Porn in the 90's

After several failed attempts to do his homework, young Rakesh finally gave up, yielding to the overwhelming cringing of his heart.. Alone time at home was certainly a rareity..

He turned on the cathode ray tube screen which blinked once before it sprang to life, the tiny red dot of light turning green. A shiver of excitement ran through his spine as he fondled with the little toy in his hand as the two scantily clad people on screen took of their tops, with ferocious expressions on their faces. Their expressions seemed to be merely the tip of the iceberg of the way in which their were about to treat each other. Violent would be an understatement to describe the manner in which they would be handling each other's bodies - ah, the sounds in the background egged them on to go further. Rakesh started at the heavily built man in awe as the camera zoomed towards him - a magnificent body so perfectly maintained, his limbs stiff, tender and elastic at the same time - ones that could endure an unimaginable amount of -.. he stopped abruptly, feeling guilty at having admired this man instead of the person to his left. Before his eyes shifted, he heard his phone bell ring.

Rakesh picked the receiver of the phone beside the screen and left it aside - he didn't want to be disturbed by anyone at this time - certainly not by those pretentiously saintly friends who discouraged him from watching this stuff, for they deemed it as inappropriate, even obscene. Hesitantly, he walked a few steps back and, with some reached the top latch of the door and latched it, while trying hard to not miss a single scene on the screen. He certainly didn't want his parents seeing him doing this - he had been told against it - and while he knew neither would be back before 5:00pm, he had to be sure. He lowered the volume as a beep sound hushed a loud swear word. Rakesh smiled at the sheer pointlessness of the beep, for nearly every viewer of the show was more than familiar with each curse uttered.

The crowd jeered as one man pounced upon the other, lifting him high above his head and performing a "grand slam", as it was called, throwing him down on the ring floor. The latter bounced on the ring floor which seemed like a weak trampoline, while the former catapulted himself onto his body, which, magically seemed to have enormous resilience in terms of bleeding and even sweating - something that sounds far fetched even to cartoons.

With its larger than life (literally) people, with enviable(?) bodies that people would (wouldn't, perhaps?) dream of having, its wide popularity among the young generation, the extravagant melodrama, the large money involved (more a corollary than an independent factor), the obscure connection with films (everyone knows The Rock) and crazy peripherals, WWE (or the earstwhile WWF) was certainly qualified to be honoured with the status in the  90's - the status that porn enjoys today..

Yes, I know that pornography existed in media back then as it has always done, and that the title here is misleading, but I shall stick to it, arguing that the term 'porn' has now been extended to anything that is genuinely attractive (a pleasant surprise to see an obscene word de-obscenized in this fast obscenizing world) that cannot be ignored by someone with at least a little attraction to the topic concerned, I see no reason why I shouldn't go back on the timeline and place the word to something people were crazy about..

This, according to me, was porn in the 90's.. It was, at least, for someone born in the 90's

One step

"What difference can one step make?", I wondered.. A few meagre inches1 perhaps?

But a little observation taught me that a step ahead or behind2 decides whether you are in the train or out of it - a fact that can have the most drastic implications.. The difference between one who has a job and one who doesn't, one who can pay for the ticket and the one who can't, between one who reaches college on time and the one who can't... Life is seldom a nice linear function.. Function definitions in and of life always have discontinuities and are seldom differentiable, with long, and in most cases, several flower brackets in them, not to mention the crazy curves that the equations define..

I guess it's all these flowers and designs that make life so beautiful...

1. Or rather, a small fraction of a metre. I love the SI system and am no American

2. Thank you shock nomenclature

This one's foot you Manipal, my small-steps friend

Perhaps there's a thorn on their seats

The past couple of years - especially the recent few months have seen people, especially women standing up - far too often, I'd say, for what is considered their rights - or, something.

Standing up has become some sort of a fashion statement - well, it certainly is a pretty easy way to get cameras rolling towards you, even if it means embarrassing yourself, and, in several cases, going to the length of heartlessly putting a man behind bars merely to evade marginally idiotic questions from the media - albeit for a day or two, with his name possibly being cleared, but doesn't it remain as a stain on his record throughout his life? Yes, there have been quite a few cases deserving drastic action, but blowing up every tiny remark into a serious case is frustrating to the sane mind. I, for one, see it as an outcome of some people's joblessness. The 'issue' is taken up as serious debates on popular news channels, with people  getting emotional and making statements which will, in turn sprout several more controversies - a chain of news items and a good opportunity for many totally unrelated faces appearing on TV (and some, of course, not being 'available for comment'), if not anything else. And it's a pity most of this happens at the Capital.

A new kind of politically acceptable talk has arisen, with random people appreciating and consoling the limelight girl (oh yeah, I've seen some boys crying about having been raped too, on the internet, legit or not) and giving speeches about bravery. I hesitate to add this, but these are the very people who look at girls in the same provocative manner, passing comments about them amongst each other and doing much more. Yes, there are mad men (and women) out there - cold blooded ones who make me shudder, but this article is not about them.

People have either stopped being sportive and are taking life very seriously, or their masks of politically acceptable crap have stuck to their faces far too long. People love others' problems - even the best news channels in the world - or at least Eurasia (yeah I'm including BBC on the list, for pretending that UK is rape free and graciously coming all the way to India to shoot their "India's Daughter film) crave for TRP ratings, broadcasting people's personal problems and listening to bullshit with serious expressions. A few more examples include programmes like Satyamev Jayate, Solvathellam Unmai (a Tamil show on people's intra-family problems) among others.

With yesterday's cliche (damsel in distress) becoming today's fashion trend, melodrama reaches new peaks almost every other week these days, based on some incident or the other (not to mention, real or cooked up), and someone has to stand up.. for something, so here's me, standing up.. I don't know what for, but I'm going to carry a candle around, organize a protest and speak angrily in front of some camera..

References:

A report

An excellent comeback

The picture is a screenshot from Times Now's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCWtiZCBB6I)

I told you so

And the madness continues..

Even more..

Phew!

Images from: http://www.pink255.com/vogue-fashion-through-the-ages-level-shoe-district/ and http://iameduard.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/white-knight-2.jpg

Flexibility - at what cost?

Patrons of the English language pride themselves in the fact that English is a dynamic language - one that adapts to changes, to the passage of time, borrowing words from several languages and so on.

While this may be the reason for it having survived through the ages and being so popular, going much further than overtaking French as the world's most spoken language, but I feel that this borrowing words business crossed the label, 'far fetched' long ago. What remains to be called English today, seems to me, to be a fat dictionary full of borrowed words, and newly coined ones - neither of which adds to what I'd call beauty. The dictionary has gloated, devouring words from every other language, munching on any cheesy word or usage flinged at it by some random person, and used a couple of times on social media. As an Indian, I'm proud to see that several words from Indian languages have been gladly accepted by English, but even to a guy like me, this is going too far. Vocabulary sounds acceptable, but grammar itself appears transient.

It must be remembered that I speak, here, not as a hater of the language, but as a feeble lover of it (of course, I choose to write my articles in it) craving for its purity. On the pretext of being an accommodative tongue, English seems to have reduced itself into a whore, letting itself be tormented and tread on, by anyone who passes by it. It has been defiled so badly that it is almost impossible to identify a fixed point in time before which the language was pure. Sometimes I find myself reading a classic like Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, just to taste some good English - I'd add Harry Potter to that list too, but books with good English are hard to find these days.

With several 'cool' words being introduced into the language, especially to articulate untellable stages (or types? the description sounds disgusting), redundancy has become rampant in English, pushing it to the point of implications of common words changing drastically. The corruption that plagues young (and old, I guess) minds today reflects in the language too - the paradigm shift that has attacked life itself is reflected in language. Innocence has almost been destroyed - this doesn't mean people know things today - things that they didn't know - I mean that they interpret things differently now. And I would name the language infiltration as one of the causes for this - or at least an effect of it.. Or both.

To substantiate my stance, I will pick an example from this very domain.. Or, rather, a slightly different one. Well, I'll let you decide. I bring in the topic of sex. A simple act of procreation has become the talk of the town, bringing bedrooms to the streets, with people cutting sorry figures, caught between proudly brandishing their carnal desires on one side and being afraid of being thrashed by someone - or the media on the other. That aside, I brought in this topic to showcase what I consider the best example of corrupting innocence. The primary change that took place is the corruption of the term 'love' - a word that implied, well, something different, implies sex when 'made'. Some of these implicit changes can carve permanent images - or rather, forge connections in the brain. After all those talks about mind maps and the like, I'm sure you will have no difficulty in admitting this possibility. Similar words including bed, sleeping, affair, fondling, stroking and many more innocent looking (and, in fact, innocent) words have lewd pseudo-homonyms that come to one's memory so often that many often replace these with relatively less misunderstandable terms. And then there's a class of pathetically misleading words like masturdating (implying a person who goes to a movie or for dinner alone) - honestly, is such a word necessary? Sounds more like a good opportunity to call even singles by choice as losers.

Moving on to other examples, the number of times the word 'like' is accepted in a colloquial sentence tends to infinity, the word 'random' is permissible in any random context and can be used as a random adjective for any random person, punctuation (especially capitalization) is a forgotten concept, 'awesome' is an awesome word that gets awesommer with every 's' and 'm' added, reaching the pinnacle of awesomeness at awesummax, (thankfully, many of these developments haven't crept into written English yet) - and, of course, the internet lingo that stuns language-lovers into oblivion.

Is English going to the dogs? Perhaps that'd be better fate than where it's headed now..

Being a student again..

The vast sheath of clouds that I mistook to be blankness dissipates as I sit down to think of the student life that lies ahead of me, revealing the bright sky beneath- above, rather, clearing my mind of all worries- well, except some trivial ones... A place where men who run the hostel and mess disprove theories of affection, extending motherly care even towards overgrown PG dudes, mistaking then to be children. The mistake is hilarious, and even more so is the attitude of students who, forgetting that they're adults, happily accept all the pampering they receive... It occasionally gets frustrating, especially to a guy who lived alone and fended for himself for nearly two years, but I won't complain... It did get really weird when I went out of the campus one night and had to put up with a security guard's lecture on young boys wandering off at night, turning a deaf ear to my struggle in explaining to him that I was a master's student (all because I said I was a first year)..

For the first time, I felt like an adult..

I'm undergoing a change: words like PG, landing, CFD, analysis, calculation, happiness, fun, discipline, all changing meaning, most of all.. life..

Some sunshine at last

My first few weeks at IIT Bombay - up until yesterday, in fact, have been pretty drenched - and marshy, to say the very least, with rains pouring decidedly at unexpected times, turning the validity of this statement onto itself..

This celestial - or rather, heavenly incontinence has made life hell for Mumbaikars - well, I didn't really go out of the campus much but I'm pretty sure of it. And today, the sun shines exceptionally brightly, lighting up our day, elevating our moods and filling me with untellable joy. The has never felt more welcome before.

I often get laughed at for enjoying the sun, but I've stuck to my liking. There have been similar episodes during my life at Bangalore but this feels like it's the best one ever. Maybe  it's merely a thing of the moment, but I can't contain my joy - so much so, that I'm going to cut this post short, and go out for a nice, long walk, for my skin to get all the vitamin D it wants (vitamin D is absorbed from food only, but in the presence of sunlight, that's all - there's no solar nutrition or anything - or maybe there is..)

A couple of photos for you:

Without naming it

How do birds live their life?
Full, from start to end, without naming it
Out of their egg with nothing but chirps
Ready for a life to live on their own terms

They learn their flight
With science not even slight
They gather their twigs for a nameless nest
Where they rear and rest

Discipline with no clock and nests with no lock
Drinking and bathing in water that they don't call
With ease they face life as no human can
Defeating challenges with their little brains

Perhaps it's all about keeping your mind empty
Not filling it with data and names - of no use can that be
Perhaps this is the way to lead life, sans  names and books
Perhaps we're doing it wrong, trying to define it

------
Note:
I'm no poet and I won't pretend to be one
This came as an emotional thought, and I wrote words as they came
Paying no attention to grammar or even rhyme
I don't call this a poem, definitely not prose -
But it's got to be something and I'll let you decide what that'll be
------
This thought came to me - well, the heading at least, on 18/8/2015, as I was in the Tum-Tum back to my hostel from class at 12:50pm for lunch, I saw two birds (pigeons, I think, might've been crows) bathing in and splashing water at each other in an open drain near Hostel 9. The thought that they didn't know it was called water triggered something in me..
I typed down the words straight on my blog page here as they came.