Book Review: The Odditorium | The Tricksters, Eccentrics, Deviants and Inventors Whose Obsessions Changed the World

Book: The Odditorium: The Tricksters, Eccentrics, Deviants and Inventors Whose Obsessions Changed the World
Author: David Bramwell and Jo Keeling
Publisher: Hachette
256 pages
Rs 599

In January 2014, Arvind Kejriwal played to the gallery when he led an unprecedented dharna, spending a night under the open sky in the bitter winter in the Indian capital's high security area to protest against Delhi police officers' refusal to follow his minister's orders. "Yes, I'm an anarchist," the then newly sworn-in Delhi chief minister had declared. And with that proclamation, Kejriwal sealed a spot in the annals of Indian history as a political deviant.

Kejriwal might've found an admirable fellow politician in Screaming Lord Sutch if the latter was still around. Born David Sutch, the British politician was renowned for losing 40 elections and for advocating bizarre ideas. Sutch unsuccessfully contested against Margaret Thatcher, founded the Go to Blazes Party, coined the slogan 'Vote for insanity, you know it makes sense' and always held a 'victory party' the evening before the election to "avoid disappointment". It is also thanks to Sutch, who in 1963 floated the National Teenage Party, advocating for 18-year-olds to vote, that the UK reduced the legal voting age from 21 to 18 in 1969. But we digress. Kejriwal might find inspiration from the manifesto of Such's Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which states that in the event of any member being elected, he/she would be immediately expelled from the party — for what reason though, we don't know.

The adventurous and amusing life of Screaming Lord Sutch is one among the inane, irreverent and often lonely and troubled lives of 48 personalities documented in The Odditorium: The Tricksters, Eccentrics, Deviants and Inventors Whose Obsessions Changed the World. With inputs from 13 contributors, authors David Bramwell and Jo Keeling have put together a splendid compilation of the so-called 'crazies' from both sides of the Atlantic. Among its pages are pioneers such as Buckminster Fuller, explorers like Alan Watts as well as pranksters like Reginald Bray, a Victorian who mailed himself to himself, and mavericks like Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, who gave birth to the concept of 'readymade' art — a found object not made by the artist but which becomes a work of art because an artist declared it to be so. There's also the absolute wild child Frank Buckland, a zoophaginist, who, motivated by the desire to make meat affordable to the poor, advocated eating all animals and himself served among other things sea slugs and rhinocerous pie.

For all their obsessions — which have undoubtedly shaped the world as we live in it today — these individuals remained on the fringe. Ridiculed and ostracised, their motives and ideas seldom captured the mass imagination. The sketches lay bare the wretched path the lunatic pioneers, the wild explorers and the eccentric philosophers among us must tread.

The Odditorium is a fitting reminder that it takes all kinds to make the world.