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Profanity As Self Expression Vijendra Rao "Vijendra Rao has been with The City Tab, Sunday Mid-Day, STATUS, Indian Express, Deccan Herald, and The Mysore Mail. Now he does freelancing. He is handling the www.royalsplendourofmysore.com, the portal on the Mysore royal family. He is Gearing up to release a coffee-table book, "The Inside Glory", also on the Mysore royal family. He is trying to market his currently published book, "Run of the mind" to a global audience. Another project that he is working on is to make Mysore a model city through his own website, www.iouindia.com. He is trying to bring about a hygiene revolution in the city of Mysore. He is a consulting faculty at Mysore University's Bahadur Institute of Management Sciences conducting a training programme for the MBA students. He is also developing content for functional English for the engineering students of Visvesvaraya Technological University. He gives guest lectures for the journalism students of University of Mysore and Karanatak State Open University."

'Run Of The Mind' by Vijendra Rao

'Run of the Mind', from which this essay is excerpted, is a collection of 91 essays that Vijendra Rao has just released. Says Krishna Vattam, a veteran Mysore-based journalist, in his foreword to the book: "Very few journalists combine in themselves the good traits of a journalist and a literary genius, and my esteemed colleague and dear friend Vijendra Rao is one such. What distinguishes Rao is his keen sense of observation of the day-to-day incidents of life. He picks up characters or events from his wide spectrum, representing as they do, a cross-section of Indian life, their beliefs, idiosyncrasies, customs and manners and devotes to create a live atmosphere with an uncanny perfection in his presentation." For copies: vijendrarao@iouindia.com / vijendra.rao@gmail.com

THE urban-rural divide in the subcontinent is too deep to go unnoticed. Except in one area. In the use of profanities. Our day is never complete without our mouth excreting spite in measures that are directly proportionate to our daily, nay hourly, intake of cultural offal. Mouth as an excretory orifice? Why not? Only the other day there was this report of an upscale restaurant extending perverse hospitality to its customers by serving them in tableware resembling potties. It is absolutely in sync with voluntary depravity, today's loudest fashion statement. Who knows, it may even be their way of expressing solidarity with the have-nots of the subcontinent who eat from garbage bins. The have-nots have a reason to feel grateful towards the haves. The North-South schism is narrowing, after all. The same way the two ends of the open-ended alimentary canal are being fused for synergy.

The incessancy with which shit comes out of the wrong end of our digestive tract is in total defiance of gravity. Forces of cultural constipation act in a direction opposite to the gravitational force. So, what ought to come down goes up, and the soul is razed to ground zero from its rarefied home. 'Shit' – least of our abusive words – flies between ourselves in our routine conversations. We live amid it all the time, as if all the speakers of the surround system spouted it in our home theatre, the theatre of the absurd.

Many years ago, a friend was offered a piece of advice in jest: 'Hey, your son does not look like a tennis player in the least. What are you doing? Let him first learn to look like a tennis player. Every time he serves an ace, he must pump his fist; he misses it or drops a point, let him swish his racquet wildly and say, 'f*** or 'shit.'

But, then, there is so much shit all around that we have got used to its pervasive presence. More to the sound than to the sight. Because its use in speech is passe, there is a quest for something more stinking. So the word 'f*** has stepped in and is popularising itself even among pre-pubertal populace. Not a wonder, given the fact that puberty itself is in a tearing hurry, not willing to wait till 13 (probably because it thinks, like the way anxious parents of growing up children do, it is an unlucky number).

This below-the-belt term – after relocating itself from behind to the front – is a most likely pointer to the degree of frustration that mankind feels in that region. The frustration is so deep that it cannot wait to come out. And it comes out in the form of anger. Anger against the man who has triggered it. But, the profanity that is chosen against him invariably has the potential to cause collateral damage to his mother. It is killing two birds with one stone. The mother is bundled with the agent provocateur because she has given birth to him. The Oedipal slant to this verbal mauling is inescapable. (The rage at the instigator is such that the place from where he emerged on this earth also becomes worthy of hate, so it must be desecrated, at least verbally). The abuser, in slapping Oedipal charges on his target, renders himself culpable of the same Oedipal mind.

When he does not pick on the target's mother, it his sister. In the alternative his wife. Surprisingly, and mercifully, the other two women in the circle of women in a man's life – the grandmother and the daughter – enjoy a rare kind of immunity from profanities. (Curiously, the grandmother is invoked in banters between friends, not during fights between enemies. This is done most likely because of the menopausal status of most grandmothers rather than the generation divide between the target and his grandmother. The daughter may be verbally abused during a war of words, but there are no standard epithets or abusive terms against her in the lexicon of profanities). The point to note is that no matter which of the three women is chosen, it is ultimately a woman who is chosen. The first and automatic choice is the mother. Even when the vituperators are women, they mostly fling profanities at themselves, not at their male relatives. When it is a mixed pair on the two sides, the woman still relies on invectives that actually denounce another woman or the man through another woman. On a rare occasion that man is singled out for denunciation, it suffers from inadequacy in profane content. Any profanity that spares women is no profanity. The malodorously patriarchal bias in profanities has the texture of a well-woven conspiracy. The vice-like grip that man has established over woman in this area needs the collective strength of the will of the entire female population of the world to even loosen it. That can be the first (but not necessarily symbolic) step towards establishing their equal rights.

Profanities must have existed for almost as long as the spoken word has. But the import of English profanities got a fillip through the television. Sartorial influence of the white man in India began during the British rule, but it experienced an American bias through the Hollywood movies (cowboy-styled jeans, boots and belt as in the Wild West). The shift in emphasis from the sartorial to the verbal (profanities that were imitations of the foul-mouthed Eddie Murphy, for instance) became pronounced with the advent of television. Multimedia took away the cake. The influence is far from complete. Internet penetration, being shallow and broadband revolution being in its infancy, there is so much more to swallow in days to come.

My objection to profanity – a phenomenon which is growing so disturbingly that cultured existence is becoming more and more impossible – arises out of these reasons.

a) It diminishes human dignity; since profanities are predominantly female-centric, they denigrate woman and womanhood;

b) Profanity is anti-refinement; it betrays intolerance. It may be short of violence, but no less barbaric than violence;

c) It is a polluted vent to one's frustrations; it pollutes the air in which it is used;

d) It is absolute proof of the thinking faculty having deserted its user, at least for the moment that it was hurled;

e) It is disproportionate to the cause which triggers it (say, for example, when a schoolboy suddenly crosses the road and the poor fellow's parentage is called into question.

f) It is fast getting institutionalised as common parlance; no longer filthy abuse is reserved for occasions created by extreme provocation. It is becoming a form of self-expression, but without creativity.

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