Tag Archives: the venus flytrap

The Venus Flytrap: Loosen Up And Love The Lungi

When our very own humble lungi made it onto the pages of the acclaimed street fashion photography blog The Sartorialist a few weeks ago, I was thrilled to bits. Cultural misappropriation and decontextualization? Oh pshaw. That Caucasian guy rocked that indigo lungi the way indigo lungis are meant to be rocked: by men with serious balls, metaphorical and otherwise.

Needless to say, I’ve been trying for awhile to get men out of their pants. And into their lungis.

Veshtis are too formal, kilts just trying too hard, regular skirts too evocative of transvestites (and if you’ve been following this column, you’d realise that would mean all amorous hopes will summarily be squashed but we could be BFFs). But the lungi – ah, how I would love to be taken to a fancy dinner by a man masculine enough to wear an indigo lungi with a white button-down shirt.

Of course, this takes quite some coaxing. I once made a guy come to college in a miniskirt (ah, the perks of being a slightly scary chick with a college magazine editorship!). He refused to take his track pants off from under the red wraparound, but not only did he very sportingly attend lectures and go out to lunch and let himself be photographed that way, he loved it. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he’s graduated to the liberating lounge-cum-luxury wear that is the lungi by now.

Then there was Lungi-Man, the superhero who fought cultural imperialism and mental colonization – and thankfully didn’t go commando as he bounded over traffic and tall buildings. Our intrepid crusader was invented for a friend who is quite severely desi-challenged (you know the type). Lungi-Man’s partner was the über-feminist Pavadai-Chatta Girl (yeah, she liked ironic statements). If I ever get tired of writing dysphoric verse and self-indulgent columns, I’ll do a graphic novel starring the two of them. Installment one: it’s laundry day, the wife’s on strike, and Lungi-Man is forced to wear the attire of his archnemesis, Veshtimeister. Things climax with Lungi-Man and Veshtimeister glowering at one other in a showdown, tweaking their own moustaches and striking dramatic poses, while Pavadai-Chatta Girl unties herself from the train tracks in her sheer boredom, then spits paan onto the both of them, staining their garments irreparably.

I guess you could say my lungi fascination started early. Some of the most fun I recall from my childhood was something called “the aeroplane game”, the key components of which are one lungi, one person to wear it, and one very small and easily amused child (two if the lungi-wearer has long legs). My father, in lungi of course, would sit down with his legs up on an adjacent chair. His lungi would fall in such a way as to create a sort of hammock-cradle, in which I could sit and swing around. I always thought I had discovered this by accident until I met a girl in my teens who had played the exact same “aeroplane game”. My guess is it may have been a common thing in Indian households until people started getting paranoid about the perceived ickiness factor of a kid being so close to the family jewels.

Some time last year, it was reported that a UK distributor had put in an order for 11,000 lungis from Kurunjipadi. No news since about what happened or is in store for what could very well be biggest fashion invasion of Europe since jodhpurs. Take heed, men of India! You can pre-empt the fashion capitals of the world starting today.

And trust me, the girls will love it.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

The Venus Flytrap: In The Mood For Nostalgia

I once lived in a house that had only one article of art on its living room walls: a smallish framed poster from Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love. In retrospect, it was almost a mockingly ironic statement for that home, but that’s another story altogether.

It was some years before I finally watched the film myself, and when I did, I appreciated all those things that others have spoken enough of – its simmering sensuality, its restraint and its canonical status as a paean to impossible love are but examples. But I will confess: there was nothing I adored nearly as much as Maggie Cheung’s cheongsams.

When I think of the word “exquisite” I think of Kristin Scott Thomas in The English Patient, her fine hair and features glowing in the desert in that other magnificent story of impossible love. When I think of the word “elegant” I think of Maggie Cheung in that blue cheongsam with the roses, telling the husband of the woman having an affair with her own not to get an apartment where they can meet and, clandestinely, write. From scene to scene, carrying with delicate grace a different cheongsam in each one, she held me transfixed. But the blue one – that’s the one I want.

Although they look nothing alike, in my mind, the cheongsam is like the saree, a garment about which I am passionate. Both are explosively sexy in their sheer subtlety. They burn slow. They smoulder. The cheongsam obscures even the clavicle, but observe Cheung’s voluptuousness of hip as she climbs up and down stairs and try to tell me honestly that it doesn’t mesmerize you more than a cornucopia of cleavage.

Maggie Cheung in In The Mood For Love is like a Shanghainese print advertisement from the 1930’s come to life. I’ve always had a love for those. Like Hindu calendar art, they are astoundingly gorgeous kitsch that few people seem to care about. Beautiful women with little roses in their hair and willow-like grace selling beer, soap and other assorted irrelevances; I wish the artistic value of these ads survived alongside their motives in the modern world.

I don’t think I will ever have a poster of that film on the walls of any house I live in again. But I will have those old prints. And when I do I will think not just of how pretty they are, but of every association they connote: bazaars I wandered in looking longingly at frames, knowing that there were no homes or walls in them that were mine enough then to place them on, people I knew, films I loved. I will dream of China.

We travel to run away. We travel, like Tony Leung in the same film, to whisper our secrets into the souls of buildings and trees and hope they never escape into the lives we return to. And sometimes we cannot travel at all, because the places we yearn for exist only as either memory or mirage, and so we watch.

Perhaps one day I will go to China to find myself a blue cheongsam with roses on it, because you can be anyone you want to be where nobody knows you. I’ll sit in some café deliberately evocative of a bygone Shanghai and think of the incandescence of my friend the poet-countertenor Cyril Wong singing Chinese opera in a small theatre in Jakarta last year. I’ll be as embarrassingly strange and guilty of wanting to possess the exotic as Nat King Cole’s heavily-accented rendition of Quizas Quizas Quizas, yes, but at least I won’t deny the heartbreak beneath wanting any of it in the first place.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

The Venus Flytrap: Surrendering To Serendipities

A dear friend of mine resigned from her job today to be with her toddler – and see where life takes her next.

This is no small step for my freespirited friend, someone widely acknowledged as the blithely charming PR queen of her country, someone who has chased eclipses in Iran, honeymooned in Iceland and worn a dress of orange and blue to her wedding.

“I will honour my promise to you,” she said. “But I will be a humble stay-at-home mum from now on.” She had told me some time before that she was considering taking up an artform, an idea I had applauded. The truth is, other than her beautiful house décor and uncanny ability to pick the perfect present for anyone, I have no idea what her creative talents might be. But what I do know, and what I told her, is this: if she does art, she is an artist. No gallery, committee or critic needs to sanction her – or anyone – as such.

I wanted to be an author since I was seven years old. By my late teens, thanks to a series of serendipities catalyzing around my discovery of the magic of spoken word, I already had some semblance of a cult following. But I kept dreaming of having a book – a book would be evidence. A book would make my writing real.

I had the good sense, however, to not jump at the first fishes that bit. I rejected at least two offers to publish a collection because where they came from didn’t sit well with me: a print-on-demand run by a communist with a fetish for hijab-ed women in high heels, and a representative of a multinational that packages spirituality with pyramid schemes.

When I finally found the combination of people and promises that suited me best, I thought the rest would be quick and easy. Little did I know I had more to learn: three months ago, the funding for the book was abruptly withdrawn.

There was the brief, requisite shock at this bad fortune, but what alarmed me most was my surprising ambivalence. The ground had given away not because I’d lost my long-cherished dream, but because I was forced to acknowledge that it was no longer my dream. Other people wanted to see this book much more than I did – I was more infatuated with the process than the project. “You wanted to be a writer, right?” I asked myself. “Well, you already are. Book or no book.”

But this story doesn’t end with an excuse. When I finally, wholeheartedly, accepted that my book wasn’t going to happen (at least, not the way I wanted it to), the miraculous happened: a new investor showed up. Just like that. I hadn’t looked. I had asked only in the silence of my own heart. Most of all, I hadn’t expected.

And this is what I think holds me in good stead as I prepare to leave familiar waters. Whatever happens to this book, I am what I am. What I wanted in the first place was not fame or wealth. It was to write. I will do just that, and trust that all else will follow. I am humbled by this journey enough to see that I do not control it at all.

In Om Shanti Om, Shah Rukh Khan says that when you want something enough, the whole universe conspires to give it to you. What I’ve found to be truer still is that if you are something enough, if you own and inhabit that skin in a way that doesn’t fixate on its outcome, the universe aligns itself in equally serendipitous ways.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

The Venus Flytrap: Grace In Aliases

I have a friend who has a name so supremely cool that I’m concerned it cannot even be mentioned in this column without incurring royalties. It is Chandrachoodan, which despite meaning something as poetically wimpy as “the one with the moon matted into his hair” sounds like “the one who will have you eviscerated if you take his parking space”. I unfortunately, am a Sharanya. The prettiest name in South India – as all of about 20 million sets of parents seem to have realized, including mine.

However, as only people with access to my legal documents and hardcore stalkers may know, it’s not my real name, in a technical sense. My real first name, my spiffy business-like alter-ego who collects cheques, signs debit card bills and occasionally gets interrogated at immigration, is one that really does live up to my (entirely fictional, my also-fictional lawyer insists I add) reputation of eating men for breakfast. But what follows that secret sobriquet takes the cake: an alias sign. Also known as the @ in an email address. I bamboozle you not. I have a glyph in my legal name.

There are even more interesting reasons to be grateful for my monikers. I got to thinking about this topic because of the excitement over what the new Brangelina twins have been christened: the perfectly sensible names of Knox and Vivienne. Is normal the only remaining fetish in celebrity baby-naming? Not being called Apple or Audio Science might be the last taboo, a curse guaranteed to make you really unpopular in Hollywood playgrounds, and your parents total revolutionaries.

This, therefore, would make my parents incredibly ahead of their time and cool. Which doesn’t exactly compute with data already at available to me, but still.

The great disadvantage of a common name that can be pronounced two ways, however, is that mine inevitably gets pronounced in the way that I don’t like. Without the H. Ironically, one of the names I hate most contains only letter less than my own.

But there’s one specific advantage to so unexceptional an epithet: there’s already a planet that shares it, and I’m not even very famous yet! Minor asteroid 17092 Sharanya was named for an upcoming scientist from Coimbatore. Do you know who else has one of those named for them? Andy Warhol. That makes at least two things that put me in his league: incurable kitschiness and planet co-baptism.

If that doesn’t make me cosmically cool, I don’t know what will.

I could accessorize the planet with a star bought off the Internet, but that’s not extraordinary anymore. And a perfume or clothing range is just too boringly bourgeois, so the unimaginative can keep those options. I’d rather have the quirky stuff.

So among my dreams are to have two seemingly paradoxical things named after me: a cocktail and a hurricane. The second will be an act of god and the first will be simply divine.

In some folklore, such as in the story of Manawee and his twin brides (as retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With The Wolves), knowing the name of something indicates power over it. The truth is this: I considered reverting to my legal name even as recently as last year. And then things beyond my control pushed this name, the name you know me by, into a public sphere. There was little I could do but take possession.

Now I know both my names. And I am powerful in both. To the world at large, I have a common, frequently-mispronounced, everyone-has-a-relative-who’s-a… name. But I plan on owning it like none of the others ever have.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

The Venus Flytrap: Idli And A Screaming Orgasm (or, Spicing Up The Menu)

In preparation for the Olympics this year, the government of China has released a tourist-friendly 170-page book recommending new English names for some 2,000 delicacies – all of which till now go by some baffling monikers. What a pity this menu makeover is – it would be such fun to hang out in China and order, among other things, “chicken with no sexual life”, “husband and wife’s lung slice” and “fat man with straw up nose”.

Food and cheap thrills – what a deadly combo. The only reason I’ve ever asked for a Screaming Orgasm (that’s a drink, by the way) at snooty restaurants is because I love the expression on most waiters’ faces when I tell them what I want to have.

So now that the chicken who can’t score becomes the much less colourful “steamed pullet”, and “Chinese buttermilk” is all that’s left of the chubster snorting his drink, I think it’s time to come up with a few good replacements. What’s world cuisine without tact, political correctness, prudery and the taste-buds of the tame getting lost in translation?

First, let’s take the idli. Ah, the idli! Plump, perfect, pillowy and so very native – no? According to the 7th century writings of Xuang Zang, vessels for steaming came to India via the cooks who accompanied the Hindu kings of Indonesia back here. The idli, therefore, was born of the marriage between Java and the South. Ergo, we have the Chubby Marriage Pillow.

Chubby Marriage Pillows go best with sambar, which is made from toovar dal, also known as pigeon pea. I say we rechristen it Pigeon Pea Broth. As a committed carnivore who rolls many an eye at the prissiness of too many vegetarians I come across, I think the confusion can only mean more for me. Great! Pile on the ghee while you’re at it (also known as Distilled Cow Blood – don’t you good veggos know where dairy products come from?).

Before we move on the meaty stuff, let’s linger a moment on one more chaste item: the ubiquitous khichdi. There’s a story about the king Shivaji, who wandered lost and hungry in the forest one day. Coming upon the hut of an old woman, he asks to be fed, and she gives him some khichdi fresh off the fire. When he burns his fingers attacking the hot, hot dish, the old woman chides him for being like “that impatient king Shivaji”. Not recognizing him, she instructs him to approach the thin outer layers of the khichdi first, which are easier to handle. In learning how to eat this simple meal was how Shivaji was supposed to have learnt a valuable military strategy.

In the centuries since, the good king’s name has been taken in vain, in gain, and in disdain many times over. I don’t have to tell you where it most recently appeared. All I’m saying is, it’s not for nothing that khichdi will henceforth be called “Hot Hot Rajnikanth”.

All this food smut has made me really hungry, so before I absolutely have to go devour something, I’ll make one final recommendation. Like any funky Indian goddess, I’m usually very well-satiated by a good goat sacrifice. And to keep this new menu locally loyal, one of my favourite desi dishes is mutton rogan josh. Let’s be literal, for a change. Mutton is mutton, rogan also means mutton, and josh means mojo. The sum total of which we can take to mean Twin Mutton Mojo. Ooh. Two sets of horny things are always better than one. Bon appetit!

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

The Venus Flytrap: Pride and Prejudice

I’m thrilled by the gay pride parades held earlier this week in Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore. I know it doesn’t matter that Chennai didn’t have one (far as I know, anyway) – legislatively speaking, any successful activism will affect us nationwide. I know there’ll probably be one here next year, if not sooner, and that we’re the stick-in-the-mud city, but we’ll catch up. I know all this, really I do. Still, I’m kind of, just a little, selfishly sad.

You see, I am a faghag. Ever since school, my closest friends have always been gay men. I find these relationships infinitely less complicated than those with women, which are ruined by the deeply-conditioned rivalry that is the cross we bear, and straight men, who get the wrong idea when you call them “honey”. There’s no social situation I adore more than one in which I’m surrounded by boys, all whom are prettier than me, and none of whom will take me home for anything more Broadway karaoke.

So you can imagine how I felt when I moved here. To sum up a rather horrifying realisation: I couldn’t find the gay men. I was a faghag in straight-acting city.

I knew they had to be around. Homosexuality is universal, no matter what conservatives claim. Our ridiculous sex laws and current brand of moralism are, after all, British imports: indigenously, our mores and mythologies are deliciously decadent. Chennai could not possibly be the boring strictly-hetero capital of the world – Tamil Nadu’s recognition of transgender rights was proof enough. But relying exclusively on Gtalk marathons with friends elsewhere to get my fix, sometimes it really did feel like it was.

A couple of months into the relocation, I met a flamboyant producer who had the stereotypes down pat: loud shirt, bitchy repartee, the works. I nearly fainted when he mentioned his wife and three kids.

At one point, I got so desperately perplexed that I went to a gay dating site, just to remind myself that it’s not that they don’t exist, my future friends, they were just in hiding. It was lots of fun for about two minutes, and then the chest area-only profile shots got a little repetitive. All I learned was that you can take the heterosexuality out of the Indian man, but not the Oedipus complex.

Over time, the nature of my conversations and enquiries took more serious tones. It didn’t take a genius to see that my problem was not a lack of gay men – even men who identified as straight divulged to me that they had enjoyed encounters with other men. The sexual aspect in itself was common.

What was not common, however, was the lifestyle I had come to associate with gay men. This was a sobering understanding. How ever these circles and communities came together, there was no room for the faghag. Not only was I out of depth among them, I was also completely superficial.

I am always intrigued by situations that challenge my liberalism, and this lonely experience was enlightening. What I knew of gay culture was homogenous, centred around the arts and pop culture – a fabulous culture, to use the iconic word. But that is not gay reality in Chennai, which is characterized by concealment and subterfuge, not concealer and showtunes.

So rest assured that when the pride parade finally hits the city, I’ll be there in full regalia. Only this time, I’ll keep in mind that the fight for acceptance of diversity can, reasonably enough, include my exclusion. I can’t wait to see what a more open Chennai will look like. Even if it looks like nothing I’ve ever known.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

The Venus Flytrap: Between Bread and Betelnut

I was raised by my Sri Lankan Tamil maternal grandparents, and among my various cultural heirlooms comes that famously recognizable accent. That conversation-stopping, glint-in-the-eye, connotations-stirring, “Yaarlpanam-ah?” accent. The one my mother, in her less matriotic moments, tries to pass for Malayali. That political, poetic, deeply personal dialect that I call my mother tongue.

As fiercely in love as I am with this tongue, I have had to rein it in. Living in Chennai and having to haggle with auto drivers on a daily basis does that to you – do you have any idea how much they charge otherwise? I learnt to imitate the coarser rhythms of Madras Tamil out of the need for defense – like a stereotypical Ceylonese, I keep my allegiances close but my wallet closer still.

Still, it’s an accent that never fails to surprise me. The affirmative om that perks up in place of the ama I’ve conditioned myself to use in India. The fact that I cannot bring myself to use the personal nee when the neenga I am used to is just that much more pleasingly polite, and somehow, to my ears, more intimate. My accent gives me away when I least expect it to, like a blush-inducing pinch that makes sure I don’t forget. Just like how my v’s and w’s mix when I argue in English, any Tamil conversation in which I wholly participate is jazzed up (or if you’ll excuse the blatant exoticism, baila-d up) with my real accent. The one I had before I knew it was an accent.

My accent is too pretty to make fun of, I think. But some of my island-inflected vocabulary isn’t.

When I was 18, I spent half a year living with my local grandmother. Bless her, for she tried her best to take care of this half-and-half foreign-returnee. I think her patience was sorely tested by a few incidents in the kitchen (which is not called quisine here – sigh!), in particular.

I wanted some paan, I told her once, incurring her disdain. Paan, as far as I knew, was bread. Paan, as far as she knew, was betelnut. Not getting the hint, I tried to describe a sandwich. Finally, a wave of clarity broke upon her face and she exclaimed, “You mean roti!”. But roti, as far as I knew, was what’s known here as the Malabar paratha.

Equally flummoxing was when I asked for kochikai (chilli, to the Ceylonese). “What you mean”, someone corrected me, is “mizhagai“. “No”, I insisted. “That’s pepper!”

But the linguistic faux pas that I didn’t stop using until literally months ago is the one that takes the cake.

Grand old Ceylonese ammammas, at least in my experience, greet children by grabbing their chins, sniffing both cheeks, and muttering in rapturous tones, “Enda kunju!” Or (once again, to show you how little I knew), “my little one”. Fancying myself a grand young Ceylonese lady, it’s a term of endearment I also use to embellish my speech.

Imagine my glee and horror when my very irate sister informed me recently that kunju, as far as Indian Tamil is concerned, means penis.

So don’t blame me for my dirty mind. It’s genetic.

I love that my Ceylonese accent gives me away, because years and years from the first home of my childhood in Colombo, not so far away at all from losing my grandparents, it’s one of my dearest possessions. An accent like the surprise of sweet in mango pickle, I wrote in a poem once. So leave me to my broken Tamil and my quaintly scandalous expressions in it. It’s one of the few ways that I know how to love and remember love.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

The Venus Flytrap: Hoping For A Revolution

A friend of mine says you either have a soul, or you don’t. It’s a dispassionate way of looking at compassion, as contradictory and yet as perfectly truthful as when Tori Amos sang, “I believe in peace, bitch”.

Faith in humanity, in the face of the obvious proof that some people really are that irredeemable, is hard to maintain. Real faith, not what we profess at fashionable fund-raisers and through email signatures. Anonymous altruism is the real test – can you send love out into the world, with no expectation of acknowledgement?

Take it a step further. Can you send love out into the world without knowing who its recipient will be?

The love I speak of here is not romantic, but love in the Buddhist sense of metta (loving-kindness). Love that comes from the wish for the wellbeing of the world. Impersonal, all-encompassing benevolence that takes within its stride the fact that to hate and to be hated are inevitable, but that compassion for people beyond their actions is an achievable ideal.

A woman in New York decided to do exactly that earlier this year, initiating what she calls The Hope Revolution. The idea is simple – leave “love notes” in public places. Notes that say kind things to complete strangers, because in the times we live in, a little more thoughtfulness could go a long way.

Imagine it: the discovery, the intrigue and the joy of finding encouragement. Something left on the seat of an auto, or tucked between the pages of a browsing copy of a magazine. Consider the thrill of finding a message that seems almost heaven-sent, written as though it was meant for no one but you, a marker on your personal journey. That reassurance is something we probably don’t get enough of ourselves, and how good it feels to be able to bestow it!

Of course, there is one practical limitation: not everybody can read. So here’s a thought – what if those who can read them are gently nudged about this reality when they stumble on a love note? Whether it’s a reminder about literacy issues (a more basic humanitarian concern than many people realise), or a simple line about taking a moment to be grateful for the opportunity to have the written word in one’s own life, it’s another way of setting into motion the ripple effect of the message itself.

Maybe I do believe too much in the inherent goodness of people, when there’s plenty of contrary evidence around. But is twenty seconds to scribble a line on a napkin and put it back in the stand asking for too much?

I have a theory I hold on to very naively, willfully ignoring the damage I have seen belief in it cause, but here it is: love is a boomerang. You get what you give, sometimes not for years, sometimes seemingly never. But it comes back.

So today I will go out and leave handwritten notes. I will tell someone I have never set eyes on that they are beautiful, and someone whom I may find insufferable that they are on the side of angels, and someone who may have a propensity to hurt me that they have the power to heal the lives of others.

Because sometimes all we need is a little reassurance to grow into that which already sleeps within us like a seed, dormant but alive. And someday, somewhere, at a moment when I need it more than ever, I could find the perfect love note too. The one that seems as though it was written for no one but me.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Great Indian Guilt Trip

I have a proposal (actually, my friend the professional alliterater Deesh Mariwala, alleged by one publication to be the most charming man in Chennai, has a proposal, but I’m the one with the column). As a passionately patriotic poetess, I’ve spent a preposterous period of time pondering the position of the paise. Poor punnery aside, one doesn’t need to know a lot about economics to know that we need to get some foreign inflow into this country pronto.

So here’s the deal: what can we offer tourists that no other place on earth can quite replicate?

Why, the Great Indian Guilt Trip, of course.

The Great Indian Guilt Trip allows tourists an authentic experience. A package tour with customizable options, the price includes full-time residency with a bona fide, certified Indian Family. This is the single unique factor that makes this Trip indelible in the memory of the vacationer.

As an honorary member of an Indian Family, the wide range of experiences one can savour include: wedding, funeral, divorce, runaway hysterical young woman’s elopement, visit by relatives settled abroad, discovery that eldest son has been in the same room as a cigarette, serious illness in the matriarch that has been recurring for twenty years (usually in presence of daughters-in-law) and at least one suicide attempt.

More adventurous travellers can also sample of these experiences: only son coming out as gay, unwed heiress daughter coming out as pregnant and house-arrest of the girl who wants to be in films.

Of course, given that we’re the bunnies who gave the world the Kama Sutra, the Taj Mahal and the overpopulation crisis, we must sate the palates of those looking for romance, masala ish-style. The intrepid female traveller may particularly enjoy the experience of looking in the general direction of a random male and discovering herself to be engaged. Male travellers may like the prospect of liaising with beautiful women who are as free with their tears of remorse over their technical (always regeneratable) virginities as they are with their amorous advances.

In fact, the Great Indian Guilt Trip is so genuine that all passports are confiscated upon entry into The Home. Getting them back is easy. Usually, one only need wait between two and three decades before relatives in positions of authority die. Alternately, the traveller who longs for the truly holistic experience may suitably assimilate themselves into The Family and rise to an authority position themselves. However, it must be noted that most participants are so convinced by the experience that the concept of the passport and its uses is often forgotten by this time.

The Great Indian Guilt Trip is a complete journey. Unlike most packages that unceremoniously dump visitors at the airport, the send-off we give is truly fantastic. As a nation of many customs, we offer the finest farewells, typically in the range of cremation, burial, and being laid to rest at a Tower of Silence. Further options include a last leisurely ride on the Ganges. Most options involve an embarrassment of flowers. All options involve wailing, chest-beating, and professionally penned dialogues. Masochists may also enjoy the sati option.

Some will call the Great Indian Guilt Trip the experience of a lifetime. We, generally, call it life.

Since even dirty old bachelors are no exception in one of our great traditions, that of respecting one’s elders, and since I am about to save the economy of India by spinning off on his idea, some credit is due. So ladies, I have Deesh’s number (and gentlemen, here are my apologies). If you want it, I’ll throw in my entire family as a special bonus. No strings. No guilt. I promise.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: No Love In This Democracy

At their most basic, our survival needs have at least three components: food, shelter and love. The first and second are physical necessities. The third appears almost as a technical error – in no medical book will you find a prescription for causing or curing love. Yet, we know it is possible to die of heartbreak, even literally. It is the alchemy that makes the distinction between a life lived and one that is merely survived.

If Love is God, as some like to say, then it is equally contentious. Whose business is love? If recent reports are anything to go by, it is strictly under the jurisdiction of state and society. Consider two incidents in Tamil Nadu that made headlines in late May. An eloping couple in their 20s were forcibly separated with no less than the intervention of political parties. Two women, both around 40, committed suicide out of shame over their “unnatural” relationship; in an ironic twist, their families chose to cremate them together, giving them in death what was so mercilessly denied them in life.

This preoccupation with telling people how to conduct their most intimate relationships is deeply unhealthy. To enforce discipline on teenagers is one thing. To persecute adults for following their hearts is another, a malaise that reveals deep prejudices against fundamental freedoms. We live in a version of democracy which allows adults to vote for their leaders, but not for their lovers.

Race, age, gender, religion, caste, location, affluence and incompatible horoscopes have served to keep people apart not for their own good, but for the good of a system that refuses to evolve. What disturbs me is how many people continue to adhere to these codes willingly. I see shades of this mental servility even among the most intelligent people I know.

That onlookers fear love is disheartening and challenging; that those in love fear their own love is downright disillusioning.

Those who raise, erroneously, the flags of tradition and culture should consider this 2000 year old poem by Cempulappeyanirar, brought from the Sangam age to our Anglicized ears by the genius of A.K. Ramanujan. Way back in the glory days of Tamil culture, this is what was seen, sung about, surrendered to:

What could my mother be
to yours? What kin is my father
to yours anyway? And how
Did you and I meet ever?
But in love
our hearts have mingled
as red earth and pouring rain.

There, in a nutshell, is all I think I will ever need to know about life, and love. You love who you love. The end.

The most enduring romance I know of is between a beautiful artist in her 30s and someone twice her age, whose son she had gone to school with. When he dies, she does not know whether she will be permitted to go to his funeral. Theirs is a portmanteau love, patched together between countries and children from other marriages and the steadying force that has kept them together through years. It is a relationship that inspires me, one that shows courage. It is a relationship that sees the daggers, feels the fear, and takes the leap anyway.

Not all of us are so lucky as to find the ones who are made for us, cut from the same cloth of the soul. But those who do, do. It’s as simple as that. You love who you love. And the rest be damned, then? But here’s the thing: there is no rest, not really. No social construct, legal diktat or political enemy that cannot be dismantled. As cheesy as it sounds, love is all there is, and the rest is just window dressing.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: At The Mercy of Her Bite

Let me just tell you straight up that I have penis envy. Every Rorschach test you could possibly give me will prove it. Like O’Keefe, like Freud, like – Oh! – Hinduism, I can’t get the nethers off my mind. I discern shapes, nature and various abstractions as phallic or vulval. The latter I find sexy, spiritual, artistic, but complex, unlike the former. The former make me laugh, they make me ogle. The former have me fascinated by their humour, simplicity and ultimate alienness. For a pretty ballsy woman, my lack of supplementary equipment entertains and holds my attention to no end.

There, now that that’s out of the way, feel free to celebrate my complete discrediting from the feminist movement by lighting up, very aptly and traditionally, a cigar.

It was a cigar and a conversation with a male friend surprised by the sight of a woman smoking it that got me thinking about my penis envy and expressions of it. Coming to consider this, it surprised me too how few women take to the cigar. Like all the usual paradoxes of the more tasteful vices, it seems the premise of only sophisticated men and strange women.

From Che to Churchill, bastions of masculinity seem to like sticking big long objects in their mouths and sucking on them. Cigars are sexier, less subtle versions of the sceptres and swords of yore. The underlying motivation is practically kindergarten-level Freud to analyse, but worth the giggle.

Yet it remains risqué for women. Someone suggested it’s the gracelessness of it; essentially, one fellates a cigar. But if that were the case, we wouldn’t eat in public, either. Anything involving the mouth – including speech – is inevitably sensual.

After all, it’s mainly a decorative accessory; cigar-smoking is an art, not an addiction. And what could possibly be more sensual than a woman sitting by herself in a dress too fancy for the bar she’s in, sipping a gin and tonic, wearing shoes to tango in, exhaling from a Cuvee Rouge as she looks you in the eye?

I heard your breath still. See what I mean?

But back to business – do other women not smoke cigars because they do not have penis envy? Or could it be because – let me just throw this wild card in – the idea of a woman controlling a phallic object, having it literally at the mercy of her bite, is too disturbing to the (male) viewer to digest?

It’s important to note, of course, that as far as phalluses being evocative of power go, only the erect ones count. So good girls can eat spaghetti, no matter how long and uncut, without conjuring up any primal images in the onlooker. This is also why the cigarette, too skinny to be of consequence, is invalidated. Penis envy is not sex – on this count, size definitely matters. If it’s not obscene, it’s not an expression.

Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that the rooster-synonym is king. Men have their walking-sticks, their neckties, their Papua New Guinean penis sheaths. As well as their fleshly counterparts. What’s a woman with penis envy to do to take her power back but put a symbol between her teeth? What better way to deal with an object that can’t be owned than to objectify it?

A parting-shot defense of penis envy, then (because while it may be true that I’m a gay man stuck in a woman’s body, I’m thrilled it happens to be this one): war, after all, is just a manifestation of menstrual envy.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Waiting For The Dawn

Last week I went up to my roof and lay on my back to pray to the night sky.

I was praying because I had begun to feel desperate about an unresolved situation. Something I had worked on for years and seemed only weeks from completion had been snatched away without explanation, taking with it something newer and unexpected yet just as painful to lose, leaving me confused and frail of footstep. I prayed for a sign – something that acknowledged the darkness but showed the coming of the light.

I opened my eyes. Immediately, I saw a star falling.

If there’s anything I am, it’s a believer. And to me, there are no coincidences – only the exquisite synchronicities of the universe. I had asked for a sign. And I had gotten it – one that had proved to be auspicious in the past, in my experience.

But after the sign comes the waiting.

Ambrose Bierce wrote that patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue. I have more to add: patience is an expletive involving the person who gave birth to you and the act that produced that birth. You can definitely quote me on that one.

Still, despite a low tolerance level for enduring life as a spectator sport, I have absolute trust in the goodness of the universe. I know this not because I always believed it, but because time and again this has been revealed to be true. My life is either a series of disasters or a series of miracles (and for the juice on that, stay tuned, dig up, or wait for the biopic). These days, I am delighted by the idea that it is both.

Because while I will not forget the traumas, how else can I explain the extraordinary? Showing up in a different country with 37 dollars in my wallet and nowhere to go, but as a result of it having some of the most profound experiences I have known. Meeting by chance someone gifted with the sight who was so impressed by what he saw of my destiny that he gave me a laptop. Being forced to make the choice to sever myself from the only life I knew, but coming out of that farewell happier, luckier, wealthier than I have ever been, fresh from a time when I counted coins just so I could have dinner.

And those are only some of what has happened in a year’s time.

When I think over the events of my life, too dramatic and too convoluted to get into here, I smile inside, knowing that no matter what, I’m still here. Still here looking out for falling stars to put in my pocket, even if all they do is burn up. Because all I want from life is… everything.

Who am I to demand so much and believe myself deserving? And what nerve have I to speak to the sky and treat scientific vagaries as augury?

I don’t have the answers, and perhaps I never really will. But that’s what absolute trust is. It’s being able to wake up each morning after every breakdown, every new bullet to the soul, and not go straight back to bed, unable to face the day. I know this because I have been there. I know this because I am never going back there.

Over and over, I have seen the universe uncover its constellations – all those shimmering patterns we only have to connect to see perhaps not the whole picture, but something beautiful nonetheless.

All I know for sure is that I am still here.

My way is lit by angels. Even when it is too early to speak of them.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: There’s Something About Amy

I can’t remember when or where or how I first came across Amy Winehouse, but she had her hooks in me way back when her success was a cult hit, not the embarrassing phenomenon it is today. It was more than just that smokey, showstopping voice, which would come to win her nearly unanimous acclaim. It was the lyrics. The nonchalance with which she, 19 years old when her first album came out, sang about lovers simply not man enough for her and tramps in f-me pumps had me captivated.

Today, of course, she needs no introduction. With her skin disease, stints in rehab, coked up performances, visa troubles, peculiar dress sense, publicly violent marriage and what seems to be a hell of a knack to get photographed looking like she’s a cross between your worst nightmare and your second worst one, she’s become a sort of running tabloid joke. A woman so obscene not just in the way she looks but the way she lives that no one really knows what to do with her. Heiress flashing her nethers? No. Silicone starlet? No. Spawn of two stars, reality TV wannabe, Disney tween queen gone wrong? “No, no, no”, as Amy herself infamously sang.

She’s in a category all by herself.

Winehouse is conventionally attractive only by a gargantuan stretch of sheer kindness or kinkiness. She neither cleans up pretty nor seems to make the effort to try to. The last epitaph on earth that could wind up on her tombstone would be “media darling”. No, that phrase is for wimps and little marionettes dancing on the strings held by some big machine. Amy Winehouse – or at least, the Amy Winehouse I imagine – would snort at the thought if her nostrils weren’t stuffed already.

In a world positively festering with clones and clichés and pretty puppets galore, Winehouse is a gash, an anomaly, an abomination. It’s what makes her irresistible. It’s what will, ultimately, canonize her good and proper as a Dangerous Woman. An unforgettable one.

Because here, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the few people in the entertainment industry anywhere who are where they are by sheer talent alone. Winehouse, in other words, is a serious artiste. And one in the style of the true greats – a reckless, ruthless, roaring creature. No apologies here, no excuses. No pretending to be anything but who and what she is. We can’t take our eyes off the mess the paparazzi show her to be because we’re just too mesmerized by her music to look away. She’s the siren’s call – and she’s also the shipwreck.

That category she’s in by her lonesome? It’s a category she seems to have created all by herself too, although this is probably just a side-effect of being idiosyncratic and destined to be iconic. And that’s what’s most intriguing about her – in a time of daddy-bought celebrity statuses and pin-up doll factories, this ridiculous, fabulous woman went right ahead and manufactured… herself.

And it’s the kind of self no one else wants to be, not right now anyway. But mark my words – when her birth centenary – which she’s not likely to see, if the track records of the legends before her are anything to go by – rolls around, rest assured there’ll be “Come As Amy” parties (ever been to a “Come as Frida” one?). Beehive hairdos, nasty eyeliner and tequila on tap all round. Not too many entertainers around today are going to leave such legacies. Not too many people, entertainers or not, dare to live life so unapologetically. And for that, I keep my headphones plugged in and raise a decidedly Bacchanalian toast in her honour.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement.