‘There’s wickets and not-outs,’ says the first, ‘and I call them as they are.’
‘There’s wickets and not-outs,’ says the second, ‘and I call them as I see them.’
The third umpire settles the argument.
‘There’s wickets and not-outs,’ he says, ‘but they ain’t nothing till I call them.’
47.
Valetudinarian
noun
A PERSON WITH A WEAK OR SICKLY CONSTITUTION, ESPECIALLY ONE WHOSE
CHIEF CONCERN IS HIS OR HER ILL HEALTH
USAGE
With her litany of complaints about aches and pains, my friend’s grandmother was a valetudinarian, though her concerns seemed belied by her robust appearance.
I actually once knew a lady like that, a woman of considerable heft, pink-cheeked vigour and strength of voice, whose only conversation seemed to be about her alarmingly poor health, which was apparent to no one but herself. Everyone humoured her lamentations, thinking them to be reflective of a harmless hypochondria, until, to everyone’s general astonishment, she passed away in her sleep one night without having exhibited the slightest symptom of the maladies she was constantly complaining about.
Indian society seems full of valetudinarians, not least because health is such a popular subject of conversation. Everyone has home remedies to suggest and miracle cures to offer for your slightest affliction, which seems to bring out the self-pity in all of us. We are all amateur doctors, and every bit of medical advice gets a receptive audience, because every one of us is at heart a valetudinarian!
The word itself comes from the Latin valetudinarius, and connotes someone unduly anxious about his health. Sometimes it’s a polite way of saying hypochondriac, and it has a long pedigree: an article in the Gentleman’s Magazine in London in 1787 remarked that: ‘Everyone knows how hard a task it is to cure a valetudinarian.’ (An echo of the lovely Indian proverb that reminds us how hard it is to wake a man who is pretending to sleep.) A valetudinarian is constantly wallowing in the narcissism of his own ill-health.
That can’t be a pleasant place to be. The American polymath and President, Thomas Jefferson, wisely observed, ‘The most uninformed mind, with a healthy body, is happier than the wisest valetudinarian.’
48.
Vigilante
noun
A MEMBER OF A SELF-APPOINTED GROUP OF CITIZENS WHO UNDERTAKE LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIONS WITHOUT LEGAL AUTHORITY, OFTEN INVOLVING PHYSICAL VIOLENCE AGAINST AN ACCUSED OR SUSPECTED LAW-BREAKER
USAGE
The gau-rakshak samitis have constituted themselves into vigilante groups, intercepting and assaulting anyone they suspect to be transporting cattle illegally for slaughter.
Though the word vigilante derives in the first place from the Spanish word for ‘watchman’, by the mid-nineteenth century its usage in American English referred to a ‘member of a vigilance committee’ set up by communities to reinforce policing actions in the Wild West. Both words derive in turn from the Latin vigilantem, meaning ‘watchful, anxious, careful’, as does the English word vigil—to keep vigil is to be watchful and awake for signs of danger or intrusion. Vigilance committees kept informal, if rather rough, law and order going on the expanding US western frontier and in similar places where official authority had not been fully established. A vigilante served such a committee in the belief that he was serving the security interests of his community.
Since law and order has been pretty much formally established everywhere by now, why do vigilantes still exist? Vigilantes often justify themselves, or rationalize their roles, by arguing that too often the formal mechanisms of law enforcement aren’t doing their jobs properly. In their telling, official legal forms of criminal punishment are either insufficient or inefficient. Vigilantes normally see the government as incapable of enforcing the law; in India they often claim the police are either corrupt or not energetic enough to tackle crimes like cow slaughter, so they feel a ‘moral obligation’ to take the law into their own hands. The vigilantes justify what they are doing as fulfilling the wishes of the community, which the police have been either unwilling or unable to do.
As we know all too well from the recent flare-up of vigilantism in northern India, vigilante conduct involves varied degrees of violence. Vigilantes tend to assault their targets both verbally and physically, vandalize their property, and beat or even murder individuals. People accused of crimes that carry high emotional resonance with the vigilantes, especially those involving cow protection or assaults on women, are often punished by vigilantes to general public approval.
There are many problems with vigilantism, the most obvious of which is the denial of an opportunity for a suspect to prove his innocence. The vigilante goes after an accused without any of the niceties of the genuine law-enforcement officer; no rights are read to the target, nor is he given a chance to explain his innocence. Vigilantism has often involved targets being killed or irreversibly damaged on the basis of mistaken identities. People wrongly accused of rape or theft, or of trafficking in children or slaughtering cows, have been the particular target of vigilantism in India since 2014. This is why most people think the actions of the vigilante are often worse than the original crime he claims to be avenging.
Vigilantism strikes the modern mind as wrong and unacceptable, but it is not always frowned upon by the communities on whose behalf it is conducted. Folklore and legend are full of tales of vigilante justice told with great approbation, since in these tales the vigilante challenges the amorality of the official order to redress injustice. When legitimate authority is either weak or tyrannical and the formal apparatus of governance is ethically inadequate, many ask, why shouldn’t a vigilante step in to restore justice? After all, Robin Hood was at bottom a vigilante.
The answer lies, of course, in strengthening the official apparatus of law-enforcement and justice, streamlining and speeding up the judicial system and strengthening the institutions of governance so the public will have their faith in the official system restored—not in giving a free rein to vigilantes to take the law into their own hands, thus shaming us all. Today’s vigilante is no modern Robin Hood, but just a hood robbing us of our dignity and rights.
49.
Whistleblower
noun
SOMEONE WHO REPORTS ILLEGAL, UNETHICAL OR INAPPROPRIATE ACTIVITIES IN AN ORGANIZATION, COMPANY OR GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT
USAGE
The corrupt official denounced the whistleblower as a tattle-tale, a snitch, a squealer, and a stool pigeon, but once the judge had heard the whistleblower’s facts, the official still ended up in jail.
Whistleblower is an evocative word; it immediately conjures up an image of a stern football referee blowing the whistle on some infraction, and that’s precisely what a whistleblower does. He (or she) is a figure of rectitude, someone who has witnessed wrongdoing from the inside and cannot abide it. Whistleblowers are the bane of those who break laws and rules: since most of the crimes they reveal are committed in secret, their testimony is indispensable to uncovering them.
The moral dilemma that confronts a whistleblower is that of his own complicity: as an insider in the organization where he finds a wrong being committed, he has a choice between staying loyal or blowing the whistle. Sometimes whistleblowers have been involved in the wrongs they reveal but reach a point when they cannot take any more. Sometimes their accidental or unauthorized discovery of a crime they were no part of, and of which they disapprove, makes them whistleblowers.
There are few things that can stop a sincerely motivated whistleblower. Governments have the Official Secrets Act or the equivalent which prohibit employees from revealing secret information they may come across in the course of their work. Some companies, especially large corporations, have a non-disparagement clause in their employment contracts to discourage whistleblowing. But these only deter the timid, the intimidated or those with inactive consciences (who tell themselves they need the salary or the job more than the world n
eeds to know about their boss’s illegal activities).
Especially with the passage of whistleblower protection laws in most democracies, including ours, such considerations have rarely prevented whistleblowing. It was a whistleblower, listening in on an official phone call to take notes, who revealed President Trump’s misuse of his power for his personal political ends. An Indian whistleblower revealed the fudging of pharmaceutical research data in Ranbaxy, practically destroying the company.
The phrase is said to have been invented by American civic activist Ralph Nader, but etymologists say it goes back to the nineteenth century and he should only be credited with bringing it into modern popular use. The word was linked to the conduct of US and British police and law enforcement officials in the nineteenth century, who used a whistle to warn a fugitive, alert the public or summon additional police.
The usage of the word has also evolved over time. An 1883 American newspaper story called a policeman who used his whistle to alert citizens about a riot a whistle blower (two words). Eight decades later, the two-word phrase had become a single hyphenated word, whistle-blower. With its popularization by Nader and the American media in the 1960s as a respectable term for people who revealed wrongdoing, it became the compound word whistleblower.
A whistleblower can choose to blow the whistle by revealing information or allegations either internally or externally. Internally, a whistleblower can bring the wrongdoing he discovers to the attention of senior people within the same organization who he believes are not complicit. Sometimes corporations or government departments may have an officer assigned to receive internal whistleblower complaints. Alternatively, a whistleblower can bring allegations to light by contacting an outsider—often the media but also, in government, another official, or if a straightforward crime is involved, police or law enforcement.
Whistleblowing is not a risk-free activity: it can cost you your job, and if your identity is revealed to the accused, result in reprisal actions against you and punitive retaliation: lawsuits, criminal charges, social stigma and job termination are all possible consequences. This would almost certainly be the case in most private companies; in government, a whistleblower is protected by law, but no private company is going to retain an employee, however moral, who has betrayed a confidence and lost his employer’s trust.
From a company’s point of view, whistleblowing is unethical for breaching confidentiality, especially in businesses that handle sensitive client or patient information. This is why most private company employees keep their head down when they discover their employer is breaking the law; at best, if their consciences are affronted, they set about looking for another job. A morally upright whistleblower, therefore, is a rarity, and for that reason must be hailed as a hero.
50.
Xenophobia
noun
FEAR OR HATRED OF ANYTHING OR
ANYONE ALIEN OR FOREIGN
USAGE
It’s difficult to tell if exercises like the National Register of Citizens are motivated by xenophobia or mere politics.
The fear of foreigners is, of course, neither new nor particularly Indian, but the word for it is only a century and a quarter old. It seems to have been coined in the UK in the late nineteenth century—with an 1880 citation from a London newspaper the earliest one etymologists can find—from two Greek roots, xeno- (meaning ‘foreign, strange’) and -phobia (meaning ‘fear’). The adjective formed from it is xenophobic. The modern Greek tourist industry likes to tout that Greeks speak a language that does not differentiate between ‘foreigner’ and ‘guest’, for ‘xenos’ can be used for both those terms.
That first citation contrasts xenophobia with another late-nineteenth-century coinage, xenomania (‘an inordinate attachment to foreign things’), but that word—and the taste it describes—has not had the same staying power as its antonym. The London newspaper I cited earlier dismissed xenophobia as ‘always unintelligent’, but Americans and other Europeans have been somewhat more receptive. The fear of foreigners invading the States was not unreasonable, given that that was how the country was established in the first place. Today, it crops up more in relation to the dislike of immigrants, with the hostility expressed by Trump supporters in the 2016 elections being matched by the xenophobic rhetoric around Brexit in the UK (directed principally at East Europeans flocking in under EU rules) and the invective of Marine Le Pen and other xenophobes in West European politics. Even in India, it is the passions raised by the issue of alleged illegal immigration from Bangladesh that has led to talk of xenophobia, and it is in that context that it is used most commonly these days in India.
Xenophobia is the fear or hatred of that which one perceives as foreign or strange or at minimum unfamiliar. Xenophobia usually involves people in a position of dominance in a society or country reacting with suspicion towards the activities of others, usually minorities, immigrants, outsiders or ‘aliens’ in some sense, whose presence or growth, it is feared, could cause a dilution or loss of national, ethnic or racial identity. Xenophobia gets dangerous when it translates to a desire to eliminate the presence of these outsiders in order to secure the country’s (or dominant group’s) presumed purity.
Xenophobia is not merely prejudice towards foreigners: it can also involve the uncritical exaltation of one’s own culture, in which one exaggerates to an unreal, stereotyped and extreme extent the quality of the culture one is seeking to protect. According to UNESCO, which defines xenophobia as ‘an attitudinal orientation of hostility against non-natives in a given population’, xenophobia and racism often overlap, but this is not necessarily so: the Nazis were xenophobes and racists, as are many of the anti-immigrant politicians in Europe, but Indians who favour citizenship for Bengali Hindus but not Bengali Muslims can hardly be accused of racism, since both groups belong to the same ‘race’ and ethnicity.
History is replete with examples of xenophobia, from the Ancient Greeks denigrating foreigners as ‘barbarians’, to the Chinese feeling the same way about foreigners a millennia and a half later, all the way to President Trump declaring that the US is the greatest country on earth and vowing to keep Muslims out of it. In the contemporary world, xenophobia arises in many societies, and particularly in democracies, when people feel that their rights to benefit from the government’s programmes, welfare benefits and job opportunities are being encroached upon by other people. By declaring these others to be less entitled to the benefits that are your right, the xenophobe provides a basis for discrimination against the outsider.
In the 1990s, xenophobic outbursts were followed by an increase in acts of racist violence in several societies in the world. This rise of xenophobia led UNESCO to theorize about a ‘new racism’ that developed in the post-war era, since racism no longer was based on biological but rather on cultural differences.
Two causes are put forward by theorists to explain the recent resurgence of xenophobic and racist movements. One is the new migration patterns that have developed as an effect of the gradual internationalization of the labour market during the post-colonial era. In the receiving countries, social groups in unfavourable positions in their societies resented newcomers as competitors for jobs and public services. This cultivated a social and political climate that generated xenophobia and racism (defensive reactions against migrants), as well as nationalism (demands that the state provide better protection against foreigners for its own population).
The second cause believed to reinforce xenophobia and racism is the backlash against globalization, which has led states to reduce their social welfare, education and healthcare services in many developed countries. This reduction influenced in particular the segments of the population living on the margins of society. These groups are often in direct competition with migrants for such services and are the main breeding ground for xenophobia and racism. Research has shown that those perceived to be outsiders or foreigners—usually migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, displaced persons and those who cannot pr
ove their nationality—are the main targets of those suffering from economic inequalities and marginalization. Their social decline can be exploited by right-wing political organizations through xenophobic ideologies.
Unfortunately, countering xenophobia requires leadership from the government to resist it by exhortation and by example. But when a government itself is complicit in whipping up xenophobia, a society is forced to call on its own highest values to resist succumbing to it. This is where we in India find ourselves today.
51.
Yogi
noun
A PRACTITIONER OF YOGA, A PERSON WHO IS AN AUTHORITY ON YOGA, HAS PRACTISED YOGA AND ATTAINED A HIGHER LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS
USAGE
The Beatles became devotees of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had translated his knowledge of yogic practices into a new science of ‘Transcendental Meditation’.
The English word yogi comes, of course, from the Hindi ???? (yogi), which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit ?????? (yogin), which descends from the verbal root yuj, coming from ????? (yunakti), to connect. In Hinduism, the god Lord Shiva and his consort, the goddess Parvati, are often depicted as an emblematic yogi–yogini pair. It must be admitted, however, that in the West, the word ‘yogi’ became popular from the cartoon character, Yogi Bear, who was known for conning tourists out of their picnics—a far cry from the Indian yogi’s meditative practices based on profound religious and spiritual training.
Though the earliest evidence of yogis and their spiritual tradition is found in the Kesin hymn 10.136 of the Rig Veda, which is as old a Hindu tradition as it is possible to get, the
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