Did you know that the closing lines of the one of the older versions of Baa Baa Black Sheep went –
Two for the master,
one for the dame,
but none for the little boy
who lives down the lane.
And sometime at the turn of the century, some women suddenly realized something and went “Wait a nimit for 10 minutes” like Raju in MMKR, and decided that the master couldn’t get away with two bags of wool without a fight.
So the gender-equalized and child-considerate version of this rhyme, the one that we are familiar with today, goes
One for the master,
one for the dame,
and one for the little boy
who lives down the lane.
But people had nothing more useful to do since the 1990s, so they decided to invent political correctness. And since “black” has race connotations, some schools in the UK started teaching,
Baa baa rainbow sheep,
have you any wool?
Eh? Rainbow sheep? So would that be – One for the master, one for the trade, one for the fashionable guy, at the gay parade?
The interesting thing of course is that the original rhyme that dates back to the 13th century has no racial connotations. It was intended as a satire on a tax imposed on wool by the king. A third of the wool had to go to the King ( the “Master”), a third to the Church (the “Dame”) and the farmer (the “little boy down the lane”) could keep the last third.
But I am not interested in nursery rhyme trivia and political correctness. What interests me is the fact that there were several versions of this rhyme and each was influenced a little bit by the era in which it was set in.
So how could we derive our own version of this nursery rhyme? Perhaps we could, like the 13th century English folk, hint at our own frustrations with people in high places.
Baa Baa black sheep,
Have you any shame?
No sir, no sir,
it’s part of the game.
One for the minister,
one for his valet,
one for the office boy,
it’s bribes all the way.
Lewis Fry Richardson came up with a scientific take on this popular rhyme during the explosion of scientific breakthroughs in cosmology a century back.
Twinkle twinkle little star,
I hardly wonder what you are,
For by spectroscopic ken,
I know that you are hydrogen
And brilliant physicist George Gamow had this to say when Quasars were discovered,
Twinkle twinkle quasi-star
biggest puzzle from afar
How unlike the other ones
Brighter than a billion suns
So perhaps in our version, we could ask our celebrities to stop hogging the news while farmers still continue to commit suicides in several parts of the country.
Twinkle Twinkle annoying star,
why do I care who you are?
Up above in your flats so high,
Stay out of my news, I bid you good-bye.
Commenters. The floor is yours. Contemporary Indian nursery rhymes, and if they come out well, we could try publishing them like this.
Doing Jalsa & Showing Jilpa 
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