Sunday ka Funda

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
— Aristotle

What happens if beast and human come together? When I saw this photograph, even before reading the article, I found immense beauty in it. Beauty, not courage, not adventure. We have seen divers, all dressed up and prepared to face sharks. In an older video, Christina gets real close, and the BBC commentary even talks about the sexual attraction, of mimicking a shark, of the shark being in a trance.

There are other questions that can be raised about interfering with nature, courting danger. And what happens were the shark to turn violent? Who is to blame? Would killing the shark that you have been embracing until now be deemed self-defence? Can it, if we rally extend the argument, be a crime of passion?

The article does not have answers. However, it describes the encounter:

At the 22-second mark, one man swims down and grabs the dorsal fin of the lemon shark. After riding it for several seconds, he does something truly shocking. He swings around to the bottom of the shark, gives it a bear hug and hangs on belly to belly. His head is precariously located just below the shark's mouth and he hangs on for several seconds before finally letting it go.

Before you watch this, let me ask Aristotle: Is it solitude when man and beast come together in what could be a spiritual (and a broad sense godly) experience?

Betrayal of beauty?

What Jian saw and committed to

The Chinese man who sued his wife for being 'ugly' and won the case can be seen as a study beyond beauty.

Jian Feng did not know about the lack of pulchritude in his wife. When she delivered an “incredibly ugly” baby, he figured out that this is what she looked like. She had, in fact, undergone several cosmetic surgeries.

It is interesting that he assumed she had cheated on him. This made her confess about her surgeries before marriage, where she spent about $100,000.

This was another form of cheating. It makes one wonder about betrayal. What really does it mean? He says she used false pretense. We are living in times when nips, tucks, implants, botox shots have become commonplace. In fact, if you do not have any of the new fashion “accessories”, you might still be suspect.

He got attracted to what he saw. That was the reality for him. Would he know about other forms of ugliness? These are often revealed when people are forced into situations or because these are suppressed emotions that cannot be surgically altered.

Did his wife lie to him? Did he ask her about her past? Would she have confessed to this? Regarding physical aspects too, there are so many that are not immediately visible – what about depilation, push-up bras, corsets, cosmetics that enhance looks? Needless to say, the standards would apply to men as well.

What if Jian’s wife had met with an accident after marriage? Would that be a betrayal? If he began looking at her with pity and tolerated her, then would he not be betraying her? If she underwent reconstructive surgery, but there were a few changes, would that be betrayal? What happens as she, and he, age?

As for the child, what would happen if the daughter was born cute? There would be no reference to false pretense. Would that diminish the betrayal? Is it then about the real false pretense which in turn is about destiny’s denial?

The court has granted him a substantial amount in damages. The child is a product of both of them. What is his responsibility towards the daughter who is unaware of what transpired? If she revealed to him the big truth about his wife, then should he accept her as the harbinger of news or reject her for being a part of it? Will the mother hate her because it was her looks that brought out her secret in the open?

Aren’t these additions and subtractions to the body a betrayal of the self first? Such betrayals are often choices. If people are expected to change habits and values, then why the chariness about physical traits? 

PS: I don't see any reason to post her 'before' picture. This is what she is now. 

Can you hear me, Mona Lisa?

Mona Lisa waves out?

I am not sure I’d like to have a little chat with Mona Lisa or want her to wave out to me like some movie star. This is not about purity in art but about purity in ways of seeing. Rather than humanising, it becomes robotic.

Beijing’s Alive Gallery is doing just that. It has got a whole series of famous art works that move and talk. The Mona Lisa, for example, answers questions. In a video clip when asked if she was married, she says, yes, and her husband loves her very much. What next? “I just finished chopping onions” and the Chinese wizards will show a few tears? Or, will she explain her smile with an, “Oh, I was stifling a yawn”?

How is this interference in art any different from the Russian woman who hurled a ceramic cup at the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum? Here was real frustration because she had failed to obtain French nationality. Her rejection was what made her hit out at a truly prized work of art. Interestingly, the artist Leonardo da Vinci is not French, nor do any versions mention the model being one.

I see this as a wonderful clash of identities – Russian, French, Italian – and the attempt to be one. The sense of seeking a space. What is more valid? A mute work of art that earns billions of euros? Or a woman escaping a life she does not want?

The painting is behind a bullet-proof screen. How accessible is it, then? For all its peasant appeal, it has indeed become a distant figure of admiration. That was in all probability not the intention. While many works of art are analysed on the basis of skill, historical relevance and the ability to make a statement of sorts, the Mona Lisa – ‘la Gioconda’, the laughing one – has been personalised. The backdrop, her past, her relationship with the artist, her stance, her look, her smile. It is she who has become a benchmark for this sort of ‘seeing’.

She has survived so many interpretations and infringements that she has become A Thing. Of beauty? A joy forever?

Perhaps that Russian woman’s ceramic cup must one day be able to move and talk and speak of its experience at hitting her. Forever and beauty both hurt. Yet, I wouldn’t want her to move for a fraction of a second even to hear an anguished sigh or the swish of silk or wind in her face.

Bringing Mona Lisa 'alive'

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Beauty and the Beast of Consumerism

She exposed pink underwear worn under a short black leather kimono. Japan’s finalist for the Miss Universe, Emiri Miyasaka, caused a bit of a storm in the preliminaries. Is the reaction prudish? I think not.

I am often amused by how these beauty pageant winners are termed ambassadors of nations. We send a young woman from our country after she has won the title at home, she is trained and trimmed and pruned to fit into what is considered international requirements. Requirements for what?

We fall for this standardised idea of beauty, and these days of humaneness and larger concern for social development as well. Do we realise that for many it means altering their identity besides their bodies? What sort of independence is this that the woman becomes a puppet who has to learn to walk and talk in a particular manner? Where is the individuality? And on what grounds do they represent national culture?

The kimono has specific connotations to convey myriad values and nuances. The lady is made to wear a leather one – fine, and I can hear some people call this a feminist statement of power, as though horse or cow hide can make anyone powerful. It would make better sense if she just wore some leather thingie – what is this about pink panties showing through? It isn’t sexy. It does not convey beauty, feminity, class. It is indeed crass and appears more like an ‘oops, I forgot to button up’ moment.

There are bikini rounds where she can wear whatever she wants. There is no need to combine it with a kimono. Geishas wear kimonos and we know what their job is, but there is such subtlety and class in their demeanour.

This brings me to the Indian national dresses that get flaunted at such pageants. The traditional ghagra-choli (long skirt and blouse) have enough scope to show skin but how far can you go? The saree is considered one of the most sensual garments, but some film actresses and models tart it up wearing it so low that you fear it might fall; the graceful pallu (the loose end) instead of resting on the shoulder in a flowing manner is scrunched up like a snake so that the full impact of the washboard gym-toned – if not lipo-sucked – midriff hits you in the face. The cleavage is not a hint of promise, but thrusting of a Size A cup to tell the world you can fit into anything on a ramp where women are merely human mannequins and must draw attention to the clothes and not their bodies. Ironically, they have to abuse their bodies to reach this state of robotic perfection.

These are not ambassadors of our countries but just young women who are out to make it outside. Home is their last refuge. Many have to return and then they need to alter their identities and bodies again. Pump up the breasts, add some bulk to the hips, change your walk, change your talk. They want to be in the movies and Bollywood likes them to look like they can fill up the screen and pre-pubescent fantasies of mama’s boys.

Meanwhile, pageants have a whole lot of money riding on them and the women have to be what cosmetic companies and designers expect.

It is okay as long as it is a person’s choice and they represent themselves. I see no reason for them to be hailed as symbols of their countries.

Miss Nuclear Reactor? What next?

On the eve of International Women’s Day, the Russians are on a mission and I don’t like it one bit.

This is a part of the report:

"Russia’s turning up the heat on nuclear power—it’s on the hunt for Miss Nuclear Reactor 2009.

The online beauty pageant is inviting applications from women in the business of nuclear power, and is out to prove that industry girls don’t just have Dexter’s brains, but are drop-dead gorgeous too.

The girls complain that people wonder if working in the nuclear power industry means they have been mutated in some way by radiation. This, organisers say, only proves that more awareness on the subject needs to be raised in Russia."

I don’t get it. Why are similar standards not applicable to men? Would radiation not affect them? Instead of such a beauty pageant, could the men in the field not be paraded to show that no damage is done and they have not been mutated?

This is utterly demeaning and I find it difficult to believe that women with brains enough to qualify for such professions would be worried sick about their looks. Vanity is, no doubt, a part of the human psyche and men and women display it differently. But this isn’t about vanity, for a vain woman can flash her smile and talk about her achievements.

Everytime I read such reports something really gets to me. I have often talked about my appreciation for aesthetics and how wonderful it is that women do like to do themselves up. I have my own sense of what looks good or not and am not demure about it. However, there is a limit. Looks as a parameter of beauty is one thing, but to be judged by it in the professional sphere quite another.

When a woman is performing a surgery, it is her skill with the scalpel that counts not how flat her abs are; a writer’s use of words and the content of her ideas matter not the way her eyes dreamily droop as she pens them; an astronaut on a space mission has to go through the same rigours as men and it would be stupid to expect her to think about her brand of moisturiser; a sportswoman may bare her legs, but it ought not to be anyone’s concern whether she has depilated them or not. It is another matter that in this arena, endorsements have made sports stars into commodities, the females flashing knickers and cleavage.

That is fine as long as they are not doing so to prove that their work has not in any manner mutated them.

At least not in the manner envisaged. Transformation also translates into growth – a thought that must have been forgotten by those beauty pageant people.

Ahh...men!

Look, this whole metrosexual vs. retrosexual thing is getting boring. Most women do not give a damn what men look like as long as they know what to do with what they have.

Now there was another survey by the British Yorkshire Building Society. Some nuggets from the report in italics:

The fairer sex may have all but abandoned the struggle for equality, for a new survey suggests that most men want a traditional wife and women are often only too happy to oblige.

One moment. Why does a woman playing the traditional role cease to be equal to men who also play their traditional roles? If women prefer these so-called retro men, then aren’t these guys too happy to play that role?

The survey suggested that most women desire “retrosexual” men, who are more hunter gatherer than a “metrosexual” stay-at-home father.

Hunter-gatherer? Someone is going Barbara Cartland on us. I wish these surveys examined the reasons.

“A lot of women used to think they wanted a metrosexual man. But then they realised they were fed up with a man who spent longer in the bathroom than they did,” Tanya Jackson, corporate affairs manager at the building society said. “Many women now feel they actually want a huntergatherer and they will look after their man in return.”

Why is it so difficult to understand that what glossies and ad agencies tell us is manufactured? A man is not a machine (well, working on auto-pilot does not make you a machine). Nor a fad. Men are human (ahem). And women make those choices based on the kind of people they themselves are.

This is not like going to a showroom and picking out retro or metro. And whoever gave these people the idea that the guy who spends a lot of time in the bathroom does not expect to be looked after? And isn’t the job of the hunter-gatherer to hunt, get the stuff and then go grrr…hrrmph? Why would he want to be pampered? Would that not turn him into a metro then?

And isn’t the ‘tweeze my eyebrows and do my facial’ guy getting ready to face the world and go hunting anyway?

We all have our little yes-yes, no-no list…This is mine…

Hawaiian shirts only at the beach.

Clean feet, hands and other things in between.

Not pretty to watch you licking on ice-cream cones.

A stubble only if you have smooth hair.

A beard that does not look like a bush.

Polite in public and private.

Rough when the occasion arises.

White shirt, not white shoes.

Don’t try to work on a sense of humour; men are meant to be funny as a species.

Cook, but don’t make it sound like a Cecil B de Mille production.

Do not assume all women like getting the lingerie you like. Try wearing a G-string and then you’ll know.

Don’t challenge a woman with, “Hah, you don’t have the balls”. She’ll show you what you don’t have.

Just because you read somewhere that women look at butts don’t walk ahead of her. Unless you have something to hide by facing her.

Even if she has initiated something don’t keep mentioning it; it is so déclassé and it also reveals how slow you are.

Flattering her in public might work only if she is insecure, or you are about her.

And finally, don’t ask for directions to her erogenous zones. You aren’t stuck on some highway, are you?

Muaah Mushy?

Miss Pakistan thinks Musharraf is a ‘hunk’

I think this Mahleej Sarkari woman has been set up. It is no secret that I like Pervez Musharraf, but the reigning Miss Pakistan World is sounding a bit batty when she says, “Musharraf is a hunk. He has enough charisma to have young girls going nuts.”

This has made front page news. It is a little-known pageant. The reason is that the newspapers can flash pictures of Ms Sarkari and tell the world that Pakistanis too can lay claims to half-naked women.

Also, to get back to my original point, now that Asif Zardari is being lauded for his ‘statesmanship’ (which means he could be the reign man anytime), this is one more way to ensure that the mullahs run after Musharraf.

The democrats can then talk about how they are in fact the real clean bins and even more qualified to be the Islamic republic’s caretakers.

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On a different note...

Ah... “happy day 15-4-2008” said the subject line…I got this yesterday, the 16th, in the mail by someone I do not know or one who has used a fictitious ID. It had an attachment: My picture that is here on the blog!

Haven’t replied.

What do I say?

Well, a happy day to you, too, but I really do not get it…why would I be happy seeing my own photograph, that too one I end up seeing everyday when I post and everyone else is subjected to?