There is a five year old in my building who has a girlfriend, or so his parents would have you believe. He goes over to the building next to ours to play with a girl who is only a year younger. But instead of letting them be, their parents tease them about it.
I’m not sure if they’d do the same if the boy was 16, and the girl 15. Parental paranoia seems to peak when puberty comes knocking at the door. Gosh, that’s one hell of an alliterative sentence. I hope my editor doesn’t throw it out.
I was chatting with Bollywood actor Swara Bhaskar earlier this week, and she shared a memory from the time she was in Class 12. “I had a boyfriend, if you can call him that,” she said. “We didn’t even hold hands. We used to just sit together, and share lunch.” Apparently, a teacher saw them, and made up a story about how she was sitting in that boy’s lap.
Is there an app to convert academic jargon into layperson lingo? I think it might be a cool business idea
Swara recalled, “I was the one who got all the flak. The boy wasn’t even called to the principal’s office. I made him go but he was sent back.” All the anxiety was thrust on to her shoulders.
Hearing that incident reminded me of a Mumbai school I used to consult with. One of the teachers was so petrified of teenage sexuality that she got mad even at the sight of male and female students casually standing together in the corridors and sharing a few laughs.
A colleague, who was irritated by her behaviour, came and told me, “This is exactly how patriarchy functions — by co-opting female bodies into the project of colonizing other female bodies.”
Is there an app to convert academic jargon into layperson lingo? I think it might be a cool business idea. There are too many PhDs around, and very few who can understand them. Unless, of course, they happen to be like Maya, a friend who has been studying urban development.
When we caught up over a movie last week, she said something during the interval which tickled me so much that my tub of caramel popcorn just tumbled over. “Development is like touching up your make up when your ass is on fire. You think people are looking only at your face but they can see bloody well what you’re all about.”
She was really mad about the fire at the Deonar dumping ground in Mumbai, which was making life miserable for the people living around. The level of pollution had gone up drastically, and there were numerous complaints of folks suffering from respiratory ailments.
“We sit at stupid Starbucks, order a large hot chocolate, and rant on Facebook about people wasting water playing Holi in the streets. It’s as if the cars we drive up and down the Bandra-Worli Sea Link are helping the environment,” she said.
“Spot on. And all our tetra packs, the groundwater used up by cola companies, our air travel — we seem to forget all about it when we become these eco-warriors,” I replied.
“Yes, man. I think check-your-carbon-footprint will be the new check-your-privilege,” she added.
The interval got over. Our conversation had ended. And we drifted back into a world of fantasy. Things were breaking apart in the film. People were crying, and the screen was covered in artificial rain. Who knows how many gallons of water!
***
“No, thank you. I would just like some water,” I said, while Radhika ordered a mojito. She lives in London, and happened to be in Mumbai on a work assignment. A common friend had introduced us over email, so we decided to meet up for lunch.
She had spent a few days in Gujarat before flying into Mumbai, and was quite flummoxed by something that didn’t strike me as strange. I guess one gets used to contradictions, having grown up in India.
“Gujarat is a dry state,” she said, “and the song I could hear all over - in autos and taxis - was ‘Chaar bottle vodka, kaam mera roz ka’. How does that make sense?”
I smiled, and kept quiet. But she wanted me to explain. “You should go to Islamabad, I said. “It’s a dry city, apparently. But sometimes, strange things pop out of brown paper bags when you have numbers of bootleggers. No one drinks, and everyone drinks. More beer than vodka though.”
Chintan Girish Modi is a Mumbai-based writer. That he shares his last name with a Prime Minister is purely a matter of coincidence. He tweets at @chintan_connect
