The Brave Pedestrian

We are, all of us, two people in one. Part of us deeply believes in social order, world peace, universal happiness, inner purity, karva chauth, 8% GDP growth, India Shining, no chuddies showing, awkward bulges concealed… you know, that sort of thing, which is so important for maintaining law-and-order in everyday life. Coincidentally, this is the part of us that we share with our parents and our children… especially our children. Because there is an invisible yet immutable law that we all obey: In the eyes of the children, thou shalt be squeaky-clean, sexless beings. And this brings on us a great pressure to conform – even more than the pressures of parental expectations of decency, which we all feel free to violate at some time or the other. (The ultimate nightmare of the young couple is not that mother-in-law or father-in-law will open the bedroom door at the wrong moment; it is that little Chintu will wake up one morning and ask, “Mummy, what was papa doing with his susoo ...

March 8, 2007, Mumbai: Everyday, when my son goes to school, after a few quick games of stone-paper-scissor with me while we wait together at his school bus, I find myself saying, “Enjoy yourself! Have fun!” rather than “Take care.”  I grew up hearing my folks saying, “Take care” in several different ways. I don’t remember ever hearing them say, “Enjoy yourself” to me, or to each other, when we went out. Methinks these are signs of the changing times. Looking around on the iLand, and chatting with my iLand friends, I find that happily married people — both men and women — are now looking for intimate friends of the opposite sex, and seeking to somehow infuse fresh colours in their happy but monotonous lives. Through their poems and musings, I hear them saying,   “There must be more to life than being normal and settled, and bringing up the children. I want that now… and even at the risk of being thought of as a ‘bad-character’.” Increasing...