Laughter as a therapy
By Khushwant Singh

I RECALL the time when T.N. Seshan was Chief Election Commissioner and the most popular man in the country. I had great faith in his future and hoped he would become President of India (he has very high IQ and integrity: he won the Sulabh International Award for Honesty) and his attractive ever-smiling wife Vijayshree would become the ornament of Rashtrapati Bhawan. I had only two reservations : he believed in astrology which is anathema to me, and he took himself too seriously. In my columns I showered fulsome praises on him. I also admired his number two, M.S. Gill, who later succeeded him as Election Commissioner. Gill once asked me, "Why doesn’t your friend ever laugh?" In my turn I put the question to Seshan. He replied with a growl, "What is there to laugh about?" Apparently his wife found plenty to laugh about as she was always bubbling with laughter. She was, and is, a very happy person; her husband was not, and is not.

Most of us Indians are able to laugh at other people: it is cruel laughter meant to hurt. Very few of us are able to laugh at ourselves. If others laugh at us we are quick to take umbrage. From ourselves we extend this wall of no-laughter to our community and the country. We have become touchy about most things : every community has its sacred cows about which jokes are taboo. Virtually the only people who make and enjoy jokes against themselves are Parsis and to a lesser extent Sardarjis — they have also succumbed to being touchy.

It is no great wonder what we Indians have very little sense of humour and have not produced any great humorists. I find jokes attributed to Raja Birbal, Mulla do Pyaza, Tenaliraman and Gopal Bhore very puerile and lacking in sophistication. I am also not amused by anecdotes ascribed to Sheikh Chillee, Boojh Bhujakkar and other rustic favourites. None of our humorists compare with the American, or the British. Perhaps the wittiest people in the world are Jews who despite the cruel discriminations practised against them were able to churn out jokes against Hitler and his Nazis even when they were being eliminated by the thousands in gas chambers.

Osho had quite a sense of humour. All his discourses on serious subjects were peppered with amusing anecdotes and often ended with bawdy jokes. I could not understand why his favourite jester was Mullah Nasruddin whose repartee don’t bring a smile on any face. The only thing in favour of the Mullah is that he made himself the butt of many of his jokes. The ability to make an ass of oneself is the most important ingredient of a good joke.

Having thus demolished Indian humorists I have arrived at the comfortable conclusion that in the present-day India there is only one humorist — me. I make jokes against myself, make an ass of myself and make others laugh.

Love and marriage

Everyone speaks in laudatory terms about love; rarely do people have anything nice to say about marriage. Love occasionally leads to marriage; occasionally couples who had not known each other fall in love after they get married — at least for some time. However, the general opinion of men who have written on love and marriage is that the two rarely, if ever, go together for too long. One of the most outspoken persons on the subject was English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). He was the eldest son of land-owning aristocrat and Member of Parliament. He was educated at Eton and then joined University College, Oxford from where he was expelled for propagating atheism. He was a very handsome youngman whom women, young and not-so-young, found very attractive. He scandalised the conservative English society by publishing his views on God, the Church and the institution of marriage. He wrote:"Men’s laws pretend to regulate our natural sentiments. How absurd! When the eye perceives a lovely being the heart takes fire. How is it under man’s control to love or not to love ? But the essence of love is liberty and it withers in an atmosphere of constraint. It is incompatible with obedience, jealousy or fear. It requires perfect confidence and absolute freedom. Marriage is a prison...."

Nevertheless, Shelley tried to persuade his sister Elizabeth to marry his friend Hogg who had been expelled with him from Oxford. When she drew his attention to the contradiction, he exploded: "Marriage is odious and hateful. I am sickened when I think of this despotic chain, the heaviest forged by man to shackle fiery souls. Scepticism and free love are as necessarily associated together, as religion and marriage. Honourable men have no need of laws. For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, read over the Marriage Service and ask yourself if any decent man could wish the girl he loved to submit to such degradation."

"Yet, you want me to marry your friend Hogg?

"Yes, but not by a clergyman nor according to man’s laws, but freely and with love only as high priest."

Shelley’s biographer Andre Mourois believed that men perpetually fall in love because they have in them a store-house of love which they need to spend on women they find desirable. He writes: "When people are in love they always imagine, quite wrongly, that it is because they have come across an exceptional being who has inspired them with passion. The truth is that love, existing already in the soul, seeks out a suitable object, and if it does not find one, then creates it."

Shelley’s life was full of contradictions. While condemn ing the institution of marriage, he married twice and sired children through one before marrying her. He was disillusioned by the experience of his first marriage to a girl of sixteen, the beautiful daughter of a tavern-keeper who despite her earlier protestations of everlasting love proved unfaithful to him — as he was to her.Very sadly he concluded that infatuations and pleasures were of short duration. He quoted the Scottish poet Robert Burns:

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seized the flow’r, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow-fall in the river
A moment white, then melts for ever.

The greatly admired Lord Byron was probably his closest friend and confidante in the last years of his life . Their attitude towards women were quite different. Shelley respected them: Byron who had the morals of a randy mountain goat bedded any one who came his way, countesses, and fisherwomen alike with marked preference for the married.

Rearside wisdom

Written behind a Tata Indica in Mumbai: "If at first you don’t succeed, give up — no use being a damn fool!"

Sticker on a Hero Honda: "Where there’s a will, I want to be in it!"

Sticker on a van: "Make love not war — marry, and do both!"

Sign at a marriage bureau office in Mumbai: "The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret!"

An anti-smoking slogan: "It requires only will-power and not "Wills-power in the puff to quit smoking!"

(Contributed by Shashank Shekhar, Mumbai)

Note: Khushwant Singh is away on holiday, there will be no column next week.