Tightened Lips

              After anti-ageing, vagina whitening, now its vaginal tightening, apparently to make women feel younger, 18 precisely, the state approved age for women to marry and to start having sex. If it's women and related to sex, it has to be post-marital,of course (take a look at the ad and other ads of condoms and such other products). If you didn't get the connection then refer to the book of 'Indian Culture', often quoted by our hon'ble ministers, hon'ble police, hon'ble judges, hon'ble goons, hon'ble rapists, hon'ble child molesters etc.

            Being a woman, and not 18 anymore, I dont see how vaginal tightening is going to make me feel younger (not that I want to), clearly I don't view myself as an entertainment package to please the menfolk. 

            Dear Indian man, to put it bluntly, if you want your wife to remain 'youthful' then just stop knocking her up so many times, help her in the household chores, share her burden of domestic duties, and most importantly treat her as an equal partner. And in case you too want to feel like a virgin, wait for the erection enhancement gel, '21 again' perhaps? 

             Or 18? There is the debate, for the state approved age for men to have sexual freedom is 18, however they are allowed to marry only at 21. In this case, the state allows and recognises the possibility of the existence of a concept like 'premarital sex' in the life of Indian man.

              

            (Are women not allowed to have sex before marriage in India? Well, yes and no. Legally they are. But then again, refer to the damned book, will you!)

              And dear Indian woman, your vagina is very important, and your vagina is furious with indignation and it's time you should be, too. Be outraged, be miserable please, pity yourself if you must, but stop deluding yourself.

Old Cocktail in a New Bottle

              In these times of great crises, when Indian women are openly visiting pubs, demanding the rights to their own bodies, refusing to be commodified, challenging the structures of patriarchy in the most unholy way, and most dangerously, forming their own opinions and shamelessly asserting those, in tough times as these, bollywood gifts us a film like Cocktail (not an imitation of the 1988 Tom Cruise blockbuster)- right on time. Directed by Homi Adajania, and starring Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone and debutante Diana Penty, Cocktail is the film of the moment. (Trivia: Homi Adajania is also the same dude who directed a film called 'Being Cyrus' in 2005.) To all those Indian women who have gone astray, I urge you to watch Cocktail, and you shall be blessed with the knowledge, that if you wear short clothes and are in the habit of visiting nightclubs, and drinking alcohol, you may be regarded as 'cool' or 'hot' interchangeably, and have all heterosexual males jump at the prospect of rubbing against you on the dance floor, but you stand very little or no chance of finding a suitor. The ones, who are not particularly keen on finding an eligible bachelor, drink on ladies.
                  To the guardians of morality, be not outraged by the title or the trailer of the film- it is a film that truly lives up to our Indian culture and traditions (read: Hindu traditions). It murders the individuality of its only woman character who did not suffer from identity crisis(initially) (the only character too), who was not a stereotyped bimbo, who didn't kill the audience with sicko one-liners, and who said the lone funny line in the film, righteously so!
                  Deepika Padukone plays the ubercool Veronica who along with sexy long legs, has a big heart too- she lets the petite beauty Meera (Diana Penty) move in with her in her apartment after knowing her for five (?) minutes in a public toilet. Also she doesn't like wearing pants indoors, even if its around our drooling perv-like hero Gautam (Saif Ali Khan) to the horror of Meera. So the first half is spent giving culture shocks to our desi kudi while pervy Gautam (Saif Ali Khan) delivers the trashiest one liners possible second only to Agent Vinod (Saif Ali Khan).
                  When I first watched the trailer of Cocktail, I encouraged the idea of it possibly having a bisexual or lesbian angle to it, knowing fully well that it was Bollywoody Khan film which hires models as actors and has a Punjabi song in its trailer. I even went to extent of imagining that it was perhaps a bad copy of Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, considering the number of script and copyright purchasing that is happening these days in Bollywood. But certain things remain an impossibility and it will continue to be so- capturing Don, Karan Johar finally mastering the art of direction, Uday Chopra as a successful hero, and bollywood churning out a star-studded yet sensible entertainer.
                    As tradition documents, when everything goes right in the hero's life, in other word's when there is a clear lack of story, the lad's mother shows up, adding more to the heroin's misery than his own. Here, Dimple Capadia (I was glad to not find Kiron Kher) drops out of nowhere and a puzzled Gautam declares that Meera is his girlfriend- an obvious choice given her desi profile, which normally, should terribly wound the other girl's ego but here she chooses to make changes to gain acceptance from the in-laws. 
                    So as predicted desi beauty Meera finally falls for the lame one liners of Gautam (which happens only in hindi films-do not ever try that on a woman) and Kiss happens after a Pritam song. Gautam who had always eyed Meera from the beginning (the kind of eyeing that your mother will warn you against) is all giddy with true lou happening. In the meanwhile Veronica has undergone a complete metamorphosis (a hint of possible bipolarity) and to impress Gautam's mother (Dimple Kapadia who is of the same age as Saif) starts wearing salwar suits- she even makes a desperate attempt in which she asks Gautam, main aise kapde pehnungi to teri maa mujhe accept karegi? and is treated with complete indifference from Gautam, which is enough to earn him a hard punch across his face.
                  To add to the audience's suffering, heartbreak happens soon, and Veronica deals with it, exactly in a manner a self-respecting independent woman would handle it. She goes on a drunken clubbing spree- YaY! Only this time on a more self-destructive note. Meera, as her profile suggests, makes the great sacrifice, and moves away from Veronica and Gautam. To some relief, Gautam no longer delivers his signature one liners as love has changed him. Veronica soon realises that Gautam and Meera are meant to be together and resolves to bring them together while dealing with her hangovers. 
                  Happy ending takes over uniting Gautam and Meera and Veronica and her bottle. Moral of the story: you can either choose to be a doormat or step on one. Option one gets you the Man.

On the Idiosyncrasies of the Central Board of Film Certification

Gone are those days when precocious Indian kids and adolescents awaited the 11 pm movie on HBO, with eyes glued to the screen and fingers fixed on the remote, to embark on their fantastical trips to the allure of the forbidden pleasures. Today the horny teenager has bit torrent, red tube, persian kitties (or titties?), literotica and the likes at his/her disposal. The 12 year olds don't need Samuel L. Jackson to teach them the 'f' word- or the other popular American slang lingo. They have Facebook, for fuck's sake! They weren't born in the eighties and nineties, when Tom Cruise was the iconic bad boy with the sexy RayBan shades and American Pie was crucial to sex education.

          I don't mean to beat about the bush. I'm not critical of popular culture. Yesterday, having nothing to do due to the heavy downpour in Calcutta, I was trying to watch The Social Network on TV. The film aired for the first time on TV, with all of the 'profanities' removed/muted. Earlier the 'f' words  were either replaced by a 'beep' and/or a less 'obscene' 'fish' in the subtitles, while 'shit' was replaced by 'crap', 'asshole' by 'jerk' etc. and the late night films were telecast sans any editing. Now, not only is every colloquial word omitted from the dialogues with a '****' in the subtitles, each lip lock is brutally chopped out off the films with the display of a certificate from the Central Board of Film Certification in the beginning of the films.

           In Fincher's film, Mark Zuckerberg played by Jesse Eisenberg, receives a note from one of his infuriated female classmates, which says "you dick"; on my TV screen, Eisenberg's character receives a blank note displaying nothing. Now isn't it insanely stupid to assume that there was a certain something in that note which compelled the protagonist to leave his class, and accept (as suggested) that we, the audiences, are not matured enough to be exposed to such inappropriate language? That, there, completely screwed up what would've been a delightful cinematic experience. What is Pretty Woman without a luscious Julia Roberts in her pantyhose trying to seduce an amused Richard Gere or Basic Instinct without Sharon Stone getting an entire team of investigators drooling! Will Planet Terror be the same film with all the blood and gore erased? Let me rephrase, will it still be a film? This is not entertainment. This is Doordarshan in HD. If this epic stupidity continues, then recent films like Love and Other Drugs would be left grossly butchered with about 60 minutes of the film edited during their Indian television Premiere.

             The Censor Board isn't convincing in its actions all the more, with the rampant run of the titillating B-Grade films in shabby theatres of squalid shanties and several video parlours of suburban neighbourhoods. This renders the purpose of the Censor obscure, as to whether it is trying to inculcate certain moral values in the new generation (whichever generation that is)- may be they thought ‘oh whadda hell, one in every five people in India tends to be didactic so why not us! If the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting arbitrarily blocks AXN at the drop of a hat and makes MTV run an uncool apology in its own Tickr for a month, we have a perfect right to monitor and restrict the English movie channels, which are watched by a bunch of wasted Indian youth who never step in the polling booths in their lifetime!’ Or perhaps the scissoring is a decision unanimously concurred on, by the kingpins of politicking in the greatest democracy of the world over a bottle of Bislery. All goes well in the great Indian kitchen as long as Tulsi gets to keep her three husbands and twelve children- all illegitimate.