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| For a sacred cause |
I received the most expensive and the most useless book I know of as a new year’s gift: price, Rs 12,500; name of the book, Kama Sutra by Vatsyayan, publisher and donor, Pramod Kapoor of Roli Books. Besides being an expensive old tome, it is also of unmanageable size — the largest coffee-tabler, enclosed in a plywood box. Will it find any buyer? You bet it will. Everything Pramod Kapoor publishes, he does so with an uncanny sixth sense of profitability. I have never known him to lose out on any of his ventures. As Punjabis say, he can milk even an ox (saundha chonna). And this one has a preface by the eminent psychoanalyst, Sudhir Kakkar, to lend it academic respectability.
Kama Sutra is, as I have often repeated, the silliest book on sex that I have ever read. Vatsyayan divides men and women into three animal categories depending on the size of their genitals that in turn determines their appetites for sex. He goes on to list different kinds of bites, scratches and noises women from various parts of the country make when reaching orgasmic ecstacy. The many postures a couple can take during intercourse would baffle a contortionist, and these include one in a bathing pool with the caution that the man should take care that he does not put the woman’s head under water — or he would be copulating with a corpse. How silly can one be! The one thing that the book exposes are the double standards of fundoos like the Shiv Sainiks and Bajrangdalis, who vandalize paintings of M.F. Husain because he depicts Hindu goddesses in the nude, and wreck shops that sell Valentine’s Day cards declaring love. But they have nothing to say about Kama Sutra with the most explicit paintings of couples having sex with each other because they regard it as semi-sacred: it is a sutra.
Too good to be a novel
Some time ago, Suchita Malik came to see me to seek my advice on writing a book. I recall advising her to try her hand writing a novel. She was teaching English in some college, so language would not pose a great problem. “What should the novel be about?” she asked me. I replied, “No matter what your topic, most first novels tend to be auto-biographical, camouflaged as fiction.”
So it has turned out to be. Her Indian Memsahib: The Untold Story of a Bureaucrat’s Wife is her life-story: her giving up a career in journalism to take up a teaching job in the newly set up Department of Journalism in the Maharishi Dayanand University in Rohtak. There she befriends a fellow lecturer, a couple of years her senior. They fall in love. She is an Arya Samaji Punjabi, he a Haryanvi Jat. Love transcends caste and language barriers. They get married. He qualifies for the Indian Police Service and becomes a sahib. She, his devoted memsahib. He is an able and upright administrator and goes up in the service. She is a doting wife and mother. The story could well have ended as fairy stories do: “...and they lived happily ever after.” But there were a few setbacks. He fell out with his political bosses, ever a venal lot, who punished him for being upright by transferring him from one post to another. He ends up in the Central Secretariat in New Delhi, an undistinguished babu among hundreds of babus. His aim in life is to be a joint secretary in some ministry. She rejoins college to earn a doctorate. They have a squabble or two — which married couple does not?
Suchita found a reputable publisher to market her ‘novel’. Tejendra Khanna, Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, officially released her book and had words of praise for it. I was disappointed. She remains a pedagogue and has not been able to shed the tone of a teacher of English. Her descriptions of village life as well as of her one and only romance are clichéd, all the dialogues sound alike. To be a story teller you have to be a bit of a gossip-monger, a nosy mischief-maker with a dash of malice. It may be hard, but not be impossible for one as talented as Suchita.
War clouds
Heavy and hoarse breathing, the
nation seething,
Anger unprecedented, fear, grief
and disgust,
A dreadful legacy — although it was
not the first
The Mumbai carnage was easily the
worst.
So what must be done? Attack
Pakistan, obviously
Walk through Lahore, Peshwar,
Rawalpindi
And hang every jihadi by the
neighbourhood tree
As on your way, you destroy
Pakistani military.
It is shameful to talk of diplomacy,
counsel caution
What consultation? What is the
hesitation?
Go and light up a conflagration
But first confiscate their nuclear
arsenal
And if you cannot, let there be a
holocaust
What if suicide and vast
So, go and jump into the fire
And thus express your noble ire.
(Contributed by Kuldip Salil, Delhi)