Seven and fifteen

Essay- mysteries


“Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby
I’ll get mine
Gonna make it, baby
If we try”

Part lyric from Doors song Five to one

“vox populi, vox Dei”

An old Latin proverb quoted by William of Malmesbury in the 12th Century - The voice of the people is the voice of God


Seven and fifteen

A peanut we are told is not a nut as one might suppose, but a legume. Things and people, much too often, masquerade in this fashion. It takes sleuthing and discernment to catch true meanings. Also a smidgen of the much vaunted scientific temper and maybe a trace of taste. The philosophical and mystically inclined tend to waffle, and might just compound matters might they not? Research clarifies the butter but can’t always ensure the intended results. I mean look at Rowan Atkinson saying he will do no more Mr. Bean after Mr. Bean’s Holiday (UK release today). I ask you, can anyone else do Mr. Bean? You might as well accost the putty-faced misfit after the screening in Cannes and lecture him soundly on how a blond Bond can sometimes best a dark haired one. The analogy being think what symmetry and sense can do to the future of Bean. The Americans might realise that they have a language in common. Atkinson could go on to, shall we imagine it - Baldrick Returns – strictly for the formerly infected on Black Adder.

After all, unintended results have a life of their own. Irving Wallace, who sold over 250 million copies of his 16 novels and 17 works of non-fiction wrote a book called The Seven Minutes in 1969. And in 1971 it was made into a film directed by Russ Meyer, famous and beloved for his mammary fixations. What 20th Century Fox was thinking, hiring the usually X rated “Breastman Extraordinaire” to direct, one can only conjecture. The Seven Minutes received a demure R rating, weighed down probably by a screenplay with an actual story, a sure-fire kiss of death for a Russ Meyer film. After all, Meyer’s genre ran to cult classics like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Faster, and Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Motorpsycho and Mondo Topless.

Irving Wallace, as we all remember, was big on research and turned out wonderfully plotted best sellers. The Seven Minutes wasn’t, despite its reputation, about a woman’s sexy imaginings during seven minutes of heaving sex. It dwelt upon the impact of pornography on a young lad who rapes a woman. It was rumination on some of the possible excesses of freedom of expression, all turned into a courtroom drama- a Grisham 20 years before Grisham. The book sold millions based on its sexy cover and the Wallace brand. The movie flopped despite Meyer and his sexcapading predilections. And the public kept looking for smut that wasn’t there with a doggedness that was impressive.

It’s like an adolescent reading Ulysses (James Joyce) or enduring the film. Molly Bloom it is. Porn it is not. Never mind the adolescent. People on the street know what Joyce was rapping about because they too have consciousness that streams. Underestimate da populi at your own peril. In The Seven Minutes they were actually looking for another bit of news. Confirmation, probably, from the toffs-who-research about the golden mean that is seven in number.

This rumoured paradigm, predictably, came as a shock to some - an interminable, tentacular, teeth-grittingly longwinded “average” for the whoops-a-daisy brigade. To others, more Johnny Deppish/Erroll Flynnish in demeanour and comportment, better swordsmen all, seven minutes seemed ludicrously brief. So anxiety and pride coexist and never mind that Irving didn’t even put in seven pages of description to sell The Seven Minutes. The damage, as they say, had been done. Seven minutes gives you pass marks in the sack.

And fifteen minutes, as we all know, is what everyone gets by way of fame or er notoriety. For this fifteen you need to be yourself and take your pick in reinvention and putting a lid on. Or, if you prefer, you can give Pandora a run for her fifteen in the sun. It’s all wonderfully democratic up to fifteen minutes. Any longer than that and you really have to earn it. It’s the same in the sack. But the extended play starts after seven.

Friday 30th March 2007
( 755 words)
By Ghatotkach

This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005-2007 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.

Lamppost decor

"The only way to rid the country of corruption is to hang a few of you on the lamp post.”

Justices S B Sinha and Markandeya Katju of the Supreme Court of India


Lamppost decor


Nehru liked to say he would hang black marketeers from the nearest lamppost. It impressed you when you saw the remark in printer’s ink on newsprint but provoked mirth when he delivered the self-same threat at public meetings. There was his well-bred appearance to contend with and that reedy panditji voice. The black marketeers, operating brazenly, first flush republican idealism notwithstanding, were unmoved. You need a mob Mr. Nehru, they were thinking, and a Madame Lafarge to lead it. Alternatively, you need industrial grade spite. The kind of vitriol employed by the Raj officials who put an enormous number of quiet old trees to grisly use or fired natives rather handily out of cannons. You need provocation too, 1857 style, and not a nation built on a very serviceable version of ahimsa.

Besides, if you look at the history of the thing, the only person who ever made it to being hung on a lamppost, upside down at that, was Mussolini. You need to be a full fledged dictator to make that exalted cut, mere price manipulation doesn’t hack it. Still, lampposts have always been popular in hanging lexicons if the idea is to vent ire and let off steam in the manner of all idle threats.

But verily, if you really want to strike terror into the hearts of the corrupt, then start with a series of fact-finding tours in pukka sarkari fashion. They will be very popular in themselves but a lot depends of course on who you ask. If you ask potentates from sandy climes they will point to their collection of excellent cat o’ nine tails bought from state-of-the-art S&M stores on 42nd Street. They will also show you their rack of glinting home grown scimitars oft used to separate wheat from chaff or chaff from chaff- it makes no difference. They have docile and well behaved populations in these places that prefer to leave all the “commission” paying work to their betters.

If you ask the Caucasian first world they will refer you to several of their dungeon museums (and Guatanamo Bay Resort and Spa) which graphically demonstrate a hoary tradition. There are wonderfully slick garrotes, rack and pinion used for much more than mere steering, clinging and penetrating Iron Maidens, bucolic water wheels mit built-in body harnesses in first-class rot-free leather, pincers, gouges, other light implements.

Tremendously eye-opening these tours would be. It must be realized, the fact-finders would write, that it is far more effective to mutilate and harm the totally innocent. It would set a fine example of what might befall one when one does nothing at all to offend. It would keep everything orderly because the innocent, being truly horrified at their fate, always make a most satisfying noise amplified manifold by their near and dear. Contrast this with the damp squib, the knowing reprehensibility of the purana paapi.

Puraana paapis may well provoke bleats of wrath from the likes of Supreme Court judges SB Sinha and Markandeva Katju but what is talk of lampposts but mere nostalgia for the mythical days of corruption-free street lighting?

The fact of the matter is that we desperately need instruction. We need drum courts, summary executions, impalements outside the Houses of Parliament, heads on spears to decorate our bridges, a neat row of crucifixions along Raj Path in emulation of the Appian Way. All this and more of such salutary deterrence is what we need. But to get there, we need to shorten the constitution, nay tear it up altogether! We must do away with inefficient notions such as human rights and democracy. Is it not a waste of taxpayer’s money when the obviously corrupt lay claim to due process? What about natural justice hey, that red thing in tooth and claw that has served man and beast alike for millennia? No, enough! Let us call up the vigilante squads (and Clint Eastwood) and turn the lamppost to work up to its true potential.

(700 words)

March 9th, 2007

By Gautam Mukherjee
Also published in The Pioneer www.dailypioneer.com on Sunday 11th March 2007 under "Dialogue" in the "Agenda" section.