Now, that requires a bit of thought. Is that a polite term for sycophants or as we say in the local lingo, chamchas?

Indeed, they are. There are no two ways about it. Watch them in action in office, as they go slinking up to the boss. "Yes, sir, No sir, whatever you say, sir."

These days there are no gender distinctions, either. You can hear them, "Yes, madam, no, madam," as well. A case in point is the Indian politician J Jayalalitha and her entourage of male Members of Parliament. She tells them to jump and they jump. At her bidding, they pulled down the Union Government and created a nationwide crisis.

These men, however, behave like kings in their home turf. These subservient creatures become Gods in front of their wives. "I am your Swami, your lord and master and you shall do my bidding."

They expect their wives to fetch and carry, wait upon them and, to say the least, jump into bed at their command.

Indian men as a matter of fact have developed it to high art. You tell them there might be such as a thing as working your way up the professional ladder. Indeed? You can almost hear them asking silently. Thank you, but but no, thank you. Being a flunkey is a much more preferable occupation. There is, perhaps, no greater pleasure in the Indian male psyche, than prostrating before his superior and carrying it to ludicrous lengths.

If his boss yells and shouts at him, it is like receiving the blessing of God. "Ah, the boss actually yelled at me. He took notice of me. Today is indeed a lucky day," is what the average Indian flunkey thinks. It gets him on a high. He is on the seventh heaven. He experiences a pleasure higher than love-making. If a boss does not see his chamcha lurking strategically in the corridors of the office, he no doubt feels lost. He probably pines for the lap dog, wondering, "Where is the irritating, subservient idiot who has the sole capacity to make me feel like the King, of kings."

Without his entourage of flunkies, a boss is an incomplete soul. He flounders. The flunkey is so much an intrinsic part of him. As a matter of fact, our political elite gives flunkiedom its legitimacy.

It is unlikely that a politician ever walks alone. He or she walks with a wall of flunkies on either side with a photographer trailing behind trying to capture forever on candid camera the "flunking flunkies".

C Jayanthi is with The Times of India

2) The second kind of flunkey is you. You like to keep it with your gal like the way Kenny Rogers describes it, "somewhere between lovers and friends." The trouble is that you are by birth a half-castrated Hindu, and you start off being a very decent Amol Palekar kind of boyfriend but are unable to make the switch. Something inside you screams like a burglar alarm, "cheee, cheee, cheee, the moment it's time to cross the threshold. If touching is divine, undressing is horrifying, and fucking…well that's straightaway dispatched aeons away into that Pentium disk called the subconscious. So, you play a typically flunkey power game: you touch your gal just to see whether she pulsates with desire, but she better not act up in turn. First, she loves you as a woman would for your innate decency, but your dark inadequacies get on her nerves. She kicks you for another, while you fawn on her and convert her into a part-mother, part-vamp figure. All that remains of the affair is a hidden photograph in your purse, while you are avidly preparing to rupture the hymen of a ghungat-clad woman whose face you've yet to see. As Vilas Sarang says in one of his short stories, to most Indian men, women come in two neatly divided halves, upper torso and lower torso. If you are the upper torso type, there are others who are lower-torso types. Both have one trait in common-of being irredeemable flunkeys who cannot get the whole picture right.

A Srinivas is with Meantime magazine

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