Wednesday, May 28, 2008

a story

is always very long. only sometimes the story teller makes it look like a short story.
a story can be ten years long, but it still has to be told within a finite space. you cannot afford a Suitable Boy because before you reach page ten, you will run out of words. that is for authors.

this is for me. a dainty little blog, almost like my paramour, extracting the truth from me every time. is she lucky? or does she not care? or does she want me to tell her story? if the blog too becomes a woman, i will soon get confused between her and the woman i was going to tell you about.

it is a once upon a time story and it is about a woman who studied something as obscure as metallurgy in a godforsaken university.

did i say i will finish the story?

inhibited

Some say they have been able to overcome their inhibitions and can do almost anything, while some others are not even ready to discuss their first sexual experience. When a person in Thailand drinks his own pee in order to keep wrinkles off his face, you can call him uninhibited to a great extent. I tried drinking my pee once because that is supposed to be the fountain of youth, but couldn't. I will age, will accept the crows feet, will go for botox if needed, but will not be able to drink my pee.

Just watched Fur. When Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) goes to photograph a colony of nudists, she is initially shocked. She needs some time to get things straight in her mind because she too has to shed her clothes before being given access to the colony. But she manages to do that, eventually. The movie is a little bizarre though, trying to show her journey from being a housewife (household help, almost) to a person who gradually discovers the creative, eccentric self within. Nudism at home is different, being nude publicly is quite a different ball game altogether. Makes me curious to try it out. But I want to be in shape before that. And as the host says . . . "No erections allowed." Should not be a problem.

When a movie like this comes to India (such artisitic movies never make it to India), I wonder how our inhibited censor board will react to it. Will they be shocked out of their wits? Do they even know that nudism dates back to many centuries? Do they even remember it was celebrated right here in India much before the hordes of Huns came plundering? The censor board today want some piece of cloth to cover your assets. But they do allow a lot of flesh peeping out from here and there trying to seduce the last drop of shit from our hungry, desperate, deprived filmgoers. They come out of the theater and rape minors and every single woman they find on the streets, but that is something we are not inhibited about. We don't like nudism.

Imagine the divide between the vegetarians and the meat eaters. The vegetarians by birth (not by choice) as most Indians are, are inhibited people. One colleague mentioned in the office pantry that people who eat pork stink like pigs. I was about to make her sniff my armpit right there, but I didn't. I had finished almost half a kilo of pork the previous night, complete with lard and all. It is the tastiest meat I have ever had.

"Have you had wild boar?" asked Tanvi.
"No, but I think pork is the tastiest meat."
"Then you don't know anything about meat," she quipped before giving me a classic "brb" excuse.

And there are women like that too. Am I inhibited to try wild boar? Never, but again, won't be able to eat a live monkey's brain or human fetuses preserved in formalin.

Dustin Hoffman said this week that although he has lived for about forty years with his current wife, he finds monogamy a tough concept. You cannot be in love with someone like you were in love with her yesterday. It is bound to fade. Some inhibition stops us from discussing polygamy, while the neighbor's spouse remains the mysterious object of fantasy behind the flimsy curtains.

"'Have you?" I asked him, and he logged out of chat. He could fill in the blanks, he said. And yes, I had asked whether he ever slept with anyone. It is prying into someone's private space, some would say, although I think 'I could have helped you get over your inhibition of talking about it by making you come to terms with your own sexuality like Yolande Miller helps Bernard with his gradual sexual awakening in Paradise News.' "

Time for a bath? Unlike Harry Potter in the Goblet of Fire trying to gather the bubble between his legs to cover his modesty, let's stand up and stretch for once.