While Hollywood has made the odd movie delving into the life of Martian men, contemporary sci-fi has been singularly silent about women from Venus. Unless one takes Rahul Pandey's words that on the sidewalks of Delhi streets, peddlers of porn have over the years sold books which have had a scantily-clad Venus on cover. Pandey vouches for the quality of writing in these books and a wistful smile creases his expressive face every time you mention the women from Venus.
Lets not digress, though. Fact is, on current evidence, we have little information on, or evidence of, women from Venus. Which, of course, frees us to imagine how the Venus women would have been, if they had been -- so to say.
They, the women from Venus, would be bright and intelligent and witty. They would be tall and sinuous, and would move around with a certain languorous grace. They would be white and some dark skinned too. None of them would be from the Indian sub-continent. Oh well, may be a few from Sri Lanka, Sinhalese women, that is, not Tamils.
V-Day is as good a day as any to remember all the lovely women one has ever met. A friend few years ago listed his favourite top ten women. in a rather public forum. In what was a most honest, and uncharacteristically brave, exercise, he had listed his wife at number nine. His mother and a couple of ex girlfriends, even a colleague found places at the top of the list. Needless to say, by the end of the year he was divorced.
My friend insists that it was his wife who prompted him to prepare the list. It took him and us a while to figure out she had been looking for a reason to get a divorce. We all have a list, I guess, and keep it handy for a rainy day.
That friend's wife and some other women one has met are quite, quite manipulative. Women have been manipulative since Eve first conned Adam to bite into that forbidden apple. But what about men?
Sighhhh….
To be honest the less said about them, the better. They are patheic.
Young men who grew up fantasizing about voluptuous “boudis” (if you thought boudibaaji was just a Bengali phenomenon, then you clearly haven’t heard of Mrs. Robinson or haven’t seen The Graduate) are now middle-aged and lusting over younger girls. Life has come a full, sad, circle for them. Ahem, err, us.
For a generation that grew up on love and fresh air, I have to confess that both -- love as well as fresh air -- have become well nigh unrecognizable from our initial encounters with them a lifetime ago.
I can put a date on when fresh air became unavailable. It was when I left my zero-pollution habitat of Andaman and Nicobar islands and moved to Delhi, ironically, in search of a better quality life.
It is more difficult to remember the exact date when one gave up on love. It was the day one gave up passion and settled for an arrangement. Or let practicality sodomize true feelings. Remember the day they said, "This is the time to concentrate on your career, son. If she really loves you she would wait for you.”
But she didn’t, right? She possibly couldn’t have, for she had another set of loving people telling her : “Time you settled down, girl. Look at that guy you are waiting for. If he truly loved you, he would be here, asking for your hand, but he is busy making a career.”
You would think the two sets of parents had rehearsed the whole thing. The bitch of it is, they were naturals. “Ye shaadi hargeez nahi hogi, Madanlal” is not something you have seen or heard just in Bollywood movies. Lot of us have lived through different versions of that one line.
Today fresh air is available in neatly marked cylinders and boxes, for a price, of course. Love too is offered in equally neat packages. Marriage bureaus to new-age gurus offer , nay guarantee, love -- and such incidentals as sex and compatibility -- on a platter.
Looking back at love (more prudent, I am told, than looking forward to it), from its purest teenage form -- when a casual sidewards glance, or an unexpected glimpse of a pair of lovely legs, or on your lucky day the sight of a gorgeous cleavage sent the heart on a tailspin that only the Sensex manages these days – it has come a long way.
College years were the best years of loving and being loved. One agreed with Karen Carpenter and mostly felt on top of the world. You fell in love every Monday morning on the Youth Special to Delhi University. Sometimes she was nameless, other times her face partially, rather tantalisingly, covered by a chunni, on other occasions she smiled at you from the movie screen, but every single time she took your breath away. Now, when that happens, you usually call for an ambulance.
At some point of time the business of love overtook love itself. You couldn’t convey love through those three magical words anymore. Love had to be expressed through an Archies card, enhanced by a treat at the Nirula’s, and best accompanied by the gift of an oversized bear ,called Fluffy. And you would spend disconsolate evenings wondering if you would ever get as close to her as the bear has.
I don't know about others, but Archies combined with Nirula's to deal a body blow to my romantic aspirations. The economics of love transcended, even overpowered the act, the feeling, the phenomenon of LOVE -- that mother of all four-letter words. As love became hostage to the wallet, somehow the fun, and a bit of the good, old fashioned romance went out of the window.
Two decades on, love is being held hostage again, this time by some cultural goons. And I find myself in the unlikely role of the defender of Fluffy. These days men in khaki nikkars and women in pink chaddis are ready to offer their rather varied takes on love. As someone who doesn't wear either (that is, khaki nikkers or pink chaddis), it becomes difficult to take sides sartorially, though politically I have always been opposed to the nikkardharis.
I am an optimist, though. A steadfast believer of love, a believer in love. A keeper of the faith, notwithstanding the prepositions.
I don’t believe the cynics when they say love is dead or that no one bothers about love anymore.
