Nero sometimes offered what his uncle Caligula considered an amusing but prudent choice. He excused the debt of a courtier and allowed half of his estate to pass unmolested to his children on one condition: the courtier had to promptly commit suicide. The emperor reserved the other half of the estate to his own use. This was how he adopted the practice of whimsical confiscation. He seized the property of wealthy citizens in whom he discovered a flaw of character, an irritating mannerism, or an unwillingness to listen to him play the flute.

There have been whimsical and eccentric men throughout history, but powerful men have set examples. The same Nero built a new palace for himself and stood in front of its gilded columns before he said that at long last he was going to live like a human being. The same Nero also said before he died that what an artist had perished with him. Here is one man who exceeded excess, who suffered from delusions, a megalomaniac humbug, who believed that the world belonged to him.

The 3rd century Roman Emperor Elagabalus once on a whim sent his slaves to collect 1,000 lbs. of cobwebs. When they returned with 10,000 lbs., the emperor boasted that one could understand from that how great was Rome. In modern times, a Viennese artist named Rudolf Schwarzkogler decided to make a modernist artistic statement by amputating, inch by inch, his own penis, while the photographer recorded the process as a work of art.

There is basically a hairline difference between whim and eccentricity as there is between fasting and starvation. It's also like the difference between death and suicide. One is the logical conclusion of life, whereas the other comes as a disruption. Whim is fancy but eccentricity is frenzy, one like a breeze and the other like a storm, both having to do with blowing wind yet each is different in speed and impact.

American journalist Heywood Broun used to say that every conviction begins as a whim. Perhaps it is true that every genius starts as a crank like every straight drive needs a few swerves. We have heard about philosophers, scientists and thinkers who did strange things under intellectual agitation. Archimedes ran naked on the street, when he finally solved the puzzle in his bathtub. Van Gogh chopped off his earlobe in a state of frenzy and Marquis de Sade couldn't be at ease unless he applied his perverse mind to cause pain to women.

US President John F. Kennedy once confided in Russian Premier Aleksei Kosygin during their summit in Nassau that he got headache unless he had sex every day. He is said to have often seduced under-aged girls, something that should shock the daylight out of many Kennedy lovers. Perversion is twilight between whim and eccentricity, where the mind wobbles between compulsion and reflex. A Roman empress named Messalina was endowed with so ravenous a sexual appetite that she was capable of welcoming in a single night every member of the Praetorian Guard.

If we say that whim and eccentricity are compulsive expressions of impulsive behaviours, perversity comes in with a whole range of deviations. Mind it, whims and eccentricities don't have to be irregular behaviours. These could be regular behaviours happening at irregular intervals, less frequent than mannerisms, more frequent than manners. But perversity can be of many frequencies, hourly, daily, monthly and so on. The legend of the werewolves has it that healthy-looking men would transform in the full moon. A perverse man will fancy for his impulses, which would turn into frenzy until he has satisfied it by foul means.

Think of a romantic man who wants to give a rose to a woman. If he wishes to serve the rose in a golden vase, it's a whim. But if he wishes to eat that rose in front of the woman, he is being eccentric. Again perversion is when he will force that woman to hold that rose in her hand, knowing that her grip is on the thorn and she would be bleeding from it.

Taken in their simple terms, whims and eccentricities are perverse when one person's urge for happiness can cause sufferings to another. There can be happy whims and happy eccentricities, but perversion is always a one way traffic. It hurts the victim, while exciting the victimiser, one person's pleasure hunt being nightmare to others. Perversion has its foundation in cruelty. The most ignoble of the Romans showed a rare liking for the taste and sight of blood. They found time in their busy schedule to poison their husbands, banish their wives, and torture their slaves. They drank wine distilled from pearls, dined on peacocks and flamingos, and presented matchless gifts such as so many captive Gauls, Christians, Jews, etc. to the animals in the Colosseum.

One man's whim can be another man's eccentricity, but perversion hurts forever. An indulgence in whims and eccentricities can eventually lead to perversion, because the mind explores new frontiers as the road widens to accommodate more impulses. All the whims and eccentricities of the Roman aristocrats sharpened to perversions, their fleshly titillation and metaphysical phosphorescence, their voracious hunger, insatiable lust and insurmountable cruelty exploding into a psychic disorder where excess became its own nemesis.

Keith Richards, a member of the Rolling Stones wanted to enter the U.S. for concert tours. In order to pass a blood test, he had a physician drain his own heroin-tainted blood from his body and replace it with transfusions from more normal people. Whims, eccentricities and perversions, all expand the course of imagination and people think of the unthinkables, endlessly pushing the horizon.

Perhaps the past societies handled their perversions through Schadenfreud such as public hangings, inquisitions and political persecutions. In the 17th century, Londoners sometimes spent their Sunday afternoons at Bedlam mocking the crippled and the demented. An 18th century London society figure named George Augustus Selwyn had a morbid interest in human suffering, which sent him scurrying over to Paris whenever a good execution was scheduled.

Whims, eccentricities and perversions are outcomes of our needs to release mental waste. Often, these are malfunctions of the mind created by genetic flaws or similar dysfunctions. Often, these are obdurate expressions of oblique propensities, which need to be satisfied like children who wish to go to a park, zoo or museum. The mind needs to breathe, and whims and eccentricities are open space where it goes for an occasional stroll. Perversion is when the mind chokes on that freedom because it has stayed out too long or gone too far.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.