarre and hard to believe unless you were a born victim.

“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories,” opined Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). When denied the attention, do they resort to lies in order to get a hearing? From little white ones to big black ones? The former are harmless diversions. The latter are motivated by intent to deceive.

In a Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine comic strip episode (Mumbai Mirror, 28 

March 2015), Rat and Goat have the following existential chitchat:

Rat: I have a large brain and it’s been conclusively proven that those with larger brains are smarter than those with smaller brains.

Goat: That’s not true.

Rat: Yes, it is.

Goat: How do you know?

Rat: Because something is true whenever you say it has been conclusively proven.

Goat: That’s not how that works.

Rat: Hey, in an age where no one reads, it’s how that works.

(I don’t know about you but I agree with Rat about the power of “conclusively proven”; I have recently seen it being used in a TV ad of a leading tea brand  claiming to contain herbal ingredients capable of keeping the tea drinker healthy and productive. The only evidence offered in support of the claim is, yes, you got it right: “conclusively proven”.)

By the way, if you did not like the above ending, I have another up my sleeve in the illustrious tradition of the fabulous fibber, Groucho Marx.         

A priest and a rabbi along with a pair of flaming panties (oops, pants) walked into a bar… Still don’t like it? Too bad, bud.

PIs and I.

Detective fiction is a genre I've enjoyed all my life. I remember my father buying me a hardbound copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published by John Murray. This happened to be in one of my childhood summers at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/4xyxy. I was recuperating then from a severe bout of tonsillitis. I used to suffer from this ailment not infrequently at that time and was a frequent user of glycerin acid tannic, "the throat 'paint' of choice". http://digbig.com/4yarg. Sorry for the digression. After devouring the first collection of short stories and getting well, I was hooked on Holmes. I rapidly ploughed through the entire "Canon": 4 novels and 56 short stories written by Sir Arthur Conon Doyle between 1887 and 1927 - a total of 660382 words according to Charles E Lauterbach's calculation in 1960. Holmes had a special appeal for me because, like me, he preferred to sit down and ratiocinate. http://digbig.com/4yaty. I'm not saying my deductive logical ability was a patch on his legendary though fictional one, of course. To continue the story, I made a logical progression to Agatha Christie's inimitable egghead, Hercule Poirot and, thence, to Miss Marple http://digbig.com/4yatm in the last year of school and, later, in college. Ellery Queen, reputedly the American heir to the Holmesian legacy, happened somewhere along the way. I remember being particularly impressed at that time with the way a challenge to the reader used to be thrown towards the end of the earlier EQ novels when the reader was supposed to have been given all the essential clues. I had even read and enjoyed the four Drury Lane novels written by Queen under the Barnby Ross nom de plume. These, I recall, belonged to the locked room mystery sub-genre, a format of which John Dickson Carr was a leading practitioner. For a while around then, I was a steady follower of Mike Shayne, the Miami PI, as well. Then, the focus of my attention shifted to Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason. I began to think that thinking on one's feet and wisecracking in a trial court was the height of sophistication. Then I discovered his Donald Lam and Bertha Cool series written under his AA Fair pseudonym and found it far more witty and entertaining. My meeting with The Saint http://digbig.com/4yfre I recall, was fortuitous. I happened to browse through a Saint novel at the shop on Lamington Road http://digbig.com/4ybgc where I used to borrow comics and other reading material when I was in college. I was taken in by the flippant style and tone. I went on a pilgrimage of Saintly reading borrowing all the titles in the circulating library and even buying a few second-hand titles. Another source of my detective literature supply was the JB Petit Institute at Flora Fountain of which my father and I were members. I read quite a bit of Edgar Wallace http://digbig.com/4ybge there, including a book of hilarious short stories about a race course tout. I remember its red binding distinctly but have forgotten its name. I read, if memory serves, almost all Dorothy L Sayers (Lord Wimsey) mysteries and some by Georges Simenon (Maigret is no PI, mind!) and Rex Stout, all borrowed from the Institute as well. Dick Francis came later and became for a while quite an addiction. The Institute also gave me the opportunity to enjoy Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine for several years. Although I have not read much of Patricia Highsmith and Nicolas Freeling, I hold them both in high esteem. I must confess that although I read some of Ross MacDonald, he didn't appeal to me much. Neither for that matter did Raymond Chandler who considered himself a mere pulp writer but was the toast of the British literary and intellectual circles including notably JB Priestley, WH Auden, Cyril Connolly and Edith Sitwell. Maybe, I ain't no mystery connoisseur in verity.

11 Just Men.

Edgar Wallace wrote in 1905 what went on to be accorded the status of a prototype or benchmark of the modern English mystery thriller, The Four Just Men. It was about four vigilantes who killed people in the cause of justice. To promote it, he launched a competition. The challenge was to guess the method to murder the Foreign Secretary that they would employ if he were to ratify an unjust law. This got The Daily Mail, the newspaper where he worked as a sub-editor into deep trouble. Wallace did not put a limiting clause in his competition rules to restrict the prize to a single winner. As it happened, there were several correct guessers. He did not have the money to pay them. To protect the good name of his newspaper, the owner had to loan £5000 to Wallace. He took it without a whit of gratitude and contrition and showed no hurry to repay the loan. His attitude and approach were far from just, to state the obvious. Money, I guess, does that to a lot many people. Did not The Bible warn us that the love of money is the root of all evil? Now it is doing likewise to Wallace's compatriots, the English cricket team. They have thrown caution to the winds and defied logic as many, including Pakistan's former skipper, Shahid Latif, feel, because of the big bucks BCCI has in its coffers. http://digbig.com/4xymq. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, as the French say. Translation: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In other words, nothing changes much. So, what else is new? P.S: The English Team decided to give 50% of their match fee to the victims of the Mumbai massacre. Are they just or what?

The Mind of MK Gandhi.

I've always thought highly of MK Gandhi. My unpublished novel, The Last Gandhi Movie, has him as the thematic pivot. I recently read Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates. It perturbed me and gave me serious misgivings. This narrative is based mostly on Gandhi's own writings. In it, the so-called Mahatma comes out as manipulative, pathologically obsessive about sex and sin as well as power-crazed. His logic sounds circuitous, serpentine and often self-contradictory and specious, at times even inane. He apparently played God with the lives of those close to him. He was too intrusive and interfering. His charisma was undoubtedly legendary. If he was obsessive about truth, how come he said/wrote different versions of an event to different people? If he was a god-fearing person, how come he believed the worst of his friends and associates time and again? Also, he was in the habit of praising a person to high heaven for a while and then suddenly cutting the ground from under her feet. He was so deeply involved in and on the centre stage of national politics for most of his adult life. How then did he find the time, the emotional resources and the energy to behave like a virtual puppeteer controlling the lives of those in his fold and under his care? All this seems nothing short of weird to me. His tryst with brahmacharya too is an enigma. He seemingly had an extreme revulsion for sexual intimacy. There was a deep emotional scar left on his psche by his failure to be present at his father's bedside at the moment of his death because he was partaking carnal pleasure with his wife. This is usually trotted out as the reason for his guilt feeling. This reminds me of what Aldous Huxley wrote in Proper Studies: "Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt." And: "An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." (Attributed by Peter J. Mayhew in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution. Also attributed to Edgar Wallace. http://digbig.com/4xypc.) In tandem, both seem particularly apt in Gandhi's case. Maybe, Gandhi was a bit like George III in Alan Bennet's dramatic and cinematic versions of his life. In a group reading of Shakespeare's King Lear in the asylum, he suddenly realised why others thought him mad and regained his sanity. http://tinyurl.com/3hqeev. Time for yet another of Huxley's accidentally Gandhi-centric pearl of wisdom (this time from Texts & Pretexts): "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves." On this score, maybe Gandhi was found wanting. And, what about the persistent speculation about Gandhi's tantric leanings as reflected in his brahmacharya experiments with his women associates as guinea pig? There is a cogently reasoned study by Nicholas F. Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho, Was Gandhi a Tantric? http://tinyurl.com/4qdcg2 which nearly convinces one of the likelihood. After reading Girja Kumar's book, taking Gandhi at his own words seems a bit dicey to me. Even if we find him innocent of prurience, we cannot always believe in the consistency of his utterances. Dr Sushila Nayyar told Ved Mehta that "brahmacharya" was a latter-day invention of Gandhi to ward off criticism of his interaction with his female intimates. Earlier, she used to sleep naked with him for reasons of nature cure (p.41 of Girja Kumar's book). What can we make of all this? Perhaps, the answer is as simple as the moral of this Zen tale. Nan-in, a Japanese master of the Meiji era, received a university professor who came to enquire about Zen. When serving his guest tea, Nan-in kept pouring even after the cup overflowed. The professor after watching could contain himself no more: "The cup is overfull. No more will go in." Said Nan-in: "Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculation. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" Milord, I rest my case.