The other day Tabby wrote: 

Dear Daks, 

    Here's a quiz: what does the table below stand for? First one to get the right answer gets a plate of idlis from me! [solution next week] 

Cheers! 
Tabby 
 

       Ingredients 

Dear Dakoos, 

  I am extremely impressed with Tabby. Clearly he has connections in high places. This is the secret CIA list of all the Indian babes that Bill Clinton has had over the years. I recognize some of them from my salad days in Bangalore. Even that sour-mijaaz Nimbu Twak! I had no idea! 

   The Latin names are secret CIA codes. Acorpus Calamus died and went to heaven during her maiden encounter. And what a bloody calamity that was! Balasumodendron was a modern light-weight giggler (hence the Sanskrit Guggulu). For the sake of a certain old friend, I will not mention her family connection with the well-known Balasubramanian tribe. 

    Berberis Aristata liked bery much to eat green berries in bed, and would say "ta ta" when she left to go. Similax was addicted to a certain powerful Canadian laxative from Hoffman La Roche. That was not very good for the sheets sometimes. Hollerhena Antidysentrica, on the other hand, never did anything on the sheets --- or anywhere else, for that matter. She was dead against the notion. But boy was she noisy! Kenneth Starr had to turn down the audio level every time she went in to Bill. 

    Cedrus Deodara had a drinking problem. She'd swallow glass after glass of arrack and exclaim "God, that was good". Hence Devadaru. Ocimum Sanctum was the best. She was always quiet and discreet, and treated it all as a religious experience. Nigella Sativa was not very giving, and always threatened self-immolation. Plumbago Rosea was real pretty (hence Chitram). Her cheeks were always flushed with the color of roses or --- if the proceedings had been particularly strenuous, and the day rather warm --- with the color of plums. 

     Medhika (Trigonella Foenum Graceum) was partial to unhurried and graceful three-way medleys that included longtime foe, Hillary. Muricatus liked to feed muRis to Socks, the Clinton household cat, even as Bill did his thing in the background. Coriandrum was a puzzle that no one ever figured out. Psoraleya Corylifolia (I am sad to say) developed psoriasis in her private foliage. Also, Greek [koryphe] = English [head], but we won't go into that. Lastly, Cuminum Cyminum! Wow! Her I'd rather not comment on. I would like to join Vish in pleading ghairat-e-mehfil on that one. 

    I am surprised that even Vinayak Vibhuti Saraf, who I had always thought of as a shareef and seedha-saadha person, apparently knew some of these ladies. "Garam masaala" he writes! Garaam masaala! Budmaash! No ghairat-e-mehfil from him folks! 

    I know that the curious among you are still wondering about those "mgs". I'm about there. Tabby gave us a big hint with the heading "Proportion" above that column! 

    If you were as familiar with classical Sanskrit poetry as I am, you would know that the upamaas that Sanskrit poets were given to, when describing the female form, were rather extravagant. They don't sit well in foreen language. And they sound a little overdone and overripe, too fruity perhaps I should say, even to the modern native ear. You would never ever, for example, call someone "my moonfaced sweety" today, but chandramukhi was cute in the classical era. You would never compliment a modern missus on her "elephantine walk" (gajagamini) unless you were hell bent on sar-faroshi. But the sanskritized lady would have responded differently to that compliment. She would have been as delighted with that as with a pat on her rump. (Before you raise that question, Bond, I would like to add that I am working under the assumption of a certain preexisting familiarity.) 

   Having thus set the stage, let me go on to explain that in the classical days of yore, in the heartland of Aryavrata, the womanly bosom was often upmaa-ized, with the help of a pair of ghatams --- earthenware pitchers. Hence, Sanskrit [sughata] = Hindi [sughaRa] = English [of pleasing form]. The mahaghatam (briefly mg) was adopted as a standard (but rather generous) metric of this attribute back in the happy days of Harshavardhana. What worries me is a certain overabundance of size 2.65 in Tabby's list. This could be the standard XXL kanchuki-size decreed by Harshavardhana's committee of imperial darzees (you wouldn't call 2.65 a plain "L", would you? Or would you? I mean what size ghatams do we have in mind?). Or it could be an indicator of Billi Boi's erotic preference. I must say though that Bill does not appear to me to be a very fastidious sort of fellow. Certainly not to the extent that would take him all the way in to two dushumlove places on this sort of a spec. But, I could be wrong. 

    Last of all I would like to say Tabby, that surely numbers like 144 mg and 300 mg are typos. No woman could stand up with that sort of a superstructure. She'd be walking on all sixes. Did the CIA have some special braces fabricated with wheels, parachute fabric, nylon rope, and hitch knots? Did they have pulleys suspended from the Oval Office ceiling with counterweights dangling promiscuously on the outside? Zeromebet, I would say. I bet on zero probability for that. 

     Then again, maybe not. 

     My good pal Inderdeep Singh (sadda Inna, very much one of us Dakghar dakoos), once, long ago, told me about something very important and interesting that he had learnt while at Mayo College in Ajmer. He did not say so, but I somehow imagined that he would have liked to add that that was also about all he had learnt during his many years at that fine institution. 

    So here is what Inna learnt at Mayo: There was once a Rajah in Gwalior who was so fat that it was physically impossible for him to dock with any lady. Or with anything else that did or did not resemble a lady, for that matter. So he hired a German engineer to design him a harness that would suspend him from the ceiling, like a rotund Foucault (pun entirely unintended) pendulum, while exposing him in a biologically-viable kind of way. That didn't work out satisfactorily because of problems with inertia, gravity, conservation of linear momentum, precession due to the misalignment of the angular momentum vector with the gravitational potential  vector, Bernoulli principle, slipstream dynamics, nonlinear response to driving functions, turbulence, buffeting, vibration, damping, resonance, creep, elastic fatigue, beam loading, fracture mechanics, crack propagation, shear modulus, vaghera vaghera. The usual fuss and lafDa that Mother Nature likes to make about any noble and ambitious venture on our part. Stern schoolmasters at Mayo labored sedulously to try and inculcate in Inna some appreciation for the physics of the situation. But his heart was clearly given more to the biology of the problem. 

    Having failed this first test of his pendulated ambitions, the Rajah hired a second German engineer to design a second complementary harness for a swinging partner. This was well in keeping with Professor Rosenberger's great American motto that "If less is good, more is better". But this is also something that I expect would multiply every existing degree of freedom by two, and raise the complexity of everything by the fourth power or more, but, wonder of wonders, it worked. Wahe guru for German engineering is what I say. Inna reports that the new coupled-pendulum system did indeed allow the Rajah to accomplish something equivalent to two or three spaceborne dockings (as between the Mir and the Challenger) under the bleary and watchful eye of the German engineering expedition. That was before his efforts finally did him in. Shed a tear in his memory ladies and gentlemen. This was a noble man that died in the pursuit of a great prosthetic cause. Before that happened, however, the Rajah did manage to inseminate one of his lucky Ranees, and the issue of that happy event was also in Inna's class at Mayo. Imagine that! That is what I call a well-rounded education. 

     I shouldn't forget to mention that the Indian Railways named one of its proudest superfast express trains after the lucky mom. The Flying Ranee is what it is called. 

    Actually Inna did learn just one more thing at Mayo. And that was a poem by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan that he would recite, often unprovoked, whenever the situation did, or did not, present itself. This is how it went: "Singhasan hill uthhe. Rajvansho ne bhrikuti taani thi. BooDhe bhaarat me bhi aai phir se nai jawaani thi."

    While this is a noble poem about the first Indian war of independence in 1857, it was a little disconcerting to hear it recited at full throat on a quiet Clayton street that ran alongside the hushed perimeter of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. And recited boisterously at that by a fiercely-mustachioed, thickly-bearded, and magnificently-turbaned gentleman of robust and imposing stature. "Khoob laDi mardaani woh to Jhaansi wali Ranee thi."

   The barber would stick his head out of Ace Hairdressers to find out what the bloody commotion was about. "Rund gire, naramund gire, goron ke poore jhund gire."

    I could only pretend that the crazy bard by my side wasn't quite related to me. 

    Annyway, I think the quiz is dead done. Please mail me those prize idlees by FedEx next-day-air Tabby. And please to not be forgetting the sambharam and the coconut chutney. Things not be tasting usli without such condiment items on the sideline. Vinayak, please coordinate with Tabby. I'd like my pau-bhaji on a different day. Too much good food all at once tends to inflate my personal mg (mid-girth) size. Also that of my better half (who likes a share in everything I sup on). But improvement in her mg size I am not at all minding. Thanks fellas. (Wasn't that a peach! Try a harder one next time Tabs. If you want to keep your idlees home.)