On Pornography in General

[This topic has been written in a moment of epiphany by the author as he struggles with porn-starved existence for the past fortnight. It’s always the ubiquitous stuff; we miss and need the most.]

A man is the sum of his experiences. A woman must also be, but I am deliberately being sexist as the topic might be slightly misogynist. Well there is one experience which I am curious of the role it has to play in the building up of character and psyche of every man. It has a ubiquitous presence in most of our lives but I wish to delve a bit deeper and strip some of the outer layers which have been socially and morally conditioned and get into the visceral raw selves. I am talking about pornography.

As puberty strikes in and suddenly your eyes are not the same anymore, one begins to be a bit more enterprising and inquisitive about our physical and mental needs. I wish I could accurately pin-point the day when I was acutely aware that girls had developed breasts and then go back in time and experience the joy that nubile discovery. I think that was the most decisive moment of our life-The discovery of one’s sexuality. Now you can be all sacrosanct and high-brow now, but the truth remains that almost half of the adult conversations we have had have dealt with girls, sex and porn.

The role of pornography in our lives is undeniably made even more indispensable with the sexually repressed society that we live in. This is a society where we have grown up with the image of sex as two flowers touching each other, the lights going off or bees humming and the rest of that crap. For a long time I believed that if you tear of the arms of a woman’s blouse it is termed as rape. With this pedigree, the discovery of porn in my early teens was like serendipity, as I assume it must have been for the rest of you. People, who disagree, and I have the misfortune of knowing some please consult your doctors.

But the illicit pleasure of watching porn in its various titillating forms brings a warm glow to my heart. Who can forget those days of criminally high priced internet parlors, the drooling over desibaba, worldsex and hundreds of other sites? Things that seem onerous and obsolete now, like sex stories or browsing for porn used to be like drops of nectar in those halcyon days. Our travails continued in the same fashion till we entered engineering. Till then porn or BP was associated with sneakiness, a forbidden private pleasure with generous dollops of adolescent shame and guilt.

With engineering or better still with the advent of LAN came the new age of porn. Because the primitive days of LAN-less Hall-3 if you guys can remember used to thrive on miniscule mobile videos, stashes of cheap, bawdy sex magazines and a host of filthy porn on some scattered PCs. Then came LAN and changed the playing rules. With the inhibition of discussing the role of porn and jacking off having disappeared due to shared living space, the definition of porn had been altered forever.

With Naughty America, Vivid Entertainment to the fore, we were suddenly exposed to a completely new world of entertainment. While some broadcasted their love of this new phenomenon by indiscriminately stocking their PCs with whatever they could find, there were also the diffident folk who resorted to hiding their stockpile in some remote corner of their PCs. But while the earlier elusiveness of porn had made its worth its weight in gold, with the passage in time, porn got mundane with people honing their tastes and specializing in stuff such as MMS clips, BDSM, Hentai, Inter-racial, 2X et al. The hunger for porn was best demonstrated after a spate of long holidays when a majority of the populace, including some of the porn kings had to empty their closets before donning their veneers for home.

While most of us have crossed the threshold into a more civilized way of life, and wouldn’t admit to our inglorious past selves, I certainly hope that we give pornography the due place it deserves in our hearts and more importantly our loins. Two Parthian shots before I make a disgraceful exit;

1. Does porn hold the same place in the hearts of committed folk as it does in the case of the single junta?

2. Is the stand of this post correct with regards to women-as in porn is extensively limited to the depraved males. If any free thinking female out there desists, you are more than welcome to express your opinion. (Private opinions would be given preference.)

A Week at the Anti-Christ's

I hate kids. I hate them emphatically. Not to sound cool or to make any kind of statement. I just hate them. I am ready to go to arms against the people who melt into raptures when they see kids. I don’t care if they are cute, are innocent or say stupid things in a cho chweet voice. I hate being pestered by their questions, I hate laughing at every mundane thing they do and I hate being told that the kids these days are smarter than us. Anyways let me come back to my topic and tell you about the Devil Reincarnate that I have been living with.

He is my youngest cousin, four years old and unfortunately I share my birthday with him. He is Satan’s emissary. Five minutes with him and you would prefer hell to earth. After my arrival at my uncle’s house, it took him minutes to realize that his latest victim was in his presence. A mere second later I had been pinned down by this pint sized person who was sitting on my neck and all the while I had to smile and remark how strong he was. Then I watched the travails of my aunt as she tried to follow him all over the house trying to force food into his mouth. She finally succeeded after two hours when he found out that the inside of the washing machine is a good substitute for the dining table.

He likes waking me up in the morning by jumping on me, blowing in my ears or pulling the pillow from under my head, whichever catches his fancy. By the time I sit down with the newspaper, and he has succeeded in making my aunt and granny run a marathon for his breakfast, he comes over to make my morning miserable. He takes a devious delight in shredding the sports column to shreds right when I am in raptures over Sachin or the Commonwealth Games. He scribbles nonsense over the Crossword and Sudoku just when I am stuck in a tricky position. Shooting darts at my face is his latest contravention.

He also has a special antipathy to any other channel other than Pogo or Nickelodeon. I swear I will have those two channels cut out when I have my own place. The imp can raise the dead with his screams and cries and he holds the whole family at ransom due to his impressive bawling capacity. When I had just made myself comfortable with my copy of I, Claudius, he promptly tore off the cover page causing me to stop reading there and then, which even my parents haven’t been able to in the last two decades. His favorite way of baiting me is to turn off the power when I am on my lappy, or pressing all the keys at once or spitting on the keyboard. When he is doing none of this he is hanging from my shoulder, or pulling my hair or pulling down my trousers. He can give Macaulay Culkin of Home Alone fame a run for his money any day, I swear.

And trust me I am trying. I spent three agonizing hours building a house from Lego bricks which he smashed into bits because he wanted another design. I have lost in mock alphabet and letter writing contests to him. I have got bitten and spit upon and been made a Bull’s eye for his shooting prowess. I just can’t wait till his school reopens on Monday and I will be rid of him for at least six hours a day. And now I must stop cause he has lost interest in the fire-truck I got him and is making faces at me, which I am sure does not bode good news.