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ShareMumbai: What's the worst thing that can happen to democracy? The middle finger! It's ironical that the world's largest democracy showed its middle finger to the Lok Sabha elections. On April 30 this year, the middle finger officially got some respectability after years of being a gesture of insult.
Nobody is quite sure when and how the middle finger attained notoriety. But its origins can be traced back to the good old days when the Romans used to call it Digitus Impudicus - or Impudent Finger, for those not as well versed in phoren languages as me! Interestingly, the middle finger was how a man used to communicate his desire for sex with a woman in the ancient era. Somewhere along the way, the gesture got lost in translation and resurfaced as an insult that vaguely meant the same thing. In fact, it is widely believed that when Brutus stabbed Caesar in the back, the dying emperor showed him the middle finger and said, "**** you, Brutus!"
There is also a section of historians who prefer to believe a rather less obscene version that traces back to the 100 Years War (1337-1453) where the French used to cut off the middle finger of English archers so that they couldn't use their bows. But after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the victorious English soldiers showed their intact middle finger to the French. The French retaliated by building the Eiffel Tower.
The first person to use the middle finger in space was Buzz Aldrin when Neil Armstrong tricked him into agreeing to toss a coin on deciding who should be the first man to step on the moon. While Aldrin watched the coin float in zero gravity, Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module and into history.
Back home, Greg Chappell caused a riot four years ago in Kolkata when he showed his middle finger to cricket fans at Eden Gardens. Later Chappell clarified that his middle finger had been injured and hence the unintentional gesture. What he didn't tell anybody was that his digitus impudicus was injured by Ganguly who'd twisted it when the former coach pointed the same at him earlier at the team meeting.
But this year the middle finger became a gesture of people's faltering faith in a democratic system with far too many political parties and prime ministerial candidates but not one desi Barack Obama.
