It is said that ‘the economic man and the sensual man are insuppressible’. In other words, human beings must make both love and money, these being unstoppable drives. But whereas we celebrate love in song and poetry, we could never sing a paean to money. For love is associated with glamour, romance, ecstasy; money with greed, avarice, dishonesty. Love is reaching out to another, money is drawing tightly into oneself, with only a stack of banknotes or a pile of gold coins for company. Read more

In one of my short stories in a collection which exuded much fun and hilarity (a marked departure from the usual bleak, melancholy stuff I write) there is the celebrated comedic character of the humsub. Now the humsub, a lecher through and through, is a figure of fun precisely because 1) his lechery is that harmless variety that does not go beyond fantasising about women, peeping at them bathing, attempting to chat them up, etc. 2) he always ends up the loser, that is, he is chased away by the irate bathing women, he falls down from the tree in which he has been hiding and disturbs a nest of angry wasps, he approaches a gorgeous-looking female, she turns out to be male, and he runs for his life, etc. In one of Chaucer’s bawdy tales, the serenaded woman opens the window and empties a urinal over his head. Read more

A healthy person looking upon one worn down by disease, the sighted looking upon one blind from birth, the well-to-do tourist looking at a group of beggars from the window of his air-conditioned tour bus, the happy family man surrounded by his family happening to meet a former classmate who went down the desperate path of high-stakes gambling and is now divorced, bankrupt, miserable—all may be provoked by the sudden humbling realization that without God’s blessings, they would be in that very position. Read more

It was a scientific experiment about the power of touch, the hypothesis being that the physical act of touching—a light friendly touch on the arm or hand that had none of the elements of the invasive, sexual advance—produced a positive reaction and elicited helpful, co-operative behaviour. The experiment was conducted in a busy part of the town, in which two matched groups were instructed to act as ordinary shoppers seeking some information about the time from those coming out of a phone booth, the first group to accompany the request with a slight, friendly touch of the arm, and the second to just make the request with no accompanying action. The results of the experiment showed that a significantly larger number of people responded more readily and in a friendlier manner when they were touched. Read more

The image of the mad woman, with her long tangled hair tumbling over her face like a black veil, parting the veil with both hands to peer out at the world, seeing someone who suddenly stirs the dark tortured depths of memory, erupting into a screaming rage and sinking sharp teeth into his flesh, before she is overcome and led away: I confess that this portrait of poor mad Bertha has gripped my imagination ever since I read Charlotte Bronte’s amazing novel ‘Jane Eyre’ more than fifty years ago. Read more