Profanity in the Age of Globalisation

 

The World-War-II movie Guns of Navarone (1961) had an ensemble cast with some of the greatest stars: Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, David Niven, Anthony Quale, and a very young Harrison Ford, Ford played a cameo in the beginning of the film as an angry Australian pilot who had just lost some fellow pilots in a failed air attack to destroy two strategically placed massive cannons in Navarone (a fictional island on the Aegean Sea). To explain why the attack had been a stupid idea, Ford says something like, ‘The bloody guns are in a bloody cave which can’t be bloody seen from a bloody aircraft in the bloody sky because it’s bloody hidden by a bloody ledge which is bloody big and we don’t have a bloody bomb to do bloody anything to it.’ ... A sentence with a dozen bloodies, give and take a few!

If film were made today, what word would Harrison Ford use instead of “bloody”? Well, no prize for guessing, and we’ll come back to the high-frequency word soon.

We watched The Guns of Navarone when we were in college where no one possibly loved movies more than Tushar did. And among my close friends, none was possibly loved as much as Tushar was. He was and still is a genuinely uncomplicated person. As a young man, he could perhaps have been described accurately by either of the two adjectives that were hardly used then: cool in English, and बिंदास in Hindi. How cool / bindaas was he?

Once, from our university we went on an excursion to Chittaranjan Locomotive Works or CLW, the first loco factory set up in independent India by her now-much-maligned first prime minister. The town around the factory too is called Chittaranjan, which happened to be Tushar’s hometown then. I may be wrong, but I think during the two days we spent there, he didn’t deny himself the company of friends by wasting his time to visit parents. However, he did introduce his family to us. Well, in a way: as we were crossing CLW’s sprawling head-office complex, Tushar pointed at the building and said, ‘Friends, have a close look. My old man pushes pen in there!’ His exact words in Bangla were: ঐ বাড়িটা দ্যাখ, ওখানে আমার বাবা কলম পেষে!

Once, in the beginning of a vacation, when the boarders were going home, Tushar went to the railway station to see off a prospective girlfriend. As the train whistled and was about to start, the girl said casually, ‘Tushar-da, come home sometime.’ (In our time, some girls would address their senior boys with the suffix -da which stands for older brother in Bangla, although they (the girls) didn’t necessarily consider them (the boys) as brothers. And vice versa, needless to say.)

It was a mistake for her. Before she could complete the sentence, Tushar had boarded the train. He returned from North Bengal after three days.

Possibly because he had to spend a major part of his meagre allowance on films, tea, and Charminars, Tushar couldn't afford haircuts. He would get haircuts twice a year when he went home and his mom could no longer suffer the mess that his head was. Consequently, in the rest of the year, Tushar’s shock of curly hair used to end up to about six inches above his nut; he could be recognised from a mile.

The time he saved by not studying he devoted to more esoteric activities like playing cards and watching films. He was a serious movie buff, who would watch every film that was shown in Chitra and Bichitra, the two cinemas in our small university town. Bichitra was a truly classical small-town theatre where we didn’t have the privilege to accompany girls because “ladies” were seated on the balcony. (What a shame!) We would see the screen through a fog of cigarette / bidi smoke and for the front stalls, there were rickety old wooden benches from where enthusiastic viewers would whistle when a heroine (rarely) showed her cleavage or when she was locked with the hero for a kiss that would be aborted by the censors. Only Hollywood actors had the privilege of kissing in Indian cinemas in the 1970s. (In 1969, a committee headed by GD Khosla had decided that Indians had grown enough to kiss, it took many years to implement the guidelines.)

If Tushar took a fancy to a film, he would watch it multiple times. He would also vividly replay it in words for the less fortunate who hadn’t seen it. Being present at the “first-day-first-show” was an article of faith for him. He wouldn’t miss it, for love or money or exams.

For almost 40 years, we friends lost touch with Tushar completely. Almost every time we met and talked about the glorious days in campus, we would grieve that Tushar had been lost. But thanks to the Internet and painstaking research done by two of us, he has been rediscovered recently and fortunately, as the bard with the bald pate said long ago, time hasn’t been able to wither his shock of hair, like it had failed to wither Cleopatra’s beauty earlier.

For me at least, rediscovery of Tushar was almost the only good thing that has happened in the fucking year that 2020 has turned out to be. (Gentle Reader, if you are upset with the f-word, please brace yourself! There will be more.)

*

The human mind works in curious ways. Tushar rushed into my mind only because three days ago, I watched, first time in my life, a first-day-first-show. On Netflix. And it reminded me of the first-day-first-show guy in our hostel.

AK vs. AK, released on 26 December, is a taut thriller that tells an unusual story about a film director Anurag Kashyap, who is a superb actor too, and a film star, played with equal aplomb by Anil Kapoor. It is not a great film, but you can surely watch it. You’ll have two hours of good time.

The following day, my wife and I tried to watch The Gangs of Wasseypur by the same director, but we couldn’t because there was far too much of violence in it for our timid souls; we decided to give up after an hour or so.

Two films by Anurag Kashyap, one new and one old, the latter being the first Hindi film made it to the Cannes Film Festival, although we couldn’t sit through it. The common thread between the two was that in both, in every second sentence somebody used the word fuck. The Hindi equivalent of mother fucker – which in any case is a hybrid word made of English and Hindi – was used almost as extensively (and printed in English subtitle), as articles or prepositions. (If you are not sure of your English grammar, it just shows your sanity. You don’t have to Google for article and preposition; you’ve got the drift, haven’t you?)

The word fuck seems to have united the world.

This morning, when I got up, I was thinking about how cuss words in English has changed from the time of the Guns of Navarone to the Gangs of Wasseypur. My wife was awake and I shared my two-penny linguistic insight with her.

It was still dark then, the time was 5:30. My wife, the ever-curious person with an academic bent of mind, asked, ‘What is the Hindi word for mother fucker?’

I said, ‘No! No, Darling, please don't ask me to say it the first thing in the morning, Not at 5:30.’

Bengaluru / 30 Dec. 2020