The Jesustan Diaries

The English Vice

2009-01-23T09:18:00.006-05:00

Minutes before he’d started throwing up over the fabulous Persian carpet in his Manhattan penthouse, my banker-friend K. had promised to take to exercise and clean living in 2009. I’d marvelled at his low cunning—the ability, even when blind drunk, find the words needed to contain his khoti’s righteous morning-after wrath.

It was with some surprise, therefore, that I heard the Bitch-in-Chief, as he fondly calls her, bragging that she’d got him to deliver on his word. B-in-C had the smug air of a woman who has finally beaten a good man into submission. I knew better. Based on the certain knowledge that K. wouldn’t work up sweat on account of anything other than a platoon of naked Uzbek Houris, I asked the B-in-C for his the address of his “gym”—and off I went.

Miss Victoria wasn’t Uzbek—but the minute I laid eyes on her, it was clear just why K. was there. Beautiful, blonde and blessed with a body built for Oriental Contortions no Uzbek Houri could ever have imagined, Miss Victoria cooed in delight at the prospect of having a fine gentleman as myself “exercise” at her establishment. Having relieved me of my credit cards, she signed me in—and swung open the doors to Paradise.

What I saw froze my blood, and shrank my killi to the size of a pea. K., trussed up in a black leather gimp suit, was performing push ups. Each time he failed to drag himself off the floor, one of Miss Victoria’s stunning assistants would, with a languid flick of her arm, horse whip him within an inch of his life. All around, there were men screaming with pain—or was it pleasure? “I ache for the brush of her lips”, K. said, with the helpless air of a man who has crossed the frontiers of all reason, “but I ache for the crack of her whip”.

For the first time, I looked at the name on the registration form Miss Victoria had handed me: Slavercise.

Now, it isn’t as the idea of tying up people and whipping them is alien to my watan. My dear friend, the Maharani of B., took no small small pleasure from flogging the peasants at last year’s mango-harvest time, when the uppity so-and-sos demanded money, will you believe it, to pluck the fruit.

And there’s Muharram, of course. Back in the Pind, they take the whipping stuff seriously. The flagellants would march down the street to the Masjid, each determined to demonstrate their neighbourhood’s abiding grief about the unfortunate events of 680, A.D.

Ya Ali! Ya Husain!, they would rhythmically cry.
Ya Ali, Ya Husain
Jor Sey Kutto Behan Dey Lodon [Hit harder, you sister-fuckers], the flogger-in-chief would shout out periodically, to the shirkers
Ya Ali, Ya Husain
etc. you get the idea.

At first, I thought the existence of Slavercise was a symptom of the Protestant distaste for sloth which runs through Jesustan—a distaste which manifests itself in a veneration of exercise, cold showers and outdoor discomfort that is just as unhealthy as the fat-fetishism I have earlier written on. But on closer inquiry, it turned out that this was a facile analysis.

In my watan, the infliction of pain is what god intended it to be: an instrument of punishment; a means of control. Its experience, be it in the mango orchards or at Muharram, is merely a dress-rehearsal for the larger agony we call life. In Jesustan, though, pain is a choice—an aesthetic of profound spiritual significance.

From Piety to Pornography
We desis have long known that White Master enjoys a strange relationship with the whip: its not for naught, after all, that the urchins on Janpath run after goras with enormous leather hunters in their hands.

Like all good stories, the story of White Master’s and the whip begins a long, long time ago. During the tenth century, historians tell us, flagellation was as core a part of monastic practice as prayer. Indeed, psalms and prayers were often recited as monks and nuns were flogged.

Processions of flagellants also travelled Europe for periods of thirty-three days, enacting the years of Christ’s life. Prophecies of the coming apocalypse were in vogue then, as they are now; the flagellants hoped to reduce their time in Purgatory and to ward off ailments like the plague.

Through whipping the body, one attacked the home of the devil, and thus drove out Lucificer—to the delight of god, the angels, and any deviants who happened to be watching. From various thirteenth century accounts, we learn that the flagellant was often naked, in a ritual remembrance of Adam and Eve in the state of nature. As such, flagellation was a means atoning for Original Sin, and of seeking the intercession of the Virgin through sharing in the pain of Christ’s Passion.

From around the fifteenth century, though, flagellation began into fall out of fashion—in no small part because the Spanish Inquisition deemed the practice heretical and began executing its practitioners. Flagellation was thus driven underground. But this pious act was kept alive by underground orders of gynopygian clerics, mainly Jesuit, who saw it as an essential tool for exorcisms.

Two hundred years later, whipping would have a magnificent revival in that glorious media for society’s most secret secrets—pornography. Much of this revival was inspired by the famous scandal of Catherine Cadiére. In September, 1731, Cadiére was sentenced to death for witchcraft—and then released, to public applause, a month later. Cadiére’s health had been ruined by the plague of 1728, and she began to suffer from what she believed to be possession by the devil. The Jesuit priest Jean-Baptiste Girard, whom she met in 1728, undertook to deliver her from evil—using a whip and his penis. He was later investigated for abuse. In an effort to protect the church in general and the Jesuits in particular, though, Cadiére was tried as a witch.

Divine ecstasy and profane ecstasy—the spiritual experience and the orgasm—were shown to be intimately entwined in the course of this revival. Pornographers of the eighteenth century added the whip to the iconography of the nymphomaniac nun and the debauched Priest—all well known, the English-medium types among you will know, from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer onwards—thus tying together pleasure and desire with pain and punishment. It was, it takes little to see, a uniquely Christian pornography. In popular imagination, the Marquis de Sade is seen as a libertine; his sexuality was, in fact, that of a Christian ascetic.

The English Vice
It was among the Angrez, though, that the tender art of flagellation reached its finest flowering.

In his 2007 work, In Praise of the Whip, Niklaus Largier notes that the widespread upper class embrace of whipping made England the “homeland of flagellant tendencies”. He notes that brothels in continental Europe labelled their flagellation services an “English education”. Flagellation was, the historian Ian Gibson noted in his 1978 classic on sex, shame and beatings in Victorian England, “The English Vice”.

Unique to British flagellation was its very public practice: this was not practice secreted away in the brothel. The author Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote at great length of his fond memories of being whipped at Eton. Eighteenth century English doctors recommended whipping as a therapeutic instrument to treat melancholy, epilepsy, mania, and increase blood flow—which it indisputably does. Whipping, Largier reminds us, was also recommended in nineteenth-century martial guides as an instrument of conjugal intimacy: six of the best, it was widely held, was just what was needed to get the Khoti all hot and sweaty.

Gibson, in the noble cause of seeking to end corporal punishment in British schools, railed against flagellation, arguing in White Master’s whip fetish “as with all sexual perversions, we are dealing with a form of arrested development, with a prephallic fixation that puberty and subsequent experience have been unable to dislodge”.

But is it? Its entirely possible, for example, to argue that many normal heterosexual marriages far exceeded in their pain that so far inflicted by the most hard-wielded whip. Yet, no one characterises marriage as a prephallic fixation.

Khair, we often see whips-and-leather masochism as a furtive activity, hidden away in sordid brothels. In Jesustan, though, it is increasingly occupying its rightful place, sanctioned by history and culture. Slavercise isn’t the only service offering the sweet touch of the whip to enhance your workout; establishments like Stiletto Heel Workout offer competing services. There are clubs and associations like flagellants; one site even offers them the opportunity to put up happy photographs of their holiday flogging experiences.

In Jesustan, it is clear, the pursuit of pain is taken as seriously as the pursuit of happiness (or what passes for it). We have much to learn from White Master in this, as in other things.

All about child sex

2009-01-04T14:19:00.006-05:00

“He laughed uproariously when his nanny wagged his cock with her fingers”, wrote the physician Jean Hérouard in his chronicle of the Emperor Louis XIII’s childhood. It was an amusing trick the child seemed to enjoy. Later, Hérouard—physician to Louis’s parents, Henry IV and Marie de Medici—noted that the Emperor-to-be “in high spirits made everybody kiss his cock”.

It is near impossible to be blasé while encountering Louis’ highly sexualised childhood—so ably documented by the social historian Philippe Ariès in 1965. In our world, the conduct of Louis’ caregivers would constitute child abuse, plain and simple. Even someone like me, who can think of few more pleasant ways to pass the time than having a French nanny in a nikki-nikki skirt kissing my killi, has to admit that the thought of her doing so to a three year old is profoundly disturbing.

Part of this has, of course, come about because of a recognition of the scale—and damage—inflicted by child abuse across the world. But part of our loathing for the conflation of the words ‘sex’ and ‘children’ is also historically conditioned. Ever since the nineteenth century, childhood has been reinvented as a space segregated from the adult world by a wall of innocence. In the centuries that have passed since 1604, when Louis was three years old, we have built a culture that sundered childhood from sexuality, Sigmund Freud’s best efforts notwithstanding.

But now, the young of Jesustan are fighting back. With the grim determination of a generation determined to set right a great historical wrong, they are shagging on the beaches, in the mountains, in school toilets, and on their parents brand-new leather sofa-sets. Late last year, Louisiana teenager Brittany Phillips even stabbed her 35 year old boyfriend because he just wouldn't give it to her. Fortunately for middle-aged men, about half of Jesustan’s children will have managed to get laid before they receive a high-school diploma.

To my mind, all is well and as it should be—after all, Dada-ji and Dadi-ji were rolling about in their parent-funded, Pandit-sanctioned manji at the age of fourteen (not always sanctioned; there was the time Nani-ji had a fling with a Pathan dry-fruit seller, which I'm told left idli-dough all over the kitchen walls, but khair, I digress).

Most people in Jesustan, though, don’t agree. Back in April, the situation alarmed President-elect Barack Obama—who will replace Beloved Leader later this year—enough to talk about addressing the problem through a “focus on abstinence, where we are teaching the sacredness of sexuality to our children”.

I’m not sure what he meant by the sacredness of sexuality—personally, I like it as profane as possible, although I must try to do it to plainsong or Vedic chants one of these days—but I suspect the phrase suggests Beloved Leader’s long shadow will be upon us for some time yet.

Back in 1996, Jesustan’s national panchayat authorised an abstinence-only programme to combat teenage pregnancies—a programme that, instead of handing out birth-control pills or just splaying the brats, put up $ 50 million a year for promoting Virginity Pledges (last year, it was up to $ 204 million).

It all began in 1993, when the Southern Baptist Church—beloved of Beloved Leader, and beloved, evidently, of Barack—set up an organisation called True Love Waits. “True Love Waits”, its website states, “encourages moral purity by adhering to biblical principles. This youth-based international campaign utilizes positive peer pressure by encouraging those who make a commitment to refrain from pre-marital sex to challenge their peers to do the same”. By signing its Virginity Pledge, adherents promise to live “with sails raised for revival”—as opposed, presumably, with their penises rampant.

Variants on the Virginity Pledge flourished, all subsidised by public money. For example, an organisation called the Silver Ring Thing issues—no, you dirty-minded bastards, not that—silver rings with Biblical exhortations urging teenagers not to dip their wick in the first available chick. Silver Ring Thing also holds classes explaining “how God can help young people overcome temptation in their daily lives, how to support one another and what to do when tempted to give into sexual pressure”. Sic., I should add, it is pressure: not pleasure.

Last year, though, a study by the Johns Hopkins University demonstrated what any idiot could have told Congress: that you just can’t trump teenage lust. Teenagers who pledged to avoid sex until marriage were as likely to have intercourse as other U.S. adolescents, the survey found. In fact, kids who took the pledge also were less likely to use birth control pills or condoms than those making no promise. Fifty-three percent of the teens in the pledge group said they had engaged in premarital sex compared with 57 percent of those who hadn’t taken the pledge. Eighty two percent percent of those who had taken the oath simply denied five years later that they had ever done so. “The results suggest that the virginity pledge does not change sexual behavior,” wrote author Janet Rosenbaum, just in case anyone had missed the point.

But what is in fact driving teenage sex in the United States? Here, the tale takes a twist

Not long ago, Time broke news of a “pregnancy pact” made by teenage girls at a school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which led to seventeen students—most aged younger than sixteen—ending up expecting babies. Investigators found that the girls had decided to have children together, both in an effort to deflect adult opprobrium—and, evidently, to give their unbearably boring lives some meaning. “Some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were”, Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan told the magazine.

Teenage pregnancies have been rising across Jesustan after having declined from 1991 to 2005. It isn’t just the young and careless who are ending up getting pregnant. Pop star Britney Spears’ sister, Jamie Lynn—star of Nicklodeon’s popular show, Zoey 101—gave birth to a child when she was just seventeen. The hit movie Juno, vested teenage pregnancies with a certain social cachet, as did Knocked Up, a comedy about one-night stands.

What is remarkable, of course, is the Protestant seriousness of purpose with which Jesustan’s children engage in sex: cocks are for procreation, not for play (like for their great-grandmothers but not for Louis’ nurse). Part of this protestant ethic, of course, is deep rooted in Jesustan’s culture: it is not for naught, after all that, that penises are referred to as ‘tools’, women are ‘nailed’, or that this land’s pornography revolves around sex on office tables, doctors’ clinics and farmyards. Even this rebellion, thus, is suffused by the neurosis of the culture which it opposes.

Now, its not my case that having your killi kissed at a tender age liberates you of the sexual neurosis which Mom—or Mummy-ji—inflicted upon you. Louis, notably, grew up ill at ease with women. His married a Spanish princess—who, oddly enough, was known as Anne of Austria—in November, 1715. But their wedding night was a disaster; Louis’ killi thereafter didn’t get anywhere near Anne of Austria until 1619. “He thereafter occasionally managed to sleep with the Queen”, one historian has recorded, “but only from a sense of duty”. (of course, this is true of all married people; the one percent who claim otherwise lie).

My point is only that taboos transform through time—and that what we are seeing compels us to examine the robustness of the rules we have grown up with. The English-medium tabka amongst you will, doubtless, recall the story of the rape of Ganymede, where Zeus abducted the so-named young boy and carried him up to Mount Olympus to be his eternal lover. In the original Greek myth, it needs to be noted, the term “rape” is used in a clinical, value-neutral sense. Everyone concerned was happy at the turn of events—Zeus, of course; Ganymede, too (and even Ganymede’s father, who was for some reason delighted at the thought of his first-born being buggered senseless on them yonder mountains).

For centuries, the myth of Ganymede was a centrepiece of ancient Greece’s well-documented culture of pederasty. On the island of Crete, the historian Ephorus tells us, men would ritually kidnap young men, and take them into the countryside for two months of feasting and fucking. The boys’ families would pretend to resist the abduction but the few that actually did so were scorned. A family that protected its sons was “extremely shameful”, Ephorus explains, “since in effect they are publicly admitting that the boy is unworthy to get such a lover”.

Unless you live in Kandahar or Peshawar, though, it is no longer cool to shag little boys. And unless you live in Jesustan, you will likely get expelled from school if you are caught at it in Class IX B. Since I do not shag little boys, and—alack!— Class IX B is just a frayed memory, I have no issues with either rule. But I do remember wishing Mrs. S., the Sanskrit teacher, would play with my penis. Perhaps it would be pleasant to have a world where that was at least possible.

White Master and His Baubles

2008-06-18T14:04:00.015-04:00

Last month, a series of unfortunate events led to my being press-ganged into flying all the way to Fort Lauderdale to provide twenty-four hours of tender loving care for an angelic little Gudiya whose mother, having developed leprosy or some other such disgusting tropical disease, had to be shipped off to hospital.

I’d worked out a perfect plan of action, which was to slip some Rum-no wasting Single Malt-into her milk and then settle down for a little time in the pool with the friendly neighbourhood chaloo chachis, for whom Florida is justly renowned.

Like most brilliant plans, though, it didn’t go quite according to plan. It turned out angelic little Gudiyas in Jesustan don’t drink milk—and are, moreover, immune to the soporific effects of alcohol, having encountered plenty of it in pre-school. The Beastlet had been given to believe I would take her to Disneyland for the day, and insisted I deliver. First, she screamed; then threw things about; and finally, displaying an admirable ingenuity that I must confess is rare in one so young, threatened to call the police and claim I’d been trying to talk her into pervy sex.

“Wallow in defeat every time”, wrote Sun Tzu. I did

$75.62 Adult and $63.90 Child—no half-tickets in Jesustan—might not seem like too much to pay to stay out of the paedophile pen in Fort Lauderdale Federal Penitentiary. But I knew for a fact I could do better. Not a great distance from the Beastlet’s home was the world-famous Fetish Factory, which was just then holding its thirteenth anniversary celebrations. A strange place to take a nine year old? Not really: there’s very little a child wouldn’t read as something from a comic book. It involved a certain amount of lying—I had to persuade the Beastlet to wear her Super-Woman costume, and then tell the darbaan that it was my business if I chose to date a midget—but much fun was had by all.

It did get me thinking, though: just why is sex in Jesustan so heavily accessorised—so tied to the purchase of things? At some point in their lives, most Jesustanis will feel compelled to pierce their penises or adorn themselves with nipple bling. Only in Jesustan could someone have invented the Silicone Flexi Power Rod, which can bend dozens of ways and, judging by the brochure, perform calisthenics of a kind no human penis ever could. Or there’s the Flashing Disco Dong, which can play tunes and changes colours, the EZ Rider, which allows you to stick a dildo inside you while practicing abdominal exercises, or the Mutant Double Dong, which does nothing my limited imagination can comprehend.

Some of White Master’s Baubles cross the line between being driven insane by lust, and just being plain insane.

In Des, for example, we administer electrical currents to men’s testicles at police stations, to make them confess to blowing up people in the bazaar or chopping up their Khotis and sticking the bits inside tandoors. In Jesustan, the activity is a loving gesture. MedicalToys.com offers the PES PowerBox, which allows users “erotic electro-stimulation play in medical fetish”. For just $ 259.95, you can access that enables the most “exciting aspect of role-playing Nurse/Doctor”: “when that patient complains about aches and pains, these handy little devices will have them wriggling and squirming from the rippling pulses”. “The Electro-Simulator TENS unit”, the sales brochure gushes, “is a perfect starter set for those who wish to push the boundaries of intense tactile experiences”. Other joys include an $ 149.95 set of electrodes to stick up men’s urethras, to simulate blow jobs, and the $ 499.50 ‘Samurai’ vaginal simulator, which gives electric head—no pun intended.

There’s even a genre of magazines devoted to reviewing sex toys, with articles that—without the slightest trace of irony—discuss vibrators, latex vaginas and dildos with much the same plastic enthusiasm Sunday magazines in Des talk home theatre systems or cars. Consider this discussion of the Natural Contours Ideal vibrator by Abby Ehmann, writing in ErosZine: “the Ideal isn’t the most discrete of machines; it makes so much noise I was afraid I might wake the neighbors with it. But be advised: the Ideal's buzz is pretty robust! I’m also not sure I’d advise direct-to-clit stimulation for the faint of heart or less stout of genitalia! In other words, I wouldn't recommend this as a starter toy”.

All of this is all the more perplexing because White Master has long claimed the Orient is lascivious and exotic. But there isn’t in fact all that much sexual exotica in the Orinet, bar the pussy-and-dick ashtrays that line the streets of Denpasar or the ping-pong shows in Patpong, which of course are for the viewing pleasure of White Master. Not even one of the regrettably few Oriental women I have had the pleasure of throwing on to my manji has sported a nipple hugger—or even asked me where my PowerBox might be.

But while White Master is inscrutable, he isn't in fact incomprehensible.

It isn’t until very recently that I have come to understand that accessorised sex has nothing to do with the erotic: it is a highly-ritualised celebrations of origins of the species. Baubles have a special cultural significance for White Master: after all, it wasn’t just guns and germs that helped him become White Master.

For eight thousand years before White Master arrived in what is now Jesustan, life was at one with nature. From morning to night, first the manji beckoned, and then the chulha. Khoti-ji had to be shagged to ensure the propagation of the species, and then chained to the tepee so she had no choice but to care for the half-tickets. Buffalo had to be caught, and then fucked to death (presumably chained to the tepee, since they are large and ill-tempered) before finally being eaten.

Do I sense disbelief amongst you judgmental Behan-key-Loday? Do I hear you thinking I am making this up? No! Native American sexual behaviour was what one eminent anthropologist describes as “highly inclusive" [FW Voget, ‘Sex life of the American Indians’, in A. Ellis, A. & A. Abarbanel, A. (eds.) The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Behaviour, Volume 1 (London: W. Heinemann, 1961), 90-109.] Regrettably for you super-dheela Madarchods this isn’t available online and will actually require effort to obtain, but you may wish to check out the scholar DF Janssen’s essay on the subject. For those of us familiar with what goes on in ponds between adolescents and buffalos in saada Punjab, it will immediately be clear that it wasn't in error that native Americans were called Indian.

Khair, the point is that sex was work, enmeshed in the mundane, not a time-pass faltootype thing. Time pass consisted of making, wearing and trading beads made from shell, pearl, bone, and teeth. Perhaps the best known kinds of beads were wampum, small cylindrical white-and-purple beads which were used as legal tender across Jesustan until the mid-eighteenth century. Beads were used to signal war, peace and a range of other human emotions. For example, a man might give his beloved a wampum ring as a sign of undying love. He might, on the other hand, slide an erect finger in and out of a ring of wampum before the friendly neighbourhood chaloo-aunty, as a way of asking, “How Much for you”?

Now, when White Master arrived in these parts, he set about using the locals’ bead-fetish to make to make chutiyas of them. He would sell them glass beads purchased 10,000,0000 for tuppence in Home Country in return for things that actually had value. In return for a six foot string of small beads, White Master would buy a beaver skin that Armani’s great-great-great grand-mummy-ji (who was not chaloo) would sell to the Nawab of Sault Sainte Marie (who was super-duper chaloo) for a hundred tons of gold. Nawab-Sahib would then give the beaver skin to his loving khoti, who would then overlook the fact that he was getting himself buggered by the dhobi, and would go off warmly clad to console herself with the khansama.

Meriwether Lewis, who made an epic crossing of Jesustan in 1804-1806 in search of a dark corner to shag his lust object William Clark found a smooth blue glass bead known as the ‘Russian’—actually made just off Dariba market, second gali on the left—to be especially valued by the native becharey who on the Columbia River in Pacific Northwest. Lewis tried seducing Clark, I’m told, with a large string of smooth blue glass, ideally for being slid in and out of the buttocks when tempered with a teaspoonful of olive oil. However, Clark went off and married a woman called Julia; Lewis committed suicide.

Enough, though, of what my friends the Pathans called Bacccha-Baazi (and Bakri-Baazi).

The point here is simple: White Master has understood that Baubles are Power. Jesustan colonised the world not through the power of its guns, as its fifth-rate Faujis like to imagine, nor the knowledge of its universities. It triumphed through the sheer power of but things. Jesustan rules the world because of the slutty seductiveness of iPod and Gap, of Diet Coke and yes, even Dorritos. It is this great heritage that Jesustanis celebrate when they bring Baubles into their bedrooms. In every culture, sex and power is entwined. In Jesustan, that embrace is particularly intimate.

Pinky and the Pure Kudi

2008-06-15T12:11:00.004-04:00

More years ago than I care to remember, my friend Parminder—Pinky to his friends—tired of the long, lonely nights he spent with only his penis for company. He decided, as even the wisest of us sometimes do in moments of madness, to get married.

But in Jesustan, as every fool knows, there are no Pure Kudis—women with immaculate, never-before-used vaginas to whose caresses a man’s first love might be entrusted. But even in saada watan, things are not what they used to be. Not every Kudi can any longer be counted on to be Pure. Just as some our own have adopted the execrable habit of wiping their bottoms with toilet paper, many Kudis have become utterly indiscriminate in who they let past the door.

A test was needed to reliably determine which Kudis were Pure, as reliably as pigs can sniff out shit.

I soon hit on a brilliant idea. When Pinky would visit the homes of the applicants who would respond to his advertisement in the Punjabi Tribune, he would be offered tea, samosas and jalebis. He would then ask for a moment along with the girl to determine her desires, and taking advantage of this time, whip out his qilli. If she knew what it was, she quite obviously wasn’t no Pure Kudi. No green card for her.

And so it happened at the first home: tea, samosas, and jalebis. And then, having taken the Kudi aside for a minute, Pinky whipped out his penis—and got a mighty slap across his face for his pains. He came out and gave me a huge hug. “She seemed like a really nice girl”, Pinky said, “if it hadn’t been for your test, I would never have realised wasn’t no Pure Kudi”.

And so it happened at the second home: tea, samosas, and jalebis. And again, having taken the Kudi aside for a minute, Pinky whipped out his penis—and again got a mighty slap across his face for his pains. And again, he came out and gave me a huge hug. “She seemed like a really nice girl”, Pinky said, “if it hadn’t been for your test, I would never have realised wasn’t no Pure Kudi”.

And so it happened at the third home. And the fourth home. And the one hundred and fifty-fourth home.

Pinky’s world had turned dark. But across the Ravi and across the Beas, beyond the marshes of Maand and the swamps of the Satluj, was one last Kudi on whom Pinky had yet to call. He arrived there with no hope in heart. But this time, when he whipped out his penis, things were different. “I’ve no idea what that is”, the Kudi said, puzzled, “perhaps it’s a toy”?

With Pure-Kudi-Beloved-Wife at his side, Pinky went to Mussoorie for their honeymoon. There, on the red satin sheets of their heart-shaped bed, laid out under the mirrored ceiling, he pulled down his pyjama to reveal once more to Beloved Wife his magnificent penis. “This is no toy, my love”, said Pinky, his chest swelling with pride, “this is a true, asli-ghiyo manly-man penis”.

“A penis”, she muttered? “No, my love, the shoemaker’s son had a penis; this is just a toy”.

ONCE I finished wiping his brains off my very nice Armani jacket, I completely forgot about poor, poor Pinky. Until last week, when Ms. P.—no relative, I assure you, of the deceased—rang the doorbell.

She was in search—surprise, surprise—of loot. Generally, I’m quite content to fork out cash to pretty young women; it is, after all, an investment. Ms. P., a good Pure Kudi who was often seen in the company of a loutish Lala who imported pressure-cookers from Karol Bagh, had never seemed like a target. But now she was asking for money, which of course changed everything. In my highly subtle, ingenious way, I asked what might be in it for me.

“Ten percent of gross”, Ms. P said, without batting an eyelid “if you get your hands off my boobs right now”.

Lala-ji, it turned out, was good to go: he’d proposed marriage with the special kind of desperation that Desi men are given to when they think they’ve found a fuckable edition of their Mummy-ji. But while Ms. P been driving him insane with desire, playing the Pure Kudi to such effect that even I had been fooled, she’d in fact been banging the proverbial cook, cleaner, driver and maali. If Lala-ji found out her vagina wasn’t in factory-packaging, there would be hell to pay: no post-divorce 50 percent of the $ 2.6 million apartment in Chicago; not even the teeniest, weeniest sliver of alimony.

Ms. P.’s progress hinged on an $ 1800 surgical procedure called revirgination—a process that, as I understand it, is not dissimilar to retreading a tire, or, more accurately, that that wonderful Desi car-mechanic technique of sticking a metal sleeve inside an exhaust pipe to make the silencer last longer. Basically, Ms. P. would walk into the doctor’s clinic a battle-fatigued slut and just two hours later emerge as virginal as Mother Mary, with a hymen to prove it

While Desis and Arabs are major source of revenue at revirgination practices across north America, the fashion is catching among Jesustan’s natives. Last year, San Antonio resident Jeanette Yarborough went public about a very special, and very painful, gift she’d decided to give her husband on his fortieth birthday—her reconstructed virginity. According to a top Canadian plastic surgery practice, “hymen restoration has become one of the most popular cosmetic surgical procedures for women in Toronto, and around the world”. Most also opt for “designer vagina” frills, like tightening up childbirth-loosened canals, or the cosmetic trimming of enlarged labia.

Marco Pelosi, a New Jersey-based plastic surgeon who performs ten hymenoplasties a month, says much of his custom comes from “affluent upper-class ladies coming in from Manhattan, getting ready for a second-honeymoon cruise or something like that. Or some women had a disappointing time the first time they were deflowered and now they have found someone special they would really like to give it up to”. He didn’t say, but should have: “found some chutiya who is willing to pay them a fuck-load of money to satisfy some perverse fantasy”.

Brown people are, predictably enough, irate about the deception that revirgination enables . A court in France recently annulled the marriage of a west Asian manwhose bride turned out to be a retread. But hymen reconstruction has also aroused the ire of the Lashkar-e-Jesus, which is terrified that science could liberate sin of its consequences. One Lashkar-e-Jesus website argues that “God’s forgiveness is founded on our willingness to admit our sin and not cover up. People who hide their sin will not prosper but those who admit their sin and leave it behind, receive God’s mercy”.

Most Jesustanis, though, claim that they are unconcerned with questions of virginity. I am sceptical about this claim, not only because people are willing to spend I have yet to hear a native father discuss his daughter’s deflowering with anything other than alarm. I’ve been to coming-out parties, graduation parties, engagement parties—but no My-Beti-Just-Fucked-The-Pimply-Gandoo-Up-The-Street Party. At campuses across the country, there are vocal "rebel virgin" movements, which claim that premarital sex is the root cause of many hideous problems—an interesting inversion the pre-seventeenth century notion that delayed sexual activity was the cause of the anaemia-related disorder chlorosis.

Immaculate hymens just as in my beloved watan, are treasured commodities. Promiscuity is a vice. Mother Mary Zindabad. Mary Magdalene Murdabad.

But just why are men, exceptionally among all species, so concerned with the insides of women’s vaginas?

For decades, shrink-types have peddled all sort of spurious theories about our virginity-privileging behaviours. Some claim it has to do with the male desire to ensure genetic propagation; others that its rooted in the notion of women as property. Still others attribute it to cultural particularities.

Bakwaas!

As every man knows but none will confess to, our craving for virgins has nothing to do with either biology or cultured. It is rooted, instead, in garden-variety fear. Its simple: if Pure Kudi hasn’t had the opportunity to take a few test drives, she has no way of knowing if she’s got a Maruti or a Ferrari. If she doesn’t know, she can’t choose. And men like it that way.

Science suggests that while virgin-seeking men might be chutiyas, they aren’t actually stupid. A study by Joan Kahn and Katherine London determined that women who were sexually active prior to their marriages had a considerably higher risk of breaking up than virgin brides (where they actually found virgin brides to populate their model, I am uncertain; I’ve yet to meet even one). Being English-medium types, Kahn and London used very large number of words to explain this phenomenon. All of them boiled down to this: if Pure Kudi drives car ‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’, she will buy the one she likes the best. Two out of three men will lose out, and we can’t have that.

For the system to work, of course, Pinky has to make sure that Pure Kudi doesn’t ever get even go window shopping. It is a brutal business, involving constant stocking up on war supplies like Burkhas, nylon saris and kerosene.

Endless fear is the price of security. But then, as Jeanette Yarborough might have said in secret, no pain, no gain.

Begums Built For Comfort (But Not For Speed)

2008-04-18T20:20:00.004-04:00

M. STAGGERED through my front door, his belly heaving through the gaps in his shirt-front where the buttons had been ripped off.

“Jannatein ladkhadaaein”, he said, reaching for the bottle of Glen Garioch, 1958, I keep for such occasions, filled of course with watered-down turpentine, “the heavens thundered”.

It took me a moment to work out just what he meant. My cryptanalytic skills are, like my powers of deduction, legendary, but it was past two in the morning and the doorbell was still ringing inside my head.

Wisely, I’d taken my time before opening the door. First, in my sleep-induced haze, I’d imagined that the Pathans were at the gates and then that it might be local Habshis in search of my loot. But as I thought through the situation carefully, I realised the Habshis would have kicked the door in instead of ringing the bell and Pathans don’t know what door bells are. And so, putting away the fine assault rifle I’ve taken to stowing under my bed, I opened the door—only to be confronted by the sight of a drunk, sweating Punjabi low-life Lala from Hoshiarpur which, as you will understand, is far more frightening than any Afghan or habshi could possibly be.

Khair, the salient fact was this: after many, many, many years, M.’s penis had been put to work for purposes other than making pee-pee.

Despite the abundance of fuddi in Jesustan, M.’s pursuit of happiness had run into an aesthetic problem. He felt that there is too much haddi on the local kababs and not enough charbi. He would turn away with a shudder when those hoor-like undergraduates jogged by the Ravi Kabab House, clad only in very very nikki chaddian—the very sight which thousands of illegal immigrants from sadda wattan risk their lives to witness, crossing borders stowed away inside container-trucks.

“Built for speed”, he would mutter, “not for comfort”.

Last week, someone put M. out of his misery by pointing him in the direction of a preparatory workshop for the upcoming Los Angeles convention of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. NAAFA believes that the drive to get fat people to shed kilograms, so pervasive in Jesustan, is the outcome of a weight-loss industry conspiracy. In NAAFA’s view, although “95-98% of diets fail over three years, our thin-obsessed society continues to believe that fat people are at fault for their size”.

NAAFA’s convention draws lots of men who like King-Size women, not all of them from Hoshiarpur. Some, like M., just like banging fat Begums—and at the convention, there are plenty in search of men who like to be cosseted in lard, reliving that primal memory of being smothered by their Mummy-ji’s mammas. Others have more complex motives. The convention attracts numbers of Feeders—men who, like Punjabi Mummy-jis, find pleasure feeding their loved ones enormous amounts of food while at once ensuring they remains immobile in bed to avoid burning any more calories than are absolutely necessary.

Every Feeder aspires to get his creations into the 900 Club, which celebrates the world’s fattest people. Carol Yager, who made it to the infamous Jerry Springer Show, weighed an astounding 725 kilograms at the time of her death in 1994. Roselie Bradford of Sellersville measured eight feet wide at her peak, and took up two reinforced king-size beds. When she fell out of bed, rescue workers used an inflatable cushion designed to right overturned cars to get her back into place. Her breasts, if they could be called that, measured over 2.5 meters—which, if word had got around in Punjab, would have brought her thousands of suitors—and her hips carried 90 kilogram bags that hung down her thighs as far as her knees.

Now, it did strike me that this could indeed be a brilliant strategic manoeuvre that even Moriarty would have been hard pressed to come up with—you know, “here darling, have another tub of ice-cream”, and off you go to frolic with the undergraduates while the Head Bitch poisons herself quietly; there’s no kerosene or nylon sari purchase to give away the game.

However, it turns out some folk are genuinely turned on by fat, witness the success of Dimensions magazine. And, of course, the harkatein of M.

In Jesustan, the natives have odd attitudes to fat. You cannot make derogatory remarks about women and the lower race, even Bengalis. You may not praise bride-burning or pederasty. So suffused are the Jesustanis in political correctness that if a leper sat next to them on a train, I suspect they would choke down their nausea and, from sheer shame, stay put.

But there are two sets of people it is safe to mock: the poor and the fat, who in Jesustan, unlike at home, are much of a safeness. Being fat is almost a crime—a crime against a society that valorises the Protestant ethic around which Jesustan is built. If some people in the Mississippi House has its way, the fat will soon be exactly like lepers, shunned by society. In February, Representative W.T. Mayhall, Jr., introduced House Bill 282, which seeks to prohibit restaurants from serving people who are determined to be obese by standards set forth by the Department of Health. Others have demanded that the fat be barred from squeezing themselves into economy-class airline seats; still others that the obese be denied public health services.

All this is a long, long way from home, where the non-English-medium tabka are still proud of the lard that coats their bellies, cardiac risk be damned. In the Pacific Islands, where more people are clinically obese than in any other part of the world, vigorous efforts to stamp out obesity have come to naught. Fat was always considered beautiful in the Islands: a nineteenth century visitor noted that Nauruans “admired big, fat people and put girls on a diet to fatten them and so make them more attractive”. Post second world war canned-food imports made it possible for more people to go on such special diets than ever before. In Mauritania, they even have special fat-farms, where the Moor Arab population employs instructors plumps up prospective bribes and bring them up to the standards of rotundity that are considered desirable.

Fucking Fat or Fucking Thin has been—and ought to be—a simple aesthetic choice. Like everything else in Jesustan, though, it has become a fraught moral and ideological issue.

Up The Tailpipe: A Meditation on Flatulence, Civilisation and the Anal Orifice

2007-02-09T15:38:00.000-05:00

THIS November gone by, a Sunderland man stuck a Black Cat Thunderbolt rocket up his tailpipe and, apparently apropos of nothing, set it alight.

“Fuzzy mobile phone footage,” I have it on the authority of no less than USA Today, “shows a blinding white flash and the group of spectators laughing.” “The man, whose injuries include a scorched colon, is still in hospital,” the newspaper reported.

Ejecting bubbling, hissing shards of undigested mirchi ka salan from my innards, as I have been compelled to spend this morning doing, I know just what the Black Cat Thunderbolt must have felt like. I am not laughing. I am contemplating, instead, our civilizational attitudes to flatulence and the anal orifice.

I.
IN my beloved watan, it is considered acceptable to fart as loudly and often as you might wish. Sticking things up your tailpipe, though is deemed a crime, even though nine out of ten desi men are closet bundus.

By contrast, in Jesustan, you may stick almost anything you like up your tailpipe – as the story of the Black Cat Rocket demonstrates. To expel hot air through the anal orifice, though, is to cross the limits all decency.

Consider this passage from Mark Twain’s Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors:

“… ye blody bucanier had got his wind again, and did turn his mind to farting with such villain zeal that presently I was like to choke once more. God damn this windy ruffian and all his breed. I wolde that hell mighte get him.”

Now, I know plenty of Desi women who wolde that hell mighte get him. For the most part, though, their ire has to do with their husbands’ drunken demands to stick things up their tailpipe – not flatulence. In the Jesustani imagination, however, flatulence is almost akin in its horror to paedophilia. It is a perversion so horrific that it may not even be named.

An excessive assessment? Miss Manners, that great chronicler of Jesustan’s mores, tells us that there are Acceptable Noises “such as burping or the sounds accompanying choking, to which the response should come from the noisemaker himself. Society acknowledges that these noises are made from time to time, but does not dignify them with a response. The offender says ‘Excuse me,’ and the subject is considered closed.”

Not so for the Unacceptable Noises. Miss Manners mandates, chillingly, that these “be acknowledged by neither the noisemaker nor the noise recipient, because socially they do not exist.”

II.
MISS Manners' insistence on Omerta has ancient roots in the western tradition. Concerned that Rome’s citizens were poisoning themselves by retaining flatus, the chronicler Suetonius records in The Lives of the Twelve Ceasars, that the Emperor Claudius was compelled to pass a law legalising farting at banquets.

Perhaps the Romans’ deep fear of farting had its origins in Semitic rage against the body. Flavius Josephus reports in The Wars of the Jews that a Roman soldier raised his clothes and farted at the Feast of Unleavened Bread. This profane act so enraged the Jews that it caused a riot in which many thousands were killed.

“Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta,” reads the last line of The Inferno, Chapter XXI: “and he made a trumpet of his buttocks.” For Dante, flatulence denoted a demoniac condition. Similarly, in St. Augustine’s The City of God Against the Pagans, farting was closely intertwined with heresy. Augustine takes jaundiced note of men who “have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at will, so as to produce the effect of singing.”

Farting in fact occupied an honoured role in some cultures at the margins of western civilisation. Irish professional farters, known as braigetori, found mention with other performers and musicians in the 12th century Tech Midchúarda, a diagram of the banqueting hall of Tara. As entertainers, these Flatulists ranked at the lower end of a scale headed by bards.

In the late nineteenth century, Jesustan saw a brief rebellion against the shame-system that had stamped out Fart-Art. While still a child, Frenchman Joseph Pujol discovered that he could suck up water through his arse and then squirt it out several feet. Not surprisingly, Pujol’s comrades-in-arms in the French army found this an entertaining spectacle. He became a part of Moulin Rouge in 1892.

Pujol’s most-applauded act included playing a flute through a rubber tube stuck up his anus, and fart-effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms. He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. Between 1894 and 1904, Pujol refined his act, adding a wide array of new sounds to his repertoire: the calls of farm animals, for example, or a virtuoso impression of the great San Francisco earthquake.

World War I broke Pujol’s heart. He retired from the stage in 1916, and never performed again.

III.
DESPITE many months of research, I have yet to find a Jesustani who is willing to forge art in the crucible of his shame; to transform his flatulence from biological imperative to art. it is tragic, but this probably means the end of Fart-Art: it cannot be outsourced.

My watan will never produce a Pujol, for flatulence, unlike anal penetration, occupies no great place in its imagination. You will never find fart-toys retailing in Lajpat Nagar market, because no one will think there is anything especially funny about the sound - and because there's no call to spend good money on a gadget to produce noises that be had simply by eating nice hot mooli-parantha.

Science, though, offers some hope of freeing farting of the shame that taints it in Jesustan. In 1998, the eminent scientists Michael Zanakis and Philip Femano filed U.S. Patent application 09/088,006, for a fart-powered ballistic missile. Zenkis and Femano’s research enabled them to manufacture a “gas-fired missile and launcher assembly whose missile is composed of a soft head and a tail extending therefrom formed by a piston.”

“To operate the assembly,” the Zanakis-Femano patent application states, “the operator places the inlet tube with its valve open adjacent his anal region from which a colonic gas is discharged. The piston is then withdrawn to a degree producing a negative pressure to inhale the gas into the combustion chamber to intermix with the air therein to create a combustible mixture. The ignitor is then activated to explode the mixture in the chamber and fire the missile into space.”

Our unnamed Sunderland man may yet turn out to be a martyr.

Will Jesustan make spiritual, rather than merely utilitarian, peace with the fart? I doubt it. Both the Jesustani and the Desi, you see, have a deep need to feel shame. Although the Desi feels no shame at farting, his need for guilt is met by loathing his own sexuality. And although the Jesustani feels no shame at sticking things up his tailpipe, his craving for self-loathing is met by his proscription of flatulence.

Shame.

Here, stuck on a pearl-white toilet seat in the heart of Jesustan, with nary a plastic mug of water to cool my burning buttocks, I suddenly feel that I have never left home.

One sunny afternoon in Detroit...

2007-01-19T02:58:00.000-05:00

“NEVER a dull moment,” my beloved Grand-Mummy-ji used to cluck as she attempted to detach my Pujya but exceedingly perverse Grand-Papa-ji from yet another screaming, terrified village wench, “never a dull moment.”

Last Friday, I was peaceably laying around in the winter sun at a friend’s house near Detroit, rubbing olive oil into my uncoiled python-like but (as you know) slightly battle-fatigued qilli – the thing us mard-e-awwal types do while the begums are busy with the coconut-oil-and-champi stuff. All of a sudden, the pleasant suburban quiet of Ferndale was shattered by the sound of breaking glass, followed by loud moaning and a police siren.

One of the neighbours, a runt named Richard Dotson, had it turned out broken into the local dry-cleaners. Dotson, it transpired, had been driven mad by lust – no, not by the sight of my qilli, but that of a mannequin dressed in a black-and-white French maid’s uniform and placed in the shop window. The police arrived as he was humping the mannequin, and away he was dragged to the friendly neighbourhood asylum. Of course, it is all very unsavoury; I have advised my friend, Ms. A.-ji, not to ask her Mummy-ji over for a vacation from Des until the dust settles.

It turned out the poor fellow had done this six times before over the last thirteen years , and will now more likely than not get a life sentence. To my mind, this seems quite unreasonable. In my beloved Hindustan, it is rare for the police to even inconvenience men who rape and murder children, let alone mannequins (judging by the way things are going, it won’t be long before the Prime Minister starts inviting paedophiles for dialogue on their problems as long as they promise not to bugger infants in the interim, but that’s another story)

Khair, in my beautiful watan, we don’t have the Dotson Problem. Not because our men are not sexual deviants, of course, but because our societies have been carefully designed to meet their needs in a non-judgmental, user-friendly fashion. Desi women are trained from early childhood to lie prostate in bed without twitching a finger or moving a lip, so even the most fastidious mannequin-fetishist has no need to leave home in search of gratification. Bang, bang, bang, and then the mannequin goes off and makes you chai, what more could you possibly ask for?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m as partial as the next man to French maids, especially if can’t demand you do the dishes and won’t ask to get married. But I draw the line at mannequins, not the least because it seems, well…

Unnatural?

As I pondered Dotson’s sad fate – and the tragic character of Desi marriages – I discovered that mannequin fetishism had a long and honourable history; indeed, there was much to commend it. From antiquity, philosophers have known and written of Pygmalionism, so named for Ovid’s sculptor, who fell in love with a statue. In art and in photography, Pygmalionism has been celebrated with abandon.

Sailors have long used what the French called the dame de voyage, or wife of passage, a cloth doll sewn provided on board ship to stop the staff from buggering each other senseless. The Germany Navy manufactured the first modern fuckable mannequins in the 1930s, followed in short order by the Japanese for use aboard their submarines. By the 1950s, the first commercial sex-mannequin, the alarmingly Barbie-like Bild Lilli Doll was on sale in Germany.

Nowadays, there’s a flourishing market for sex mannequins (I’m told they’re particularly popular in Japan, where there’s even a rental service for what the thimble-dicks for some inexplicable reason call ‘Dutch Wives.’) At the absolute bottom of the market, there are $ 50 inflatable vinyl dolls modelled on my Class IX English teacher Mrs. Martins. Those with a little more discernment than Mr. Martins can buy $ 200 water-filled latex sex-mannequins with hair, hands and feet.

Finally, for true aficionados, there are $8,000+ asli ghee silicone models, which can even be made to resemble real-life lust objects like Urmila Matondkar, Juliette Lewis, or even, if you’re a really sick demented freak, Mrs. Martins. Perhaps the best-known of these mannequins is Abyss Creations’ Real Doll, but a new company called CybOrgasMatrix is claiming that its product, which uses an elastic gel with a strong shape memory, as well as a pelvic thrust motor and built in eight-channel audio, is far superior.

After my horrific experiences with the memsahib fauj over the last few months, I’m going to stick with olive oil and onanism for some time to come. But who knows where I might next turn? “Everyone needs a bosom for a pillow,” sang that wonderfully-eccentric underground band Cornershop a decade ago, “mine’s on the 45.” Their ode to vinyl, I’m discovering, had more meanings than I had at first contemplated.

Jesustan Fauj Hai Taiyyar

2007-01-16T14:50:00.000-05:00

It is I.

I am back.

I know you missed me, but I was busy. Painfully busy.

Beloved Leader’s ceaseless campaigns to annihilate distant nations faced a stern test some months ago. Sundered cruelly from their men, abandoned to their fate, the women of Jesustan set about a hideous wailing. In the old days, it mattered little, but now what with phones and TV, the ranks threatened to abandon their posts and return home.

Aware that Caesar’s armies and Ceaser's god-ordained order has often been undone in such circumstances, even gentlemen of leisure disinclined to either altruism or vigorous physical activity (such as myself) were compelled to pitch in and do their Patriotic Duty.

Saddey mulk mein ich maujan hi maujhan, wrote the Pakistani poet, jithe vekho faujan hi faujan. Patriotic Duty, which is much the same in any land, was like that only. I cannot tell you how miserable it was: hour after hour after hour of ceaseless in-out, in-out, in-out with Memsahibs who had been reared for years on extra-large size packets of aloo chips in sour cream dip, and having all the while to listen to the strange squeaking sounds made by the springs the natives insist on nailing under their manjis

Oh, the horror, the horror. That spoiled so-and-so Joseph Conrad had no idea what the heart of darkness looks like, and this I can tell you, it most certainly isn't in Africa.

Now, though, I am free, to write (and to nurse what was once my proud manhood, but resembles nothing so much as a gajar as it is being shredded to be turned into halwa .) At the core of my new-found liberty, as with most things in Jesustan, lie technology and entrepreneurship: billions of dollars of investments in research, and thousands of the finest minds in this land, have worked in perfect harmony to set me free.

Long Island-based Create-a-Mate has come up with, well, how do I put this, means to mass-produce gajars, sort of like tractor-and-fertiliser farming versus hothouse organic production [http://www.createamate.com/default.aspx]. Create-a-Mate's new technology calls on women to persuade their lords-and-masters to stick their gajars into a something that looks a lot like a large bowl of idli-batter. Given that their lords-and-masters are, for the most part, either deviants who have always longed to stick their gajars into idli-batter, or total kaddoos who are beyond caring, this is usually not a problem.

Once the batter hardens – ideally with the lord-and-master’s gajar well out of the way by then – out pops a perfect, cast-plastic penis. Egg-like vibrating devices – which, for reasons that escape my imagination, are also available separately – are then inserted into the cast-plastic penis. Zindabad! At one fell swoop, and for just $ 79.95, vibrating eggs extra, the Jesustanis have solved what was threatening to be a debilitating social crisis.

Now all is well. No more loneliness. No more infidelity. “Call it fun, call it sexy, I call it practical,” wrote one Army wife to Create-a-Mate, “My husband is in the service and while he’s away fighting for our country, well … I’m smiling as if he were here!”

So, GI Joe can sleep well in Baghdad, secure in the knowledge that Mrs.Joe is curled up happily with her plastic gajar, contentedly turning the 99-kilo steak she had for dinner into methane as she sleeps snuggled inside the nice, warm duvet. In fact, she can even have the gajar, which comes in chocolate, mocha and vanilla flavours, for desert. I know it is made of plastic, but then so is almost anything else that is sold on the food shelves of Jesustani supermarkets.

Dushman Khabardar, Ab Jesustan Fauj Hai Taiyyar!

Gold Dust, Gastric Acid and True Love

2005-10-08T15:04:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, or so the Associated Press claims, a 13-foot Burmese python burst after it apparently tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole. The snake was found with the alligator’s hindquarters protruding from its mid-section, which suggests the reptile may have clawed at the python’s stomach as it was being eaten.

To any Hindustani who is or has been married, this situation will seem familiar. Not to the Jesustani, who has been indoctrinated since birth to believe that slowly dissolving in gastric acids is a passionate, fulfilling experience.

It isn’t a coincidence, I’ve long believed, that the world’s greatest film industry grew in this greatest of lands, for the idea of Jesustan is founded on the suspension of disbelief. Among the core fantasies on which the entire edifice rests is the belief that something called True Love exists. Unlike us Hindustanis, Jesustani wage-slaves do not work endless hours merely for the loot. They toil instead for love of their people, love of their planet and love of something called self-realisation. You will never catch a Jesustani soldier admitting he signed up to feed his eleven brothers in Begusarai. He will instead insist that he did so for love of his nation, love of freedom or even love of Beloved Leader. Etcetera.

Most peculiar of all, Jesustanis marry for True Love. Not because to-be Husband-Ji wanted a fat dowry or was sick of the self-loathing caused by masturbating to fantasies about Bhabi-Ji, you see. Nor because Mummy-Jaan and Daddy-Jaan were making to-be Beast-of-Burden-Jaan’s life even more hellish than she imagined a life of servitude to a low-life halwai would be. Not because the condom didn’t work, nor because they were sick of being bitten by mosquitoes while furtively shagging in the North Delhi ridge. In other words, Jesustanis get married for no good reason at all.

The one good thing about this is that it generates a fair amount of high-grade tamasha.

In weeks to come, the United States Supreme Court, no less, will decide the fate of a minor TV star’s claim to her very rich, very stupid and very dead husband’s enormous fortune. In 1991, the senile oil tycoon J Howard Marshall II ran into Anna Nicole Smith – who used to call herself Vickie Hogan before she graced the centre-fold of Playboy magazine and starred in particularly third-rate afternoon TV shows – at a strip club in Texas. Ms. Smith was particularly down and out at the time: so down and out, in fact, that the strip club wouldn’t let her work in the evenings, before prime-time dirty old men, and had given her a slot in the afternoon instead.

We will never know, of course, just what drove J Howard Marshall II into the strip club that particular afternoon. He was, we have been told, also down and out. His wife had died, it is true, and so things were not so bad – but so had his mistress, because of a seizure she suffered while undergoing a facelift surgery. $150,000 down the tube, and nothing to show for it, and in that moment of darkness he bit. Before long, Howard Marshall II was buying Ms. Smith expensive jewellery and cars. He also paid for a pair of magnificent breasts that enabled Ms. Smith pull herself out of the strip club and on to the pages of Playboy.

By 1994, Ms. Smith had become something of a star model for products that needed endorsement by women of a certain age with breasts of a quite different age, notably Guess Jeans. What happened next? True Love, of course.

But Ms. Smith was not the only one who felt True Love for the millionaire. Marshall’s son, Pierce, was less than happy about the marriage, and even more so when his father died eight months later leaving her an enormous fortune. Various courts in Texas have held that the True Love Pierce felt for his father (who hadn’t even bothered to make a mention of the son in his autobiography) was greater than that his father felt for Ms. Smith, and therefore ordered therefore that the loot go to him. Another court in California, though, took a strong dislike for Mr. Pierce and ruled in Ms. Smith’s favour to the tune of $ 500,000,000.00 (sic.). Now, the Supreme Court, no less, will judge these claims.

Other courts have been hard at it too. Just last year, there was the case of Iryna Singerman, whose accountant husband seemed surprised to discover that the 22-year-old mail-order blonde from Ukraine had been banging a mystery millionaire who had given her a gold-coloured Mercedes. If it hadn’t been for self-delusion brought on by blind faith in True Love, the husband would have known this was precisely what accountants, bankers and other dead people ought to expect. And then there was the even sadder case of Richard Foster, a real-estate agent who was for some reason shocked to discover that his wife, having run up an $ 150,000 jewellery bill, decided that it was more fun hanging at Hollywood parties than with an ageing kaddoo.

Its rare you find anyone who sees through this True Love stuff, although my journeys through history led me to at least one Zen Master, the late Peggy Hopkins Joyce.

Born in 1893 to a small town barber in North Carolina, Joyce famously asserted that ”true love was a heavy diamond bracelet, preferably one that arrived with its price tag intact”. After one brief and disastrous marriage for love, she wed the youngest son of a wealthy Washington, D.C., family. Using the seed capital, she engineered another short-lived marriage to the millionaire James Stanley Joyce. It ended in a highly publicised, scandalous divorce, but by then the new Mrs. Joyce had made good. In the spring of 1920 alone, she spent $1 million in a single week, buying $300,000 worth of pearls, a $65,000 Russian sable coat and a $30,000 chinchilla. Three other divorces followed, punctuated by affairs with the likes of Charlie Chaplin. At 60, she entered her last marriage, this time to a bank clerk 20 years her junior: she had, by then, had her fill of travelling, in the words of one biographer, “from adventure to adventure, from country to country, and from man to man”.

I salute her: she was Queen-Ji, woman-e-awwal, chick-e-rustom, because she saw through the scam. In another world and another time, she would have been happy. “What a pity”, said Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, on hearing that the extremely rich, extremely old and extremely stupid widow of his best friend had died the previous day, “she would have been a fine catch the day before”. Thing is, even Christ suffered his agonies for the good of mankind. What's the point of being eaten alive for no reason at all?

Ways of Dying

2005-09-29T14:16:00.000-04:00

On the day he died, my friend Dr. J’s uncle had stepped out of his village home in Kerala for a crap. He felt the warm, tender caresses of a fine morning turd beginning to slither its way out of his innards – and then he felt no more. An enormous jackfruit fell from the tree that shaded his labours, smack bang on to the top of his head. And that was that.

At the funeral, I have no doubt, they had a lot to talk about.

Bar the odd hurricane – and even Beloved Leader cannot be counted on to be incompetent all of the time – the death of a Jesustani is for the most part a placid affair. Some, to be sure, are shot dead by demented juveniles or run over by drunks, but this, in terms of its conversational value, is much the same as departing this world laid out on a hospital bed. We Hindustanis, by contrast, die deaths of infinite variety: we are splattered on the sidewalk by Blue Line buses; eaten by leopards; knocked off motorcycles by runaway pigs; murdered by criminal tribes who rob only on full moon nights and defecate over the bodies of their victims. Even our diseases – Japanese Encephalitis or Leprosy or Cerebral Tuberculosis – have wide and colourful arrays of symptoms adequate to satisfy the most jaded of mourners.

And so, to compensate for the utter lifelessness of the manner of their death, the Jesustanis are getting to work on the means used to dispose of their mortal remains.

One method which is spreading like wildfire is advertised as offering the opportunity to be reborn as a flower. A less delicate way of putting it, of course, is that your body is turned into dung. Invented by a Swedish biologist named Susanne Wiigh, who learned early in her life that the Jesustani will pay almost anything for something that is both European-designed and of no practical use whatsoever, the method in essence consists of immersing corpses in a liquid nitrogen bath. At -200 degrees centigrade, the body turns brittle. A mechanical vibrator then breaks it into a pink-beige powder, which relatives scatter amongst the shrubbery. “For me”, Ms. Wiigh told The Washington Post last year, “its really romantic. It smells good. It feels like gold”.

Which makes you wonder just what Ms. Wiigh gets up to on Lyr, the romantic island resort on which she lives.

Only cutting-edge cremations, of course, end with dear old Uncle K. being dumped amidst the dahlias to be peed on by George the Cat or Emma the Dog. In Georgia, Florida and Texas, you can for a mere matter of $ 1,950 arrange to have yourself interred in a plot of land in a manner that is completely eco-friendly. Instead of a normal coffin (which would have set you back some $ 5,650) you have your body packaged in a biodegradable container – known to desis as a cardboard box – and carted off to the nearest bit of vacant forest. It all seems fairly romantic until it gets slushy, because then the box melts away and the congealed body starts to drip into the neighbourhood aquifers. If you’re smart, of course, you’ll do the dirty in a suitably distant city and even if you can’t, well, $ 3,700 will pay for enough single malt for you not to ever have to drink water again.

Even the manifest risks of ecological burials, though, haven’t been able to stop the flood of customers lining up to be disposed off in a planet-friendly way. Some places in Canada, or so I’m told by my mostly-addled informant, are demanding that the bio-degradable casket be further encased in a concrete cave, which begs the question of why anyone would indulge in this kind of silliness in the first place. Why not just burn the damn bodies, you might ask? Well, that would be a simple, sensible answer and for that very reason tens of thousands of Jesustanis have been protesting against cremations. Despite a mass of evidence to the contrary – Mary Roach, the author of that mind-boggling masterpiece Stiff, asserts that the pollution caused by an average crematorium isn’t that different from what is emitted from a restaurant grill – protests against crematoria have been mounting across Jesustan.

Is there an alternative?

Indianapolis-based Waste Reduction Inc. has a solution: a machine that might be described as a tissue digester. It uses giant pressure cookers to execute a process known as alkaline hydrolysis, which has been shown to liquefy a 700 kilogram cow into 35 kilograms of bone remnants and 1500 litres of a solution of water, sugar and fat within eight hours. The bones can easily be turned into dust; the solution into fertiliser or soap. Unlike traditional methods used to dispose of corpses, which can leave behind the Prions which cause dangerous conditions like Mad Cow Disease, Scrapie and Chronic Wasting Disease, tissue digestion generates products which are completely sterile. Problem is, no one seems to have thought of using alkaline hydrolysis on human corpses – although there is more than a little evidence that dead people are of greater danger to the health of humankind than dead cows.

It doesn’t take much to see just how much at variance all this is with our own attitudes to the transition to the next life: we bury our dead, burn them, leave them to rot on the streets, feed them to crocodiles or, where inconvenient ex-girlfriends are involved, stick them into the nearest tandoor. All this, though, is the consequence of mere necessity. Even in those parts of des where peculiar means are used to get rid of the dead – the Tibetans, for example, grind up corpses into keema which is fed to the local vultures – it is an act of desperation, in this case a reaction to the unfortunate habit corpses have of refusing to decay at high altitudes. And so we might laugh at the Jesustanis, and mock them. In fact, the truth is that great empires have always understood the value of life and reflected that in the ways in which they handle their dead. The Egyptians embalmed bodies; the ancient Babylonians and Persians stuck them into jars of honey and wax. We can build all the nuclear bombs and long-range missiles we like, but we will never be King until someone sets up a tissue digester in Greater Kailash II and we can mournfully watch Mrs. Khanna dissolve inside it.

Field-Marshal M. and His Mummy-Ji

2005-09-18T05:51:00.000-04:00

My darling friend Field-Marshal M., mard-e-awwal, shahenshah-e-mardangi (i.e. Real Man), has Jesustani feminists – along with those back home in des, of course – all atwitter. In a moment, I suspect, of single malt-fuelled candour, Field-Marshal M. claimed that women in des were arranging have themselves raped in order to be able to claim few million rupees in compensation loot and asylum in Canada.

Now, a lot has been said on the subject but no-one has pointed the finger of blame True North: it is all his Mummy-Ji’s fault.

How Now, I Hear You Cry! Fear Not I Shall Reply. Anon. Sabr, little ones, a few minor points of order, first.

To begin with, Field-Marshall M. isn’t right, but he will be, one of these days, if all these NGO types keep at it. As Kerala’s former Chief Minister, that good and great progressive EK Nayanar, once pointed out, women in des are raped with about the same frequency as government employees drink tea, which is all the time. If this is going to happen anyway, you may as well get something out of it. Given that life for desi women is fairly unliveable, the day isn’t far when women have themselves wheeled through Lajpat Nagar market laid out stark naked on vegetable carts, shouting ‘le lo, le lo’.

Second, Field-Marshal M., as his Mummy-Ji will tell you, didn’t mean to be insulting. His remarks reflect, rather, his legitimate resentment that every E-grade churi now has a free pass to Toronto while he, a man of such obvious merit, remains stuck in Islamabad. Its no secret that, what with large hairy Pathans setting off bombs under his buttocks ever third day, the Field-Marshal would love to escape his beloved watan. His problem is that no one will have him unless, of course, he manages to get himself raped, and even the mujahideen aren’t willing to sacrifice quite that much to enter the gates of heaven.

If Field-Marshall M. listened to me, instead of those low-life darbaris he chooses to patronise, I’d have shown him a way out. You see, Bonobo pygmy chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, use sex as a means of social bonding. Arousal isn’t the primary issue; showing gratitude is. Offer a Bonobo a banana and, as a Tanzanian friend who visited a wildlife park near Kinshasa recently found out, it will promptly offer nookie by way of thanks. All the Field-Marshall needs to do is fly to Kinshasa armed with a banana, feed the chimpanzees, and then wiggle his backside suggestively.

Making sure, of course, that there are four male witnesses to witness what will follow – and that the sounds he makes suggest pain, not pleasure.

And there’s the rub: he’ll like it, because it will be his most fevered wish come true.

You see, I’ve been thinking of late about the curious character of desi manhood. My Jesustani friend Ms. P., who is married to my Hindustani friend Mr. M (no relative of the manly-e-kaiser Field-Marshal) recently claimed that eight out of ten hetrosexual desi men are in fact closet homosexuals, and the other two out of ten are confused. I would have offered to put the theory to the test if Ms. P. wasn’t such a hideous majh, but before I could think up another means of empirically testing the proposition, her whining was seconded by a large number of mems.

Truth is, most Hindustani men never recover from being weaned. Mummy-Ji’s humongous tits are an overwhelming, life-long obsession. Try, if you don’t believe me, to refer casually to a desi man’s mother as hideous bitch, and see what happens. Soon after Munna is yanked away screaming from Mummy-Ji’s tits, he gets a pacifier in the form of a khoti. Now, the scheme sometimes falls apart at this point – vanaspati never tastes as good as asli ghee after all, and in the rare cases that it does, the asli ghee usually evicts the vanaspati, taking recourse to the time-tested two-litres-of-kerosene-and-a-nylon-sari method. Most often, though, the vanaspati reconciles itself to a second-class existence, sad but resigned to the fact that Husband-Ji hankers after ghee. Her turn, after all, will come.

Point is, when Munna gets down to putting his penis to use for purposes other than making pee-pee, he is stalked by the spectre of Mummy-Ji. His desire brings with a hideous darkness, guilt and remorse. Some desi men try and hide the scarlet stain on their soul through heavy-duty promiscuity, but this camouflage, like lipstick on a pig, hides nothing. Field-Marshal M. clearly suffers from an advanced form of Mummy-Ji fixation. Note that his mother, known to her friends as Bitch-in-Chief-Ji, tenderly reads the day’s newspapers to him each morning. Note that Mrs. M. does not. Note that Bitch-in-Chief-Ji accompanies him on long trips to New Delhi. Note that Mrs. M. stays at home and dusts the war trophies. Note that Field Marshal M. and Bitch-in-Chief-Ji have long conversations about life and the universe. Short of banging his mommy – like a demented brat in Lucknow was recently reported to have done – he couldn’t be more intimate with her.

Now, the Jesustani Mom might, like Mummy-Ji, also be demented, but her neurosis are of a very, very, very different order. Just last year, Patricia Johnson of Hermitage, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to a prison term after doing a strip-tease act for her thirteen year old son and three of his friends on the occasion of his birthday party. Apparently, the go-carts the kids had planned to take for a spin hadn’t showed up, and Ms. Johnson decided to provide alternate entertainment instead. She claimed it was all the fault of booze and pills, of course, but in vino veritas, as we all know. Point is, drip-fed on pop-psychology and easy-instalments plastic surgery, the Jesustani Mom seeks to make sex normal: to bring it out of the closet, along with the vacuum cleaner and clean sheets. Her enthusiasm for the project might be excessive, but at least it is all out there in the open.

No freedom from the closet for the Field Marshal, then. One of these days, someone is going to have to do the world a favour, and find a large hairy man willing to bugger him violently. The only other escape from Mummy-Ji, I fear, will be nuclear war.

Trivial Pursuits

2005-09-10T14:56:00.001-04:00

If you ever happen to be passing by the inner lanes of Nizamuddin just short of dawn, you might hear a desperate, heart-rending chirping: it is the sound of chicken realizing their karmic destiny and beginning their journey towards becoming tikka.

It was with not a little nostalgia that I responded to similar saliva-inducing twittering last week, emanating from inside the forbidding walls of the Smithsonian Institution. I still had a quarter of the bottle of Napoleon VSOP with which the night had begun left, but food was not to be found for love, for money, or by begging. So I walked inside, hoping not unreasonably that some fellow desi might be preparing breakfast.. What I saw shocked me sober, which takes some doing: the sound was not of pre-tikka chicken, but of dozens of parrots in the throes of having thermometers stuck up their buttocks.

Now why on earth would anyone be doing such a thing?

I wanted to know, of course, but no one would tell me until I threatened to dial 911. Knowing full well that zoophilia is frowned on in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian’s scientists finally talked. A great epidemic, I was told, was sweeping our planet, an answer to which had eluded the best scientific minds of Jesustan for years. At the end of last year, the last known example of the Po’o-uli, a bird discovered three decades ago, died in captivity. Thirteen other species of a type of bird known as the Hawaiian honeycreeper had also become instinct. Apparently, a form of malaria transmitted by mosquitoes which had made their way to Hawaii from East Asia was responsible for the decimation of these birds.

Jesustan’s scientists, who like their fellow countrymen seem to have trouble comprehending that the appropriate place for beast, fowl and wives is inside a tandoor, wept at this great calamity. Eric VanderWerf, of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, described the loss of the Po’o-uli as a tragedy similar to the destruction of “the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel”. George Fenwick, President of American Bird Conservancy, went one further, claiming the extinction of the Po’o-uli was “a global tragedy which is being ignored”. So they coughed up a few million dollars, and brought in the world’s leading authority on avian malaria, the Fabulous Dr. F., Ph.D, to find a solution.

Dr. F was a little reticent about discussing her work with me, despite my obvious charms and the offer of what was left of the Napoleon VSOP. I do not blame her, for the task she had been handed involved a certain, well, indelicate procedure. As all Hindustanis know, the principal symptom of malaria is a fever. For the Fabulous Dr. F to test the efficacy of her remedies, she had to be able to know whether the fever of her avian patients had diminished after her minstrations. Now, it is no use telling a bird, even if it is born in Jesustan and might therefore be expected to be English-medium, to open its mouth and say ‘aaaa…’.

And so there was just one thing to do, although Dr. F. did assure me she had done her best to choose birds which actually liked having thermometers rammed up their buttocks.

To us Hindustanis, of course, this smacks of excess. Sod birds: we’re for the most part unconcerned even about children dying because of Japanese encephalitis or tuberculosis or chronic malnutrition. Apart from that depressing rag Frontline, I haven’t come anyone whinging about what is in fact euthanasia, albeit involuntary. But the Jesustani, you must understand, isn’t moved by compassion either. You’re no more likely to catch Eric VanderWerf complaining about Japanese encephalitis than most desis, nor about Beloved Leader’s unfortunate enthusiasm for bombing half the planet.

Truth is, Jesustani science has become a trivial pursuit. Try raising funding for finding a cheap, one-shot cure for tuberculosis. Or real malaria, the kind people get in the third world. On the other hand, think of some suitably bizarre project, ideally involving rocks on a distant planet, and the loot will come rolling in.

An excessive assessment?

In 2003, scientists at Paignton Zoo attempted to test what is called the infinite monkey theorem, which states that there is a miniscule probability that the text of Hamlet could be assembled at random. The logical is as follows: ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalisation, and assuming a uniform distribution of letters, a monkey has one chance in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has one chance in 676 of typing the first two letters, and one chance in 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376, of typing the first twenty. To test the math, the good scientists left a keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques for a month. As might have been predicted with no great scientific training, the beasts produced five pages consisting of little other than the letter ‘s’, in addition to which they destroyed the keyboard with a stone, and proceeded to urinate and defecate upon it.

The monkeys, I’m sure you’ll agree, had a point. Most Jesustani science, sadly, doesn’t.

A Crime of Passion

2005-08-20T09:50:00.000-04:00

Of this I have long been certain: Rabb, our boss in this life as in the next, is a mean-spirited accountant: a third-rate bania, who taketh away with one hand what he giveth with the other.

Consider the facts: he gave White Master an empire and a wild and perverse sex life, but in return, took away his brain. Rabb condemned the Black Man to servitude and squalor, but he gave him an enormous penis. He gave the Japanese Man untold wealth and genius, but a peanut-sized penis. The Hindustani, it is true, was given no wealth, no genius, no empire and above all, no balls, but exceptions, as we all know, just prove the rule.

And the Jesustani?

My tale begins, as do all great true stories, with an unexplained death. A man was found lying dead in the middle of a farm outside the town of Enumclaw, some 45 miles south-east of Seattle – a quiet, colorless kind of place Tamil Brahmin staff at Microsoft choose to incarcerate their brats and their beasts of burden (in English, “wives”; Punjabi, “khotis”).

Detective Bob Smith began his investigations last month. Some facts were immediately became apparent. Mr. X. was dead. And he was stark naked. Apart from these two truths, however, nothing seemed to make sense. A horse stood near the corpse, as did some cows and sheep, but there were no human footmarks leading through the slush towards it. Nor did Mr. X.’s body bear the tell-tale marks of having been shot, strangled, or repeatedly hit over the head with a Dosa-making dish (which is a common form of homicide in Seattle, the result of the wives of the aforesaid Tamil Brahmins finally flipping).

Bob Smith was even more mystified when the forensic tests run on Mr. X.’s dead body came in. It turned out his colon had ruptured, spilling pee-pee into his blood-stream. Pee-Pee, as all Hindustanis know, is meant to be chilled and drunk for health reasons, not to be spilled into the blood stream; Mr. X.’s death had been an agonizing one. The victim did not, however, have any ailment which might have led this distasteful infusion of blood with pee-pee. Massive force had been used to rupture his colon – but it was clearly impossible for any human being to have inflicted this damage.

Bob Smith was, to put it mildly, befuddled: this was clearly a case for his old friend, Sub-Inspector Banta Singh. Banta Singh started, as the Punjab Police are wont to do, by interrogating all of Microsoft’s Hindustani employees, a villainous-looking bunch if there was ever one. Within half an hour of his ministrations beginning, however, they had all confessed to the crime (lack of balls, as I have earlier noted, is a condition endemic amongst Hindustani men). It seemed that the case had again reached a dead end. At this stage, however, Banta Singh’s genius led him to consider the video-camera positioned a few meters from Mr. X.’s body.

With this brilliant act of intuition, the entire case began to unravel. Mr. X., it turned out, had positioned and turned on the video-camera a few minutes before his death, filming his last moments for posterity. Even the most hardened Seattle policemen, the kinds of have seen dozens of Dosa-dish murders, blanched at the spectacle that unfolded before them:

19:17:06 hours: Tape rolls
19:19:08 hours: Mr. X. takes off his clothes.
19:21:02 hours: Mr. X. begins to play with the horse’s penis.
19:23:14 hours: The horse’s penis acquires the size and shape, as horse’s penises are wont to do, of a fire-hose.
19:24:18 hours: Mr. X. inserts the aforesaid fire-hose into his arse [the “tailpipe maneuver”]
19:24:20 hours: Mr. X emits squeals of ecstasy. The horse looks bored.
19:24:21 hours: Mr. X dies of massive colon rupture.
19:24:23 hours: Still bored, the horse wanders off.

Yes, dear readers: Mr. X. had quite literally been fucked to death. The horse was the active partner in an act of passion; Mr. X. the happy recipients of its loving minstrations. This was a crime of passion without parallel in the annals of crimes of passion. Even worse was soon discovered. The entire farm, it turned out, was one vast house of pleasure for zoophiles, inhabited exclusively by animals of a loose moral character. In Enumclaw, the cows were not kept to give milk, nor the chickens to lay eggs or the horses to break furrows. Instead, primped and perfumed by their owner, they seductively mooed and clucked for their customers. Washington state, you see, is one of the few provinces of Jesustan in which sex with animals is not illegal, and the enterprising owner of Passion Farm ran a nation-wide enterprise which took advantage of this legal loop-hole.

What we me learn from this? The Jesustani pervert is admirably law-abiding; this much is clear. And, as I have noted before, he is courageous, only too willing to give his life for love, as Heer did for Ranjha and Romeo for Juliet. Most important, though, the strange story of Passion Farm points us in the direction of the Jesustani’s fatal flaw: he practices both vice and virtue to excess, and does not know when enough is enough.

Is the Jesustani, then, just a Sardar? I leave it to you to decide.

Pervert's Progress

2005-07-11T14:29:00.000-04:00

Last month, a young lady of Louisville reported a tale of horror such that it would make the armpit-hair of any self-respecting, pure desi kudi stand on end. She had hailed a taxi to return home from the Fourth Street Live entertainment complex, a taxi which turned out to be the proverbial sheep’s clothing on a rapacious wolf, a villain and pervert named Martin Jackson.

Now, those of you who have watched films with titles like Hot White Chicks and Chadhti Jawani, or in the alternate have read the crime section of New Delhi’s newspapers, will know exactly what happened next. Martin Jackson stripped Our Lady Of Louisville down to her bra and panties, bound and blindfolded her and then… and then… and then… took pictures of her feet.

Yes, took pictures. Of her feet. And off she went, none the worse for wear.

Martin Jackson is not the only pervert to have been driven to these bizarre extremes. Not too long ago, in a wildlife park near the scenic town of Albany, New Hampshire, the police pulled out a 45-year-old man from the septic tank under a public toilet in a park, his chosen machan for peering at women's backsides. He was caught by a fourteen year old girl who saw him mired, quite literally, in shit (what she was doing peering down the toilet into the septic tank I do not know).

Arresting the man turned out to be a major military enterprise, only a touch less hazardous than the search for Osama bin-Laden. Special teams who deal with toxic waste were called in to wash down the man, since taking him to prison in that condition would have counted as a human rights abuse far in excess of anything seen at Abu Ghraib (of the other prisoners, that is). Even the very hard-bitten Captain Jon Hebert, an expert pervert-buster who I am told has seen more of the dregs of humanity that anyone in a thousand-kilometer radius of Caroll County, was obliged to say: “I started this business in 1980, and I have never in my career encountered anybody in this type of situation”.

It is hideous, isn’t it: that man should be reduced to drowning himself in tatti just to have the satisfaction of doing something that society forbids.

Truth is, there have been perverts since the dawn of humanity. Perverts derive both pride and pleasure from their perversions, i.e. their practice of practices other people do not practice. Nothing that is not unusual counts as a true perversion. Rape, for example, is not a perversion. As any criminologist will tell you, rape is a common community and family pastime, although particularly bored armies do practice it sometimes. To borrow from that great philosopher Bob Marley, “doctors do it, lawyers do it, and players of instruments, too”. Rape is completely mainstream, and, as my friend General Pervez Musharraf has recently tried to point out, barely even counts as crime.

Perverts, it is important to note, are not to be confused with deviants, deviants being the kinds of people who chop up infants with chainsaws, bugger little boys, or demolish perfectly good mosques from behind which you could, once upon a time, score some decent weed. Perverts are people of artistic sensibilities; deviants, on the other hand, are people whose sensibilities are in urgent need of 1,000 milligrams of Haloperidol, administered up the buttocks (turpentine and stinging nettle, for the ayurvedic-inclined, also works well, sometimes better than modern medicine. Turpentine was first experimented with to punish young men who got laid before I did, with gratifying results: first you convince them they have gonorrhea, then you tell them turpentine is a disinfectant, and then you call their Mummy-Ji to say that Munna’s killi suddenly looks like a sausage that has just been worked on with a cheese grater, not that I mean to give anyone ideas)

In Hindustan, we have plenty of good old-fashioned perverts: wander-stark-naked-down-Janpath-disguised-as-Hanuman-the-Monkey-God perverts, play-with-your-own-penis-in-public-places perverts, sit-for-the-Civil-Services-Exam perverts, etc. Our societies still offer plenty of opportunities for perverts, because our cultures forbid everything, on a point of principle. Taboo is the default option. Now, I know some people complain about this, but the fact is it serves a useful social purpose. Once upon a time, when White Master was White Master and the sun never set on his lands, the Angrez, too, was like us. Victorian pornographic post-cards, for example, carried images of men’s walking-sticks accidentally lifting up women’s tent-like skirts a few inches, and thus displaying their ankles. In nineteenth century London, the sight of a naked female ankle caused spontaneous ejaculations, as it still does in Doon School, Dehradun. A little perversion, it should be evident, saves all concerned a great deal of trouble.

In Jesustan, by contrast, liberty has wreaked havoc. Nothing is forbidden here, as readers of The Jesustan Diaries well know. Nudity in public places? Ho, hum, tedium. Whips and leather? Come on, get serious. Shagging animals? A lifestyle choice. Penis-cages? Passe! Sticking cigars up women’s vaginas? For god’s sake, the last King of Jesustan did it; even his successor, Beloved Leader, has never actually denied that he enjoys having cigars stuck up his butt, as long as it is not made in Cuba. So what is a poor pervert to do? The man in Albany could have peered up the backsides of as many naked women without diving into a septic tank, but his need to be a real, authentic pervert would not have been met. He would have just been one among many. He had to risk his health, even his life, to find satisfaction. Ditto, Martin Jackson.

These men are martyrs, martyrs of a society that has become so free that it is longer possible to break any rules.

Unless, of course you choose to to actually smoke a cigar instead of using it as a dildo, and ideally in a public place. Now that, ye, is a true, blue-blooded perversion, perhaps the last it is still possible to practice in Jesustan.

Holy Cow

2005-07-03T17:31:00.000-04:00

The worst thing about life in Jesustan, as I have said many a time, is that you have to use toilet paper.

The best thing about life in Jesustan is that you don’t have to tell lies, about anything. The Jesustanis are the most honest race on earth. Ghar-di-gal, qaum di izzat, badnami: all these shame-based notions which censor our thoughts and hide us from the light of truth are alien to these people. For the truth, howsoever unpleasant it might be, these people will give their wealth, their honor, and even their lives.

My thoughts on the subject were provoked by this fascinating exchange between the FOX radio chat-show host Alan Holmes, and the well-known anti-abortion Lashkar-e-Jesus fundamentalist Otis O’Neal Horsley, which aired in May:

HOLMES: You had sex with animals?
HORSLEY: Absolutely. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule.
HOLMES: I’m not so sure that that is so.
HORSLEY: You didn’t grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?
HOLMES: Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?
HORSLEY: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality.... Welcome to domestic life on the farm.

Consider it! What incredible, raw courage!!! Can you imagine the Kanchi Shankaracharya fessing up to buggering the friendly neighborhood cow, even in a moment of hormone-driven adolescent madness? Or the Shahi Imam admitting trying to sticking his penis into a well-endowed pig? Horsley might be hated by all right-thinking people for his religious fanaticism – but the truth is that he is at once a hero-e-awwal, shah of sachchaai, a true son of that very George Washington who admitted to cutting down the cherry tree for he could not lie.

Its no secret, of course, that certain numbers of people prefer sex with animals to sex with human beings. The Sunday Sport of December 15th, 1991, reported that a sex-starved wife from Sivas in Turkey was granted a divorce because her husband had fallen in love with her mule. Huriye Karacak, 42, had long suspected that husband Husamettin, 55, was being unfaithful because he stayed out night after night. She caught him, eventually, with his four-legged lover. Judge Selemi Ayyildiz granted a divorce after Hussamettin refused to sell the mule, saying “it’s beautiful and does not nag”.

Now, this sort of things happens in Hindustan as well. I remember this fellow in Amritsar’s Hall Bazaar who’d been caught screwing a Pomeranian bitch. No one seemed particularly surprised by this, which amazed me, until I learned that it is de rigueur for rural desijuveniles to have their way with the buffaloes while bathing them in the village pond. Urban desi juveniles, as is well known, bang the servant, whose social position is not dissimilar to that of the rural beast of burden. Indeed, it could be argued that zoophilia and homo- or hetero-philia aren’t all that different. Sex with some people, after all, is much the same as sex with an animal. Ask my friend R.’s wife. Or ask R. She calls him a dog; he calls her a cow; they are both completely right

But no one in Amritsar has ever left their wife for a buffalo, not that I know of anyway. It is because we, unlike White Master, do not have Big Balls. Some of us desis may shag animals, but it is only furtive and soulless sex; we do not have the courage to speak our love. Not so the white man, which is why he was Master and we but slaves. As early as 1468 AD, one Monsieur Jean Beisse was convicted of copulating with a cow and a goat. Jean, the cow and the goat were all burned at the stake. And yet the martyrs soldiered on. In 1601, for example, 16-year-old Caudine de Culam was convicted of intercourse with a dog. M. Vijon was burned at the stake in 1649 for having sex with a bird – how he managed it, I am not sure, but it presumably survived the incident, unlike Jean’s cow and Caudine’s dog.

Ever more soldiers for the truth went to the gallows cheerfully as the centuries ticked by. Cotton Mather’s seventeenth century memoir, The History of New England, describes the fate of a Weymouth man who was forced to watch as his lovers, i.e. three sheep, two sows, two heifers and a cow, were hanged, before he himself was executed. One authoritative website, www.zoophilia.net, contains this transcript from the trial of Nathaniel Moore, who was judicially executed for buggering a calf at around the same time. Robert Wyard, a prosecution witness:

… saw him buggering the said calf four or five times. In his action Nathaniel had the calf by the tail his yard thrusting into the calf several times, wiping his fingers on the calf's side and wiping it's breech with his hand.

[WYARD] Do you see what yonder fellow is doing? Who is it?
[HIS KHOTI] It is your servant Nathaniel. What a villain he is.
[WYARD] Villain. What are you doing here?
[MOORE] Nothing. Resting the calf. What should I do?
[WYARD] You villain, you lie, you’re buggering the calf and we stood looking at you.

Why was it, I wonder, that Wyard and his beast of burden, i.e. Mrs. Wyard, “stood looking at” Moore – was it envy, I wonder, or instead awe at the sheer beauty of the sight of man and calf entwined as one, in loving communion of soul and body? Having never had the opportunity to witness such a sight, I cannot say for certain. While we desis, like the gora, have sex with animals, we have no poetry or art that celebrates zoophilia. Michelangelo, on the other hand, painted that great masterpiece Leda and the Swan, (also known as Large Bird Banging Very Fat Woman, for the benefit of the unlettered amongst you) in 1530, when the price of such honesty was death.

Is there a desi alive who would dare do the same?

Verily, no!

Consider the treatment of camels by our fellow brown men, the Arabs. You see, Rab produced camels with a manufacturing defect, i.e., they’re not designed to go forth and multiply. The problems, my dear friend Dr. E. Hassnein of the Desert Research Centre in Cairo tells us, include “the limited libido of males and hence limited breeding opportunities, [and] the relatively short breeding season”.

And so, get the male going, it is “forced to turn on its side and its hind legs are tied together to facilitate receiving semen in the rubber cone and collection tube. A bovine probe (2 inches) is introduced rectally, after lubrication with jelly, and two electric impulses (12 volts and 180 mA) are applied for about 10 - 15 seconds each time with a rest of 2 - 3 minutes in between. Ejaculation often occurs after about 15 minutes”. All this, Dr. Hassnein says, creates a lot of problems notably that the “restraining of the male camel needs about 7 people” which causes “the male to coward and be afraid of any person approaching it.”

No bloody wonder; I’d “coward and be afraid” if I was held down by seven men and had an electric cattle prod stuck up my butt at regular intervals (I’m told that this a regular practice for first-year students at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, which just goes to show).

Where is the love, I ask you, the tenderness, the concern not just for yourself and your fellow man, but for your fellow species? We desis are just like the Arabs. We venerate the cow because its milk or its potty (or bits of its anatomy, for the so inclined) is of use to us; the dog because it barks at thieves (or its anatomy is of use to us); or the donkey because it carries loads (or its anatomy is of use to us). As we treat humans, so do we treat animals. The ways of the Jesustani may be a little, shall we say, inscrutable, but they are honest about them, and honesty is the font of righteousness. We have a long way to go before we may become god’s chosen people, a very, very long way indeed.

The End of Empire

2005-06-26T16:50:00.000-04:00

Lounging in my Jacuzzi last night, balancing a glass of 1975 Champagne Pol Roger Cuvée in one hand and entertaining my killi with the other, I contemplated the growing concern in Beloved Leader’s durbar that the great days of the Jesustan Empire might be drawing to a close.

Its true: they’re irreparably fucked.

For the past several weeks, the elders of Jesustan have been expressing alarm over the alarming unwillingness of their young to go forth and fight for their nation. In April, the numbers of those willing to sign up to kill for Motherland and Beloved Leader was 42% behind what is needed to stock the Red-Blue-and-White horde. One desperate military recruiter was recently taped telling a particularly demented brat just how he could hide a marijuana habit and fabricate a high-school degree so he might join up and thus avoid a prison rap.

Now, people have offered all kinds of facile explanations for this unwillingness of Jesustani youth to kill. Some claim the young have become soft. Bakwas! The youth of all lands are idle and feckless, which is why twelve-of-the-best, administered with a cane, whip or Prozac is a part of all cultures, from eastest-East to westest-West. What, then, is the problem? Is it, I wondered, the easy access to Pol Roger Cuvée, or other pleasure-giving substances more preferred by the young? Or the magnetic draw of playing with one’s killi, either by oneself or in company? None of these, though, are exclusively Jesustani pastimes. I was, I must confess, mystified.

Eureka!!!! Leaping from my bath, I rushed to my laptop, for light had dawned: it was the damned Jacuzzi. Carnality and champagne are but consequences of a far more profound seduction.

To understand this great insight, we must turn to the history of our erstwhile masters, the ferocious and feared Angrez. From their study of history, the Angrez had come to understood the perils of the bath. Consider the decline and fall of the Romans, who considered hygiene so important that they subsidized the construction of magnificent public baths where men and women washed together. Even the poorest Roman, the Angrez historian Edward Gibbon tells us, “could purchase, with a small copper coin, the daily enjoyment of a scene which might excite the envy of the Kings of Asia”. No prizes for guessing what happened next. The Romans arose and felt, after which they declined and fell.

From the fall of the ancient Romans, the early Christians, the forefathers of the Angrez, learned their lessons well. St. Benedict, Praise Be Upon Him, well understood that the caresses of warm water and fragrant soap would give rise to fevered, impure thoughts. “To those who are well”, he decreed, “and especially to the young, bathing shall seldom be permitted”. St. Agnes, who was martyred in fourth century Rome, took the injunction to heart; she never bathed, even once – which does suggest that her punishment for refusing to refute her Christian faith – i.e. being raped all night in a brothel before she was executed – would have involved some degree of discomfort for her tormentors as well. History is witness to the fact that the Angrez took the teachings of these early martyrs (St. Agnes that is, not the poor would-be rapists) to heart. In medieval Angrez cities, in addition to not bathing, the residents took a further step forward, and adopted the practice of throwing the contents of their chamber pots out on the streets: as in private, thus they would be in public.

And the Angrez were rewarded for their virtue, for they came to rule the world. How did this come about? Lust for loot, our intellectuals tell us. More bakwas!!! Nothing as base as lucre drives warrior races. The success of the White Master was a system of upbringing which drove his offspring into an unremitting frenzy which could be sated only with the spoils of conquest. First, White Master made his young eat a diet of raw beef and boiled cabbage, which induced in them a constant state of constipation, which in turn bred ceaseless ire and wrath. Then, White Master sent his offspring to English public schools, where they were turned into raving homosexuals. Then, they were told of tales of lithe, oiled bodies of natives whose buttocks were like peaches, and who ate strange spices which turned their killis into raging pythons.

Finally, there was the coup de grace: the cold shower in the unheated bathroom.

Imagine it, the constant horror of a life shaped by a ceaseless cycle of constipation, sexual torment – and then, cold showers. Now, the Angrez themselves allowed themselves to be seduced by the pleasures of the lands they conquered, and lapsed into the state of senile decadence that we witness now. The forefathers of the Jesustanis, however, saw the signs of this decline and fled the shores of White Master’s kingdom, determined to hold out against the degradation induced by warm water. Bathing was correctly understood as a hazard to both the physical and spiritual health of a true warrior race. In this land there was no tolerance for the perversions and debaucheries that were starting to invade Old Europe. Until 1820, not one of the homes in the fine town of Quincy, Massachusetts, had a bath. In 1845, the City of Boston forbade bathing by those not possessed of medical authorization. Some unfortunates did, of course, have to bath for reasons of health. Elizabeth Drinker, the wife of a well-respected Philadelphia Quaker, recorded of her course of treatment in 1799: “I bore it better than I expected, not having been wet all over at once for 28 years past”.

As late as the end of the Second World War, few homes in Jesustan had anything other than rudimentary showers and outside of the great metropolis, even these were rare. Bathing every day would have been unheard of. How things have changed. According to a recent survey, 42% of new and remodeled bathrooms in Jeusustan have bathtubs specifically designed for indolence, like the Jacuzzi or the Whirlpool. The Jesustanis spend more on their bathrooms than the ancient Romans. A basic bathtub with a bubble-jet cannot be had for less than $ 1,000; most new owners buy more elaborate models, which retail for more than $ 8,500. Is it mere coincidence that the first residential whirlpool bath was introduced by Jacuzzi in 1968 – the very period when Jesustan was to receive its first major military whipping, in Vietnam; when rebellion against the established order of things became rife; when the Jesustanis turned from being a great warrior race into aimless hedonists?

For the Jesustanis, I fear, it is too late: once seduced into the ways of the labyrinth of error, history tells us, few peoples ever discover a way out. I must confess, though, that I have emerged from this introspection with a new respect for the leaders of Hindustan. Is it any wonder that forbearers, obsessed with washing as they were, failed to build great empires? Some in Hindustan, a pox be upon these ignorant animals, have complained bitterly of the failure of municipal authorities to provide adequate water for bathing in this bitter season of heat and affliction. It is, I now realize, by design that our lords have so acted. All the young men of Hindustan have are two minutes to wash their bodies with a few mugs of tepid water drawn from a small plastic bucket – and another one to play with their penises while pretending to be soaping themselves, the real reason why adolescents in privacy-starved countries such as ours take baths.

It will not last for long: soon, the dam will burst and they will go forth and conquer. Our time of greatness is coming – slowly, perhaps, but I can say with confidence, surely. A little more deprivation is all we need.

The Death of Free Fuddi

2005-06-20T02:19:00.000-04:00

Perhaps it is already too late; in which case this will be but a lament. Perhaps, on the other hand, I am raising the alarm too soon; some future chronicler of our times might record that this dispatch was just the first of many warnings which were ignored.

Yet the truth must be told: and now is as good a time to tell it as any. A revolution is brewing in the farthest provinces of Jesustan which could destroy our civilization as we know it. Few men have risen themselves from their stupor to pay heed to these dark events; even fewer have understood their full import. The revolution that stares Jesustan in the face but from which it has chosen to turn its gaze threatens to strip free men of their greatest freedom: free pussy.

Alarmist? Indelicate? Even obscene? Forgive me, my readers, but there are no words but plain ones with which my tale can be told.

One of the less pleasant things about being an itinerant traveler in this part of the world is that it occasionally involves escorting the odd Hindustani who wishes to experience the real Jesustan. Which in turn involves something even worse: meeting the natives. Which in turn involves traveling somewhere where you cannot get a decent bottle of Montrachet Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, 1978, or a sliver of Caciocavallo Podolico for love or for money, and where the men wear Old Spice. You can even end up in places, incredible as it might sound, where they have never heard of Butter Chicken and Thunderbolt.

And so it was that I was assigned the dubious task of escorting Mr. K. across a little known part of Jesustan, the vast desert wastes of Nevada, in search of the untold wealth I had claimed in my reports to my masters in Hindustan litters the pavements of this land (I had lied, but I beg your indulgence; it is much more expensive than you would imagine to fund even a modest lifestyle in strange parts where loneliness will lead even men of sterling moral character such as myself to the odd indiscretion). Deviousness alone could save me. I turned to the services of a certain young lady named Saxophone Suzy, renowned for her skills at blowing on things other than musical instruments, to divert the attentions of Mr. K.

It all went rather well, apart from a few moment of embarrassment – caused when Mr. K. whipped out what he imagined in his alcohol-fuelled frenzy to be his fire-hose like penis, banged it on the bar-counter and demanded to know whether Saxophone Suzy likee killi (it cost a good deal of money to have all the glass shards pulled out of both Mr. K.’s killi and Saxophone Suzy’s face, not to mention the discomfiture of having to explain the situation to the staff of Reno General’s good doctors). Anyway, in the emergency room, Saxophone Suzy and I had the opportunity to discuss our respective miseries. “I have an offer for you”, she said, briefly raising the hope that she might be willing to transfer the services Mr. K. was by now in no position to have rendered to him.

It turned out the deal she had in mind was lot, lot better.

You see, it turned out an auction was to be held soon which offered us both a way out of servitude. Inez’s Bar is a well-frequented facility in the charming little town of Elko, Nevada. It has been in business for over a hundred years, and is something of a local landmark. It has a full bar and stockroom, and six immaculate, charming bedrooms. The facility was renovated in 1996, and, in addition to a computerized accounting system, has a fifteen foot concrete wheelchair ramp, which means it meets the access requirement of the American Disability Act. There is, of course, the minor matter of the neighbors. You see, Inez’s isn’t only a bar. Its also home to, well, ahem, ladies of a certain kind. It’s the Inez’ Bar and Brothel, (cat house, a whorehouse, a house of pleasure, a house of ill-repute, ho-house, take your pick) licensed, bilkul No. 1 dhanda, by the State of Nevada.

Don’t get me wrong. Elko itself is a wonderful little place. Northern Nevada has an extraordinary history, and the town has more museums per capital than any other place in the United States. It hosts a cowboy poetry festival each year, and was voted ‘Number One Small Town To Raise A Family’ in 1994, evidence if more was needed that happy children must have a happy father. Anyway, it turns out Nevada is littered with establishments of this kind, several of them on sale. There’s Angel’s Ladies, in Beatty, just a short drive from the famed Death Valley which in addition to its other assets comes complete with a vegetable garden and drip-irrigation system, for women (and men) who think cucumbers are better than men. For others with vegetable inclinations, or so I assume, there’s also the Cherry Patch Whore House; for the zoophile, there’s Chicken’s Inn.

Now, it turns out there’s a pretty penny, if you’ll excuse the unfortunate turn of phrase, to be made. Which isn’t surprising, because the services at these establishments aren’t cheap: a hand-job can start at $100, rising to $500 for what’s called a half-and-half, oral and straight . Specialties such as handcuffs-and-whips are extra, but people seem willing to pay. A gentleman named the Food Dude, for example, is a regular patron of the Bunny Ranch, and arrives weighed down with confectioneries which he pays upwards $ 20,000 to have two naked women throw at him. At other places, the sex isn’t the draw at all. Bella’s Gentlemen’s Club, for example, promises predictably enough that “the atmosphere is incredible”, but, less predictably, that “couples find the atmosphere to be very stimulating”. Lest you think Bella’s is suggesting something deviant, it hastens to add, “sexual participation is optional and available for additional fees”.

Bring Mummy-Ji. Bring Munna. Show the holiday photos to the Guptas.

From the scale of wealth-creation, it looks like a lot of people might be willing to go down that road. One prominent entrepreneur, Dennis Hof – the patron of a new Home Box Office reality show HBO show during which Sunset Thomas and Air Force Amy engage in what is advertised as recreational off-duty ghicchi with a double-headed dildo – pay pays $82,000 annually in license fees and property taxes to Lyon County. And that’s less than half of what one of his employees is reported to be able to make in a single year, after expenses. Expenses: employees must split their earnings with Mr. Hof and in addition pay $19 a day to rent rooms, eat, drink, exercise, tan, and to have their kids cared for. In other words, it’s a better paid job and a more supportive working environment than you’re likely to find in any major corporation: its not for nothing, after all, that Nevada’s working girls are legally described as “independent contractors”, and taxed as such.

What's so special about all this, you might ask? Isn't this just dollar-denominated randibaazi, Heera Mandi or Kamathipura in a MasterCard economy?

No, because an independent contractor isn't just an English-medium randi. She isn't a glorified Lot Lizard, an entity readers of these despatches will have encountered some months earlier [http://jesustandiaries.blogspot.com/2004/12/heera-mandi-on-highway.html]. Saxophone Suzy offered me a simple insight the motivations of independent contractors such as herself. Suzy-di-Mummy, like most married women, had spent an entire lifetime desultorily banging a loutish low-life lala, in return for nothing other than grief and the odd thrashing, when Suzy-da-Papa felt really affectionate. Saxophone Suzy spends her life banging loutish low-life lalas, too, but charges $ 400 an hour, which I have to agree is a much better deal. She works her own hours; she takes holidays when she felt like it, and her boss makes sure, in return for his 50% commission, that there’s considerably less risk of physical assault involved in independent contracting than in the average marriage.

Frankly, I find no rational reason for anyone to oppose Saxaphone Suzy's line of reasoning: other than that getting some is, I suspect, soon going to cost a lot more than dinner, sales tax and self-loathing induced by fake professions of love. It was in this land that they discovered that famous adage, "there’s no such thing as a free lunch". Soon, I suspect, there’ll be no such thing as free fuddi either. While the wheels of capitalism do grind slowly, they also grind exceedingly small.

The Joys of Handy-Handy

2005-06-13T19:50:00.000-04:00

“We have reason to believe”, wrote that great Pir Sir Charles Darwin at the end of his travels to far off lands and strange places, “that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation”.

Of the many great differences between my land and this one, the most profound and intimate is this: in Jesustan, it is perfectly acceptable for men and women, and men and men, and women and women, to squeeze, grope and fondle each others’ private parts in public. It is, however, forbidden, in the strongest possible terms, to squeeze, grope and fondle your own private parts in public. Even scratching your balls on a hot summer afternoon (that most elemental of Hindustani freedoms after the regrettable ongoing municipal and judicial assault on our right to piss where we please) is considered, well, gauche.

For a Hindustani like me, this attitude is a little mystifying. In our lands, squeezing, groping and fondling your beloved in a public place, if you survived the riot that would most likely break out, would result in a flogging by the village Panchayat or, at the very least, the payment of a equally painful bribe to the staff of the nearest police station. On the other hand, as any woman who has ever traveled on a Delhi Transport Corporation bus will attest, it is perfectly acceptable for men to play with their penises in public: no one will bat an eyelid.

That which is forbidden is, of course, the stuff of fantasy, the font of creativity. In Hindustan, we have an endless and rich seam of slang for sex and sexual organs, where the Jesustanis have but few. But Jesustanis beat us hands down on words and phrases that describe the fine art of masturbating: jacking off, wanking, jizzing, spooging, shooting your wad, beating the bishop, milking the lizard, spanking the monkey, choking the chicken (for some of these terms, I can think of no reasonable origin, short of another regrettable Jesustani habit, zoophilia, but more on that subject some other time).

I wonder why this is so. A social historian I questioned suggested that it might have to do with our varying demographic and economic conditions. In Hindustan, we have too many offspring and too little wealth, hence masturbation is encouraged. In Jesustan, on the other hand, they have too few offspring and too much wealth, and therefore frown on the spilling of seed upon the ground. A psychologist acquaintance argued that for the Hindustani, child of an overcrowded and intrusive society, masturbation was a moment of retreat and solitude; the Jesustani, the product of anomie, looked to the gang-bang instead for what he could not find in his pitilessly asocial existence.

Now, the interesting thing is that there are some in Jesustan who would like it to be more like Hindustan, in the matter of fornication, anyway. A welter of extremist organizations, including the Jesustaliban, the Lashkar-e-Jesus, and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Jesus, are committed to stamping out fornication before and outside of marriage. One group, True Love Waits, is rumored to have made at least 100,000 young people sign a pledge of abstinence. It is obviously a growing business, since full-color credit-card sized True Love Waits pledge forms retail for $5.99 for 20, more expensive than that one commodity desired more by deviant teenagers than sex, cigarettes (inside which other things can then be stuffed).

But what, I hear you ask, does masturbation have to do with chastity? Surely, if you don't want the brats to spend their time banging each other, you'd be best off letting them fiddle with their own bits instead? Aye, there’s the rub… so to speak, of course, so to speak. The authoritative Lashkar-e-Jesus website, Bible.com, notes that masturbation merely “creates a deeper desire and capacity for sex, which will lead to more masturbation. If you let yourself become enslaved to a sexual high, you will find that you need to go to increasingly extreme acts to maintain the same degree of excitement. There are even ungodly sex therapists who recommend masturbation as a way of increasing sexual desire, not lessening it. This creates a vicious circle, like the junkie who craves a fix.”

But, as a True Love Waits-recommended book asks, in a “world filled with pornography, sexual innuendo, and alternative lifestyles, how can a student hope to keep pure in body and mind”? Well, the Mormon Church-affiliated expert, Mark E. Petersen, in an essay written circa. 1970 and still widely circulated by the Jesustaliban, offered several useful solutions to the problem of masturbation, some of which I have reproduced below:

During your toileting and shower activities leave the bathroom door or shower curtain partly open, to discourage being alone in total privacy. Take cool brief showers.

It is sometimes helpful to have a physical object to use in overcoming this problem. A Bible, firmly held in hand, even in bed at night has proven helpful in extreme cases.

In very severe cases it may be necessary to tie a hand to the bed frame with a tie in order that the habit of masturbating in a semi-sleep condition can be broken. This can also be accomplished by wearing several layers of clothing which would be difficult to remove while half-asleep.

and my personal favorite:

When the temptation to masturbate is strong, yell “STOP” to those thoughts as loudly as you can in your mind and then recite a pre-chosen Scripture or sing an inspirational hymn.

An epiphany! Mahatma Gandhi, when he sought to test the strength of his renunciation of desire, surrounded himself by naked women and then, or so the story as told by an eminent historian claims, “stared his erection into submission”. The Jesustani, as befits a virile civilization which values rugged, manly individualism above all, must stare his erection into submission in solitude, all by himself. The demons of the Jesustani’s secular world are the houris within, not the houris without.

Will the Jesustaliban win? The signs, I fear, are that virtue is loosing the battle. The Washington Post recently reported that large numbers of the brats True Love Waits-type virginity pledges claimed buggery and blow-jobs did not count as sex, as neat a bit of pambhiri and fraud as even I ever managed at school. From the mouths of innocents and babes comes the truth. As befits my years and greater wisdom, I shall go one step further: masturbation is the hope of the nations. A little handy-handy never hurt anybody. My killi never asked to be taken out to dinner, never ever complained that I never called, and absolutely never threw perfectly good crockery at me.

Mera haath Jagannath: my hand is god; and god is in my hand.

A Post-Script: A gora reader has written to The Jesustan Diaries, asking what a chutiya might be. Contributions to the cause of education are solicited.

Fidelity: The Final Solution

2005-06-06T16:41:00.000-04:00

In Jesustan, they have an answer for everything. And if they don’t, they will invent one in short order, of this much you can be sure.

At a little desi do the other night, the very, very luscious Mrs. R was going on about her husband’s long and lamentable record of martial infidelity. I volunteered my services, as any gentleman would have done, to help her settle the score; this only served to send her off on another round of hysterical sobbing, this time even more inconsolable than the last. Mrs. E., the only gori present, intervened in her usual quiet, efficient way: “don’t worry”, she told Mrs. R. earnestly, “there is a way”.

Yeah, sure. Short of amputation, there was no way Mr. R was going to keep his killi out of the nearest available honey. Fidelity, as we all know, is one of those great problems humanity has grappled with since time immemorial. Sultan Shariyar, of The Arabian Nights, lopped off his Queen-Ji’s head, as have many others since. All to no avail!! More recently, Lorena Bobbitt went for her husband’s killi with the garden shears – she served time; he ended up becoming a porn-star. Taliban clerics hid all the local maal inside mobile tents, only to discover that the Pathans simply turned to buggering the pretty little boys of Banno’s market en-masse. Foiled again!!!

Some, like the nomads of the Pamirs, gave up fighting the inevitable centuries ago. Marco Polo tells us that their hospitality extended to the sharing of their wives and daughters with visitors. National Geographic claims this was intended to widen the gene-pool of their communities, a dubious argument if there was ever one, since I doubt very much that the smelly peasants of those parts either knew or know what a gene is. More likely, the village Panchayat just bowed to the inevitable, and decided to do away with the main consequence of proscribing infidelity, i.e. deceit. Personally, I think my neighbors in New Delhi ought to do the same thing; it would certainly make the lives of Mr. S and Mrs. K, and Mr. P and Mrs. J, and Mr. Q and Mr. N. a lot less complicated, not to mention that of Mrs. N and Ram Lal, the gardener.

But Mrs. E wasn’t suggesting either resignation or rebellion, it turned out: just a little bit of shopping. In Jesustan, it turned out, several fine models of male chastity devices are available on the market. The British manufacturer Tollyboy retails what one discerning consumer described to me as the “Rolls Royce of chastity belts”. For a mere matter of $637.00 or ∈479.00,exclusive of taxes and shipping, it ensures both fidelity and comfort. Tollyboy’s ingenious MB 100 model incorporates a “component into which the penis is inserted; it is then engaged internally into the crotch guard, which is then locked to the waistband. In this design the penis is held pointing downwards and backwards between the legs, which prevents an erection but allows the wearer to urinate without any problem - except that he has to sit like a female. Once the sheath is locked into position the penis cannot be handled. The belt is 100% effective in preventing intercourse”.

As is fitting in a free market, a number of competing models are also available for those who must balance the need to protect the family jewels with fiscal prudence. Northbound Leather, for example, provides “an adjustable leather waist band locks at four points - two at the waist, on the crotch strap, and at the hinged cage. The stainless steel penis cage is hinged at the bottom. When locked closed, the cage contains the penis in the vertical position. A full erection is possible, allowing touch, but no stroking. Four brass padlocks are provided”. Unlike users of Tollyboy’s high-end wares, those who use products manufactured by Northbound must suffer the indignity of an embarrassing bulge, but the difference in price is substantial. Models SKU 6059 and SKU CH1 sell for just $ 191.11, a price at which, the manufacturer claims, “fidelity can be fun”.

It all made me think of the sad story of my friend P, from Canada, and his search for a khoti (she-donkey, beast of burden, wife). Like all sensible Punjabi mundas in Canada, P was a bit dubious about the chastity of the local chicks, and with good reason. He decided to turn to saada Punjab, where the ganna grows tall and the kudis are pure. P knew, though, that things had changed in saada Punjab, too, and that he needed some way to make sure the goods being sold were, so to speak, as described. Since a test-drive was out of the question, this being saada Punjab, I used my formidable intellect to devise an alternate line of investigation. After he visited the prospective khoti’s house, I suggested, had finished drinking the tea and eating the samosa and jalebi he would be offered, and had made sure Daddy-in-Law-Ji’s bank balance was in order, he needed to take the girl aside and whip out his killi. If she knew what it was, I pointed out with my usual impeccable logic, she wasn’t no pure kudi.

At the first place P visited, he was almost taken in by appearances – until the kudi thwacked him across the face, and demanded to know why he was showing her his penis. Despite her demure appearance, she was obviously no pure kudi. Cancelled!!! Ditto the second place. Ditto the third. And ditto the ninety-third. It was starting to look as if there weren’t any pure kudis left even in saada Punjab, when P visited this prospect in a tiny little village across the mountains, across the Ravi, across the Beas, etc., you get the idea. The samosa, jalebi and bank-balance stuff went pretty much as planned, and P, not without some trepidation, took the girl aside. To his astonishment, though, she didn’t smack him across the face at first sight of his penis. When he recovered from the shock enough to ask her what the object in his hand was, she replied that it must be some kind of khilona, or toy.

Bells, Applause, Marriage!!! And then, on his wedding night, Pinky pulled down his silken Fab-India pajamas, and asked his wife what the magnificent organ before her was. “I told you before, ji”, she replied, “it’s a toy or something. I’ve never seen one before”. “No, my love”, Pinky said, his chest and his erection both swelling, “this ain’t no toy, it’s a penis”. “No, ji”, she replied, “what the barber’s son had was a penis, this is just a toy”.

P hasn’t talked to me a lot since.

A Dog's Death

2005-05-29T14:14:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, I was awakened by a wretched, inconsolable wailing, the kind my noise my mother made after my 12th-standard examination results came in. I knew at once that it could not be coming from the home of my aged neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. M; had either of them keeled over, the survivor would more likely than not have been breaking out some of that exceptional 1999 Barolo-Ciabot Mentin Ginestra kept in the cellar for just such an occasion.

It turned out that a loathsome couple who live across the road – you know the type, 1.83 children fed on organic groceries, two cars, $90,837,468,947,567.99 post-tax annual income, makers of regular tax-deductible contributions to the famine-stricken in Ethiopia – had lost their prized Pomeranian bitch. Having come under the wheels of a large four-wheel drive Mercedes, the beast was flat as a sheet of cardboard. By the time I showed up to see what the to-do was all about, Brat 0.83 was being carted off in a straitjacket for psychoanalysis (Brat 1.0, having been lobotomized with generous doses of Prozac some months earlier, was wearing his usual manic grin but was otherwise placid). Daddy Dear, as is de rigueur for New Men, had tears rolling down his cheeks; Mommy Dear, as befits a New Woman, had an ashen but firm-chinned look, like Cary Grant in The Lonely Heart.

Now, I’ve seen perfectly sane Hindustanis get all tight about Pomeranian bitches, so I wasn’t as taken by surprise by this tamasha as you might imagine. My sometime friend General B., who possessed two of the finest, was deeply concerned about the threat to their chastity posed by the virile street-dogs of Leh. Using his considerable influence, he had what appeared to be an entire regiment of Naga troops posted around his home, thus ensuring any roadside dogs who attempted to outrage the modesty ended up up as dinner. I have to add, though, that General B.’s concern was purely pragmatic: he didn’t want his daughter’s chastity violated, since she’d then cost him a prettier-than-usual penny on the marriage market; and he didn’t want the bitches’ chastity violated, since he needed pure-bred puppies to pay for beti-jaan’s dowry.

What did startle me, though, was that the to-do wasn’t about the fact that my neighbors’ Pomeranian had died without becoming the mother of a thousand sons, thus robbing Daddy Dear and Mommy Dear of the means to gather the vast loot they will without dispute have to cough up to get their idiot offspring into Harvard. It was grief, plain and simple. In between bouts of sobbing, what conversation there was centered around the grim business of the mortal remains the kuttiya-jaan. It turned out Daddy Dear and Mommy Dear couldn’t abide burying the dead beast, while 1.0 and 0.83 had a problem with cremating it. I helpfully suggested that they try selling the carcass to the Korean restaurant up the road, and thus make the best of a bad deal, but what seemed to me to be eminently pragmatic elicited only disgusted looks from the goras.

“Why not freeze-dry it”, someone suggested? What? I gagged on the fourth single-malt I had helped myself to in an effort to still my grief at my neighbors’ loss (ahem, ‘nuff said), certain that if my humble suggestion had seemed tasteless to the natives, this would without doubt lead to violence. To my horror, promptly everyone agreed that this was a wonderful idea. It turned out there are a large number of establishments that specialize in freeze-drying dead animals, so that their owners can gaze upon their amazingly life-like corpses with love and tenderness. Half an hour later, some ghoulish-looking fellow showed up to do the needful, bearing with him both the implements of his trade and a large numbers of testimonials about the joys his company had provided to hundreds of bereaved pet-owners. “We loved him so much”, one couple had written of their dead cat, Snuffy, who is perched for all time to come on their mantlepiece, “and to have him back is great!!”

I asked my native guides to make some discreet inquiries about the costs involved in this bizarre enterprise. Starting at $375.99 for a carcass weighing up to 1.5 kilograms, the price can run up to $ 575.99 for a beast of up to 5 kilograms, and an additional $ 100.99 for every additional kilogram. Apparently, each year thousands of loved pets are by this means restored to life, or a sit-in-one-place fashion of it (which is arguably better, given the manners of some animals and their people). It also turned out that Jesustanis lavish on live dogs as much as they do on dead ones: people buy dog toothpaste ($4.99 each, $47.99 for a dozen), dog cosmetics ($39.99 upwards), dog jewelry ($69.99 upwards) and even the services of plastic surgeons to address their self-esteem issues. There are dog psychoanalysts, dog stylists, and dog…

No, wait a minute, there aren’t!!!!!

Unlike in Hindustan, Jesustanis do not allow their dogs to copulate in public, which does rather open up the question of how these poor animals ever get any, you know, relief. I mean, being taken to the breeder once a year for a soulless five-minute fuck wouldn’t bring any joy into your life, would it? Just ask the millions of women in Hindustan condemned to precisely that fate. Opportunity knocks! I remember this fine young woman at an agricultural fair in Chandigarh some years ago, who was demonstrating the means used to obtain semen from pigs for the purposes of artificial insemination (for those of you so inclined, it involved a lubricated rubber tube, 'nuff said, again). She was surrounded by hundreds of mesmerized peasants, all in advanced stages of pig-envy. I’m sure I have her number somewhere. All I need is a financier, and then I too will be well on my way to a wife, 1.83 brats, and a post-tax income of $90,837,468,947,567.99.

Sodom, Gomorrah, and the Soul of Jesustan

2005-05-23T17:08:00.000-04:00

The soul of a nation, wrote that great traveler Marco Polo, lies in its countryside.

Before some educated chutiya takes objection: all right, he didn’t say anything of the kind. But someone else did, and for all we know, Marco Polo might have also done so while he was shagging shepherds’ wives in Outer Mongolia. Anyway, whoever said it, it is true.

Last weekend, while I was drowning my many sorrows in some of The Big Hunt’s finest, leering at undergraduates, and generally minding my own business, I was accosted by a Jesustani (who are not in general a people who respect privacy). Like me, it turned out, he was a visitor to this big city, here on business to do with his occupation as an organizer for Beloved Leader’s party.

My new-found acquaintance turned out to be deeply disturbed by what he saw unfolding before us. Hindustan, he told me, had it right. Men did not snog other men, at least not in public places. Women did not talk back. And the lower orders did not let loose at the master race with Uzis, at least not if they weren’t looking to get lynched. Etc.

In Jesustan, he said, there were still places, across the prairies, across the hills, across the rivers, and across the I-95 highway, where all was as it ought to be: lands where men were men and the sheep were nervous. There, he went on, lived the sterling yeomen followers of Beloved Leaders, the real men and real women who had voted back to power earlier this year, in defense of their values. If I wished to see the real Jesustan, my acquaintance said, I would find it there.

So off I went the next morning, disguised by way of caution as a native, with the aid of industrial quantities of Fair and Lovely Facial Cream (Jesustanis in the provinces, my native guides had warned me, are suspicious these days of little brown people, and their fright can sometimes turn to violence). I could not travel on horseback, as Marco Polo would have, but instead used Amtrak. It was a little slower than horseback, given the unfortunate state of Jesustan’s railway infrastructure, but none the less quite satisfactory.

After a long journey, during which I had to endure many privations, I finally arrived at Montandon, in rural Pennsylvania. Deceived by my disguise, the natives greeted me with considerable warmth, and guided me to a place where I might rest. Along the way, I was stopped short by a large board which read “Sodom School”. I jest not: that is precisely what was written. Behind the board was a large octagonal stone building, shaped in a somewhat phallic manner, like a shivling on steroids (the Jesustanis like large things; it compensates for what they do not have, if you get my drift).

It turned out Montandon had been founded by a person named Lot Carson, who had set up a hotel along the road to cater for gentleman-travelers on the high road from Northumberland to Milton who found themselves in need of feminine company. Carson met a sad end, having fallen into a well under the influence of hard spirits, but the Jesustanis venerate their ancestors and did not let his memory die. In 1814, the aforesaid phallus-shaped building was erected as a memorial, which served both as – and here I quote the very reliable Tourist Guide to Central Pennsylvania – “as a schoolhouse and place of worship”.

A place of worship? A schoolhouse? My mind boggled, but aware of my perilous circumstances, I said nothing. More surprises soon greeted me. My informant turned out to be right on at least one count; no Montandon men could be seen in various stages of passionate lip-lock. All the graduates of Sodom School were cloistered in an establishment known as Mustang Sally’s, watching naked women in various stages of passionate lip-lock. I now understood why the followers of Beloved Leader, who have crusaded against men violating the natural order of things, had said not one word about women who violated the natural order of things: lesbian erotica alone stood between Jesustan and an epidemic of buggery.

I had little rest that night, and not only because the images of the melon-breasted lesbians haunted my dreams. The staccato sounds of gunfire interrupted my slumber every few minutes, causing me much unease. It turned out the nearby town of Williamsport had been facing considerable problems with gun-related incidents after its bars closed, the reasons for which no-one had quite deciphered. I ventured to suggest that an advertisement I had seen on a place-mat at Mustang Sally’s might hold the answer. Placed by Messrs. Troxells Sporting Goods, dealers in handguns, rifles and shotguns, it proudly proclaimed: “We sell wholesale to Anyone” [sic., capital A]. It even provided a helpful 24-hour toll-free number for those in need of such transactions: 1-800-339-1562

No native, however, would agree that it was imprudent to sell weapons wholesale to juveniles crazed by an education in Sodom School, and brought to the edge of dementia by the cavorting lesbians at Mustang Sally’s. To them, the right to bear weapons not only served the useful purpose of protecting their womenfolk and themselves from black men with gigantic penises, but were also an affirmation of manhood: a signifier that they were different from those fags and perverts in the big cities. I said nothing; there was nothing to say. I remained silent all the way back to my base camp. I had seen the soul of Jesustan, and it was, indecipherable. Mysterious. Inscrutable. And, well, eccentric.

A post-script on my privations: should any future traveler choose to follow my example, and venture forth to Montandon, do not eat at the local doughnut-and-coffee shops. Diarrhea is, of course, an occupation hazard of the professional traveler, but the fact that Jesustanis wipe their buttocks with toilet paper rather than wash it with water creates special problems. My backside now feels like a piece of plywood must after it is sandpapered and then gone at with chisel and hammer. In addition, it is bright red, like langur’s buttocks, and there is no nice desi kudi to gently minister to it with coconut oil. Your servant is desolate.

On Swimsuits and Shame

2005-05-15T13:27:00.000-04:00

For decades, one small village held out against the tide of shamlessness that had enveloped Jesustan. Cape May in New Jersey has finally fallen. I am uncertain as to whether I should respond to the death of sharam with a loud haaw, Rabba! or whether I should first wipe dry the river of drool running off my lips: perhaps it is best, though, that I proceed with my tale before I run to buy a bus ticket to witness the apocalypse first hand.

It all began in the 1960s, when the young of Jesustan began to realize that wearing clothes in the summer serves no useful purpose. Life in Cape May became impossible, not the least because the loud factory-whistle sound of steam blowing out of its elderly citizens’ ears made normal conversation impossible. Driven to great roiling frenzies of un-sated lust by the spectacle of kudis and mundas clad in nothing but colorful underwear – if that – the venerable gentlefolk who sat on the Panchayat of Cap May decided they could take it no longer.

After a great deal of debate (a very great deal, because much of it was inaudible owing to the loud whistling sound and sentences had often to be repeated) the Cape May Panchayat determined that there was no other way to deal with the situation other than by unleashing the full wrath of the law upon the problem. Laws were passed that required men and women to cavort upon its beaches at separate times, and then only if clad in long wool suits that covered all but their faces and feet. For most residents of Cape May, I am told, this was a great convenience, since most, like their brethren in Taliban-ruled Kabul, dressed in this fashion at all times, and now did not have to change before taking a swim.

The Afghans, I see, are still holding out, but Cape May, alas, has been driven by the temptation of filthy lucre to resile from its magnificent defiance. Anyone may now frolic in the skimpiest of swimsuits on the beaches of Cape May, without fear of interference by its Saudi Arabia-style mutaween, or religious police. An era has passed, and along with it earning opportunities for the Cape May mutaween and wool-merchants. Yet this sacrifice, Cape May’s Panchayat seems to believe, is worth making. Its residents long for the freedoms they relinquished so many decades ago, and to join in the liberty and freedom of spirit represented by bikinis and Speedo swim-suits.

Freedom? Not everyone is enthused by the winds of change sweeping Cape May. Some of my native guides have objected to it on aesthetic grounds, noting that concealing all is more times than not a gift both to the individual and to the community. It is unlikely, after all, that Brad Pitt or Charlize Theron will grace Cape May in the summer. Compelling the Jesustani equivalents of our Hindustani Mr. & Mrs. English-speaking Halwai to cover up their sagging extremities is a service to both God and humankind, it is argued. Others note that the minimalist swimsuit will bring with it the ghost of the Grim Reaper: the fate of Cape May’s more elderly denizens is likely to be that of a pressure cooker whose gasket has had its day.

I cannot but note, though, that we in Hindustan have a more relaxed attitude to the human body. As long as they claim either to be insane or deeply religious, which amounts to much the same thing, individuals are free to wander the streets of New Delhi or Bombay stark naked; no-one will bat an eyelid. On the other hand, as any woman who had boarded a bus in Delhi will attest, the fact that she may be wearing a tent is no defense against sexual predators; they know the object of desire is what lies within. And, unlike the denizens of Cape May, we strongly resist efforts to interfere with our God-given sexual liberties, like groping women on buses. A social worker in Dhar, recently tried to impress on residents of the village of Dhangarh that the rape of eight year old girls, even if it was marital rape, was a bad idea. The interfering cow promptly had her arms chopped off.

All of which should bring us, I cannot help thinking, to some great wisdom about sharam and besharmi, but I have none to offer. As I prepare to witness the elderly of Cape May keel over, I cannot but help recall the sad story of my friend Mr. G., who although not a resident of Dhar, married a woman many decades his junior. On their wedding night, she cried for she had no idea what to do. He cried too, for he had forgotten what to do.

The Great Outdoors

2005-05-08T12:41:00.000-04:00

I’m not, I confess, a Real Man. My idea of the outdoors is a lawn in Chandigarh where you can smoke a fine cigar at leisure and tell the mundu to hurry back with another whiskey, and none of that chhota peg rubbish, thank you.

Some years ago, on a visit to Kashmir, I gave fishing a go, egged on by (a) a woman, who else, and (b) a sadistic fuck of a tour guide. It ended, as I knew before it began, i.e. sadly. I caught no fish. To add insult to injury, a some filthy peasant arrived at the banks of the Lidder just as I was leaving, casually tossed a stick of dynamite inside, and looked pityingly at my Rs. 23,000 worth of fishing gear as dozens of fine trout floated to the top. I had him flogged, but it was a pyrrhic victory: the woman promptly ran off with the peasant, and the tour guide with my money.

Ah, well, such is life. You can understand, I am sure, why it was with some trepidation that I finally allowed myself to be talked into having a go at deer hunting, Jesustan style. It is, at one level, much the same as at home. You lift up your weapon, peer through your sights, wish that what you were looking at was your wife, and blow the hapless animal away. It is indeed uplifting. Until recently, however, this shahi pursuit involved braving the cold, fighting off insects, and generally rolling around in the mud (as distinct from rolling in the hay, an altogether different sport involving wenches) – none of which gentleman-travelers such as myself are wont to do.

Now, a fine fellow named John Lockwood from Texas has put an end to all this nonsense. Lockwood has peppered various forests with Remington hunting rifles mounted on automated tripods, connected to cameras which are in turn controlled by computers. All you have to do is pay Lockwood the price of a down-market lunch, log on to his website, watch the deer traipse delicately through the sleepy woods, take aim, and then control-click. For a fee, Lockwood will deliver the remains to you, smoked and salted. Alternately, you can have your prey mounted, and then brag about your hunting skills to the idle rich of Greater Kailash II; none of the lalas will be any the wiser.

All of this is a great improvement on our ways at home. Hunting in Hindustan is a complicated business; only Real Men should attempt it:

First, you have to bribe the forest guards at Corbett National Park.

Then, you have to wait until they bribe their boss, who is usually some self-important twit who masks the fact that he is wetting himself at the thought of the CBI and Menaka Gandhi pulling out his toenails by being difficult.

Then, you head out into the bushes and wait endlessly for some suitably clueless and slow-moving beast to show up. More often than not, your wait is indeed endless because mobs of morons, having got to Corbett first, have decimated the wildlife.

Then, you have to load the dead animal into the back of your jeep and drive off before the cops arrive, asking for more loot (Some chaps choose to fly off in helicopters instead, but that costs even more than escaping the tender caresses of the thanedaar).

Then, you have to get rid of the dead animal at some uninhabited spot, mainly because Hindustani wives have a wholly unreasonable attitude to roasting bloody carcasses in the kitchen (I suspect it reminds them of the fate of so many of their sisters; you know, the nylon sari and kerosene thing).

Hunting in Jesustan is lot easier and a lot more fun, but also a lot more dangerous. Again, only Real Men should attempt it:

First, you get a gun. A high-velocity rifle, which only the more demented kinds of Faujis get to use in Hindustan, can be bought off the shelf for a couple of hundred dollars. However, some states have regulations barring the sale of lethal weapons to teenagers, self-confessed psychopaths, and, how does one put this delicately, the generally non compos mentis – in other words, four-fifths of the gun-owning population. If you fall into any of these categories, however, you can usually score a perfectly serviceable Uzi or M-16 in any of the more sordid parts of Washington DC, New York or Los Angeles; just ask at any street corner, but remember to put it in single-shot mode before you let fly.

Then you get a hunting permit, US$ 12 or just $7.50 for juvenile delinquents and the senile.

Then you buy humungous amounts of beer.

Then you get rat-arsed and let loose at the deer or at other deer-hunters, as takes your fancy. In general, it is easier to let loose at other hunters, since they wear bright-yellow vests and tend to sit still. A fellow named Chai Soua Vang did a fine job of this in December, when he knocked of six kaddoos who he seemed to believe were intruding on his particular patch of the forest.

Poor Vang was promptly dispatched to the clink. The to-do his actions provoked led me to believe this sort of merry boys-will-be-boys stuff was considered, even by Jesustani standards, unusual. I’ve discovered it isn’t. In 1998, for example, eleven kids aged between 9 and 17 were shot dead whilst hunting. Nobody seems to have bothered keeping count of the adults, but it seems that two brats did bump off two daddy-dears. One particularly fun bit of sport involved the hunting down of four school children and their pregnant teacher by a pack of punks with nothing better to do. “I heard a young kid scream. I thought he got a deer,” a witness to one killing told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “But he kept screaming.”

Fear not, though: Jesustani authorities tend to take a lenient view of this sort of thing. Soon after the punks-with-guns incident, Michael Bragman, a prominent legislator from New York, moved legislation seeking to lower the legal hunting age. I’ve puzzled over this wonderful laissez-faire in the matter of the murder of innocents, something over which even Hindustanis these days tend to get all hot and sweaty about. Could ‘accidental’ hunting deaths in fact be a socially-sanctioned form of murder, like the nylon sari and kerosene thing? “I’m taking my beloved and the brats deer hunting”, you would tell your best yaar, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, of course we can stay out whoring all night on Friday, that sort of thing? In any case, Lockwood’s endeavors are going to open up huge new opportunities for software types from Bangalore, who can come and testify that it wasn’t Vang’s fault: the computer did it, honest gov.

The Uses of Enchantment

2005-05-02T00:30:00.000-04:00

I awoke earlier this week to the unedifying image of Darth Vader (a.k.a. Donald Rumsfeld) locked in a loving embrace with Spiderman and Superman. The Horror! I promptly choked on my rye crackers, spilled my coffee all over myself, and had to spend half an hour flogging my native slaves before I recovered my equanimity and could turn to the newspaper again.

Darth Vader, it turned out, had recruited the services of Marvel Comics to help raise the morale of the Jesustani hordes now engaged, unsuccessfully, in putting Babylon to the sword. Now, the idiots should have known better; Saddam Hussein tried, and he didn’t get anywhere, even with the aid of mustard gas (as anyone who has tried to hunt down rats with a jackboot will attest, the vermin usually have the best of the contest, but I digress).

Anyway, it turned out the leaders of the crusaders believe that their rank-and-file will be filled with renewed valor when they are treated to comic strips in which Captain America hunts down the terrorists. Once I’d finished giving my goras forty of the best, I snorted with derision at the stupidity of Jesustanis in general, and of Darth Vader in particular, and decided to get to the truly interesting part of the newspaper (you know, where they have the wench with the enormous …, but I digress, again).

Then, it hit me: these people actually believe in fairy tales. This is precisely what makes the Jesustanis such a magnificent people. Culture in Jesustani is profoundly reliant on enchantment, on the conviction that several impossible things can in fact happen before breakfast. Enchantment is a profound historical force. Jesustanis have come to rule the world, after all, and they have done so propelled by by the belief that there is actually some point to doing so. It is my conviction that the real reason that the Soviet Union collapsed was not economic ruin or systemic decay: it was cynicism.

Of this ignoble sentiment, the Jesustanis are innocent. Innocence works: the fact is that more Jesustanis seem to live happily than most other peoples. You may assert that this is as much the consequence of Prozac as of prosperity, but that changes reality not one whit. Jesustanis believe in god, in the virtues of motherhood and in fidelity and honor, and still they are happy. They believe that their Beloved Leader will tell them The Truth, and they believe The Truth is out there, so help them god. Jesustanis even believe that Hindustani shopkeepers will hand them the right change (I have never seen anyone count it): and still they are happy.

Enchantment manifests itself across the entire terrain of popular culture. Witness the belief of large numbers of otherwise sane people that Terri Schiavo, a woman who had been brain dead for two decades and more, would at some point jumped off her hospice bed and headed to McDonalds if only her heathen husband had not decided to remove her feeding tube. Or consider what you can buy at any mid-sized store: bacteria-proof pens (we can all be healthy all the time) and plant-foggers with battery-powered fans (the flowers, the advertisements claim, find it refreshing). I’m reasonably convinced it is only a matter of time before somebody starts selling a device that masturbates dogs (after all, they too are entitled to happiness, but public intercourse between animals is considered indecorous in Jesustan) .

A fable helped me make sense of the whole issue:

A Jesustani man and his wife were playing golf. A stroke went astray, and shattered the windows of one of their club’s guest rooms. The man and his wife rushed in, only to be stopped short by the sight of naked man lying unconscious on the floor. They revived him, and apologized profusely for their carelessness. The man, however, replied that he was actually grateful to them. “However hard it may seem to believe”, he said, “I am actually a genie. I had been imprisoned inside that flower-vase, which your golf-ball shattered, for five thousand years. As a sign of my gratitude, and in keeping with the traditions of my people, I will grant any three wishes you make”.

The man asked for a billion dollars, his wife for beach-home in Bermuda, and both for perpetual happiness. “Done, done”, cried the genie, “done”! Overwhelmed by gratitude, the couple asked the genie if there was anything they could do in return. He was at first reticent, but finally, very quietly, pointed out that he had been without a women for five thousand years (a common fate for single South Indian men as well, I am told). The husband looked at his wife; the wife at her husband – and both agreed that it was but a small sacrifice for the genie’s munificence. And so the deed was done, and the time for pillow-talk arrived, and the genie asked the wife how old she was. “Thirty-five”, she answered, “why”?

“Aren’t you a little old to believe in genies”?

Most of the world is. The Jesustanis are not.

The Joys of Childhood

2005-04-26T17:14:00.000-04:00

My old school in Hindustan, dear old St. X., had a variety of teachers whose practices which were, well, decidedly peculiar .

Mr. S., for example, used to make delinquents crouch down in the native-shitting pose (known in torture cells around Hindustan as the murga mudra), and then march around the cricket field in the Delhi summer. There was the magnificent Mrs. M., who used to demand that all the lala-lets going to London for their vacations return bearing bras, since lingerie of the right proportions was evidently not available in India.

And, of course, there was Nagin, the snake-woman, who used to unbutton the shirts of her favored wards and slip her hand up and down their hairless chests, all the while recounting the tale of Nadir Shah’s bloody and rapacious sack of Delhi in 1739 (during which he stole the Takht-e-Taus, the Peacock Throne, as well as the honor of many an old-city lali, which, given the low-life halwais they are forced to marry, was probably a source of much joy).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I always imagined that things in Jesustan, with its concern for human rights and its faith in the innocence of childhood, would be different. It is – different, that is.

Last month an elementary-school teacher in St. Petersburg, Florida, put her five-year-old wards to work counting jelly beans, as part of a math exercise. One of her students started acting silly; the teacher responded by confiscating the child’s jelly beans. Not unnaturally, the child protested: she drew on the walls, then threw books and boxes, kicked a teacher in the shins, smashed a candy dish, and finally hit the assistant principal in the stomach.

You go girl!

At this point, or well before it, Mrs. Martins (she of the vilayati bras and the magnificent, all-desi udders) would have responded by whipping out her trusty 12-inch (no you perverted freaks, I know what you’re thinking and she didn’t use one, at least not in the classroom) cane and whacked the bejesus out of the brat. There would have been some yowls of agony, and that would have been that. Mr. S. would have frog-marched the little fuck in the mid-day sun. Nagin would have… well, let’s not go down that road.

In Jesustan, they are civilized and do not do not engage in this kind of vile and violent behavior. Instead, the staff of the Fairmont Park Elementary school called 911. A police car arrived, and Florida’s finest promptly dealt with the situation. Handcuffs were placed around the ankles of the child, and zip-tie plastic restraints around her wrists. [Parents of small children and sexual deviants are advised that that this maneuver must only be executed by highly-trained professionals].

You Don’t Go, Girl.

Now, the odd thing is that no one in Jesustan seems to think there is something a little, well, ahem, demented about a school and criminal justice system that handles five year olds in this way. The child’s mother, in particular, seemed to believe that the whole problem was that the Fairmont Park elementary school had nothing better to do than conspire to put her brat behind bars. “She’s never going back to that school”, Inda Akins said, “they set my baby up”.

Set her up? There you have it; at least Jesustani parents stand by their children. The day I had to have rabies shots after a savage dog bit me, my mother claimed I had probably done something to deserve it. I was very irate, because she was right: I’d thrown a stone at the dog.

The Art of Whinging

2005-04-18T23:12:00.000-04:00

One major problem with life in Jesustan, my friend B. recently pointed out, is that there is very little to complain about.

B., sadly, is right. The countryside is beautiful; the cities relatively clean. Water flows from taps on demand, and the electricity never goes out. Food is cheap and plentiful and public health standards are so high that one researcher I know of at the Smithsonian Museum has been reduced to studying the incidence of malaria among rare birds in Hawaii. It is horrible.

Moaning is a key part of the Hindustani zeitgeist. Of course, there is plenty to complain about. The town of Vellore, from where B.’s ancestors hailed, has been immortalized in Tamil poetry for its notable attributes: a river without water (the Palar ran dry after they built a dam upstream); a temple without a god (Tipu Sultan swiped the idol) and women without beauty (also men, if B. is representative). A sublime lament!

So what does a Hindustani in Jesustan do?

Default-mode whinging, favored by computer engineers who live in San Jose simply transplants home-country cribbing to Jesustan. If only Hindustan had go its act together, they insist – if only it had super-highways and soft toilet paper – they could have been happily sitting in their verandahs sipping a cup of tea after a happy half hour of morning exercise, thrashing their wives. Instead, they have to put up with some bitch who has got all sorts of ideas in her head after she started watching The Oprah Winfrey Show and now threatens to call 911 if you as much as mention nylon saris and kerosene.

If you’re an English-medium desi, you turn to Mother Jones and Arundhati Roy to find things to whinge about. English-medium desis howl about the inequities of Jesustani capitalism, the conditions of the poor, the appalling treatment of habshis, the fact that Beloved Leader is a moron, environmental degradation, and the deplorable habit of the natives of sending out expeditionary forces to obscure corners of the world on expeditions of rape and pillage. The problem is, all of this true of Hindustan as well: we’re well familiar with Field-Marshal Lootson-Maarson, and the less said about our home-grown outrages on the poor and dispossessed, the better. As such, this form of whinging is vaguely unsatisfying, like saying ‘shit’ instead of tatti, or going to Tai-Chi classes instead of throwing a stone at the nearest dog.

B. has, after considerable research, hit on a new line of attack. Having visited the recent Cherry Blossom flowering in Washington, DC, B. notes that this event arms us with a genuine reason to complain about life in Jesustan. Cherry blossoms, he notes, have no scent. By contrast, the mallipoo gives off magnificent fragrance, strong enough to even mask the unfortunate odor of Arnica hair oil, which Thambins insist on plastering on their hair. Cherry blossoms have no color; in Hindustan, even the vilest shit-bearing nullah gives birth to exquisite-pink lotus blossoms. Jesustan might be a great power, B. has made clear, but its flowers suck. A Solomon! The scoreboard? Hindustan 990283746502938475 Jesustan 0.3. The stakes are low, I admit, but still, a win is a win.

All About Style

2005-04-11T10:32:00.000-04:00

For reasons it alone understands, the venerable Washington Post has been carrying news of the trial of that well-known mirasi, Michael Jackson, in its Style section, along with news about Italian couturiers, French hair-stylists and left-wing academics.

Now why, I ask, would a newspaper do such a thing? After all, the alleged rape of a small child is something that would, in my part of the world anyway, be handled by crime reporters (the lowest of low breeds, the shit-shovelling caste of the media world) not fashion columnists (Brahmins).

Actually, let me rephrase the question. The fact is that none of the Washington Post’s readers seem to think there is anything odd about the trial of a child-abuser featuring in the Style section. The problem of comprehension is, quite clearly, mine alone. Jesustanis are perfectly comfortable with the idea.

For the Jesustani, it would appear, Jackson’s activities are exactly as the Washington Post would have it: a style, a choice, a fashion statement. Jackson uses the enormous loot at his command to have his skin bleached, his hair straightened, his nose reshaped – in other words, to look more like a true Aryan, a member of The Master Race. Jackson also uses a part of his loot to bugger little boys. It is all a question of style.

Now, there is a catch here. It is not as if the Washington Post condones Jackson’s style choices. No one in this land can afford to do so; for all its eccentricities, Jesustan is a highly moral land. Here, as an ancient Greece, Socrates would have been forced to drink hemlock – not, of course, for his ideas (Beloved Leader would have quite approved of some of them) but his sexual choices. As is well known, Jackson and much of ancient Greece had this much in common, except no one in ancient Greece was in a position, so to speak, to hurl the first stone.

Thus, there are morally-acceptable choices – for example psychoanalysis, homosexuality, miscegenation, high-fibre salads – and morally-unacceptable choices, like child abuse, leaving dog-poop on the sidewalk, and red meat. Some choices are borderline, like shagging small furry animals, as long as they are not cats or dogs, both of which are revered by the Jesustanis. Marmots and ferrets are, as far as I can make out, permitted; the loss of one’s virginity to a buffalo, a practice favoured by strapping young peasants in saada Punjab has not yet been ruled upon.

Saala style maar raha hai, is what, I suppose, the Washington Post is telling us. It is all very odd, but there it is: The Master Race has style; I, sadly, do not.

Patriarchy and Pee

2005-03-20T15:02:00.000-05:00

A great blow has been struck for the liberation of women in Jesustan: for just a few dollars, they can now pee standing up. Entrepreneurialism and technological innovation have joined together, in the great tradition of Jesustan, to free women from the bondage of long women’s room queues – and, dare I say it, threatens to bring down one of the last pillars of patriarchy!

Sweet Pee is described by its makers as “a female standing urination shield used while in a public restroom while standing as protection from unsanitary toilets instead of having to crouch or sit”. It has numerous outdoor applications as well – on treks, for example, or on long road journeys through the wilderness. An unused or cleaned Sweet Pee can even be used, I believe, to neatly pour oil or flour from a large container into an appropriate-sized receptacle.

Here is how the manufacturers of My Sweet Pee describe their product:

“Every woman entering a public restroom desires a germ-free urination facility but often finds it filthy. My Sweet Pee acts as a bridge or shield allowing females to urinate while STANDING instead of crouching or sitting down. Simply walk into a public restroom and avoid getting ‘in touch’ with the facility on airplanes, in sports stadiums and concerts, on road trips and in restaurants and night clubs.”

Out of my earnest desire to protect you from the filth that litters the internet, then, I have refrained from including here the detailed user instructions which are available at from http://www.mysweetpee.com/index.asp. May the curious wander there at their own peril! Let it suffice, in the interests of science, to note that it relies on much the same gravitational and engineering principles as a rainwater gutter, or the spillway of a dam.

You can, of course, find further material on the internet but, be warned, a Google search for Sweet Pee will list a number of websites dedicated to a sexual perversion the precise character of which shall not sully the pages of the Jesustan Diaries (Most of them, I may add, run by the natives of Jesustan and Brittania, although S. claims that a certain mid-sized late Tamil leader and a certain large-sized living Tamil leader were rather fond of this activity, amongst others of an unmentionable character. Enough said, at least for now).

Wait, I hear women from Nagaland, Manipur, and many other corners of Hindustan protest, we have peed standing up since time immemorial, without a plastic shield and without paying a naya paisa! All it takes is a full bladder, a sarong that can be moved out of harm’s way, and knees bent at the correct angle. This is, indeed, true – and proof, if any were needed, that our peasant sisters could teach a thing or two to English-medium memsahibs. Yet, the sad fact is that the artisan, no matter how skilled, cannot compete with modern technology. My Sweet Pee enables anyone to pee standing up, not just those schooled from an early age in the art.

Where will all this lead? One key element patriarchy has been the physical primacy of the male of the species homo sapiens over his female counterparts. While women may have distinguished themselves in far-away battlefields, in the arts of mortal combat, and in the farthest corners of space, the fact is that they have not been able to, until now, do what the merest little boy can: paint his name in pee on fresh snow or the neighbour’s wall. My Sweet Pee threatens to undo this most elemental domination.

It is no wonder the Taliban so loath the Jesustanis, for they play with technology with no thought as to the consequences of defying nature.

The Hindustanis of Jesustan

2005-03-06T19:12:00.000-05:00

A yellow ribbon – similar, you know, to the tape that wards off gawking idiots at crime scenes and visa-seekers at the Jesustani Embassy in New Delhi – separates the idols at a certain Hindu temple in Fairfax County from the worshippers. “Only Priests Beyond This Point”, it sternly warns.

Only in Jesustan, we are fond of saying; verily, it is true. You would never see anything of a kind in Hindustan. The temple also contains within it many other strange spectacles: a cash-only langar which serves aloo subzi, puri and mango lassi in styrofoam containers; a parking lot bigger than the temple itself; and, oh yes, western-style toilets equipped not with mugs for buttock-washing, but toilet-paper. It is a temple in which the faithful may worship – but also one that begs the gora Jeustani for respect, and towards that end contains helpful guides to what is sacred and profane.

I had long laboured under the impression that the Hindustanis of Jesustan (by which I mean the Hindus, Muslims, Christians Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis, Atheists and wagheras of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, waghera) were a sub-sect of the Hindustanis of Hindustan (likewise). I am now discovering, with some befuddlement, that this is not the case. The Hindustanis of Jesustan, in all matters except their imagination, are an altogether different species.

At the slightest perceived affront from a gora about Hindustan, the Hindustani of Jesustan will launch into an extended lecture about spirituality, the high divorce rate in Jesustan, the Bangalore software industry, and what General Pervez calls enlightened moderation. By contrast, the Hindustanis from Hindustan care little, in general, about what goras have to say about their lands, their estimation of the intelligence of that race having been shaped by its proclivity to buy bizarre leather whips on Janpath or little boys in Kandy, and that at ridiculous prices.

Conversely, the Hindustanis of Jesustan will take each possible opportunity to hector the Hindustanis of Hindustan about trains that run late, corruption, or the unfortunate habit of the audience at the Regal Cinema to pee in the back lane. When the Hindustanis of Hindustan discuss the urinary eccentricities of their countrymen, or talk about the time the train arrived bag on time, just twenty-four hours late, it is with a certain fond nostalgia. Likewise, the Hindustani of Jesustan feels compelled to defend arranged marriages; the Hindustani of Hindustan is content to wonder whether the mem asking the question, hideous as she might be, holds the keys to a green card.

What sense does one make of the admirable patriotism of the Jesustani Hindustanis? It is not love of a real homeland that exists in time and space. It is, instead, a reaction to the smug knowledge of the gora Jesustani that his land is the best of all possible lands, and that the immigrants in it are cowardly refugees from poverty, dirt and grime. The gora is, for the most part right – and it rankles. Hence, the Hindustani from Jesustan must at once construct in his imagination a homeland of great virtue – tradition, spirituality, family, whatever – and then appeal to the Hindustanis of Hindustan to work to make it real (some of them are willing to join in these endeavours, their time in Jesustan having taught them virtues like efficiency and so on).

Alas, this is a pointless patriotism: you can paint lipstick on a pig, but it will none the less remain a pig. Me, I am happy living in a pigsty; I have no desire to cohabit with a hound, however high-bred (let me add, in case someone takes offence, that this is a purely personal choice). Some weeks ago, a young gentleman who grew up in the west recently told me of his fond memories of Karachi, and his desire to go back home and bring about its rebirth. I asked him whether he cleaned his buttocks with water or toilet paper. The young man first blushed and then became angry; he refused to answer on grounds of propriety. The truth, however, will out: his very lovely girlfriend admitted he carried ultra-soft toilet paper home with his baggage.

He will never return to Karachi; of that I am sure – not until the natives have all turned, seduced by USAID handouts, to toilet paper.

Patriots Plaza

2005-02-13T13:05:00.000-05:00

A spectre has haunted Jesustan ever since the tragic events of 9/11. This is well known, of course. What is not so well appreciated is that paranoia has started to become a fashion – a lifestyle, if you will – and is, thus, something that can be milked for cash.

A large apartment block is being constructed near the Federal Center South-West metro station in Washington D.C.– the first major construction project of its kind, my native scouts tell me, since 9/11. It is called the Patriots Plaza.

What virtue, you might well ask, could a mere apartment block possess to lay claim to patriotism, that most noble of Jesustani virtues? Well, most apartment manufacturers advertise beautiful views, or generous-sized kitchens, or rapid access to the city center, and so on. The builders of Patriots Plaza say that they are, instead, “committed to meeting today’s security needs”. Its manufacturers claim Patriots Plaza has engineering which ensures “progressive collapse avoidance”, a “hardened structure and façade”, a “hardened, distinct garage structure” and “expendable entryways”.

I was so flabbergasted by these pronouncements that I took the time to carry out some reconnaissance around the premises. It does not, as far as I can see, have mounts for an anti-missile system on the terrace, nor even turrets where an air-defense gun could be installed. As such, the Patriot Plaza seems less capable of self-protection than the average jihadi encampment in Peshawar. An architect I subsequently consulted told me that its design basically ensured that a bomb set off in its garage would not bring the whole building down in one go – and that if it did, there would be more than one stairwell through which you could attempt to make an exit.

Patriots Plaza needs to be understood not as a physical entity but as a cultural commodity. It offers the security of the prison: behind bars, barricaded away from the world and your fellow human beings, you are free. Residents of Patriots Plaza will, at least in their imagination, importance through their occupation of the building. You see, their choice of the building as a living premises will denote that they important enough for some fanatic in Tora Bora to want to kill them. Their life and death have meaning and significance.

9/11 has created, I believe, a perverse industry dedicated to the perpetuation of such dementia. Patriots Plaza is at one end of this demented spectrum; the enormous and ultimately futile efforts to seal the gates of Jesustan against the Barbarians, on which vast wealth is now being spent, the other. Under seige, Jesustan has shut itself off from our planet, rather than sallying forth to engage with it. Just ask any Jesustani bureaucrat - or, for that matter, graduate student - how much begging and whining is required for them to get permission to visit some allegedy dangerous part of the world these days. No one, of course, pauses to note that the per-capita incidence of homicide in Washington DC is higher than that in Jammu and Kashmir, combatants included; I jest not.

All of which forces me to ask the question: what is the Jesustani conception of freedom? The Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, a favored official ideologue in Jesustan these days, recently proposed a test: if an individual can walk into the town square, and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm, then that person is living in a free society. All other societies, in Sharansky’s view, are fear societies. Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy, has been made prescribed reading for the many layers of minions who slave day and night for the Chief of the Jesustanis (a.k.a. Beloved Leader).

As tests go, Sharansky’s is a simple and accurate one. Its application gave me a vivid picture of what Jesustan has become as a consequence of 9/11. I haven’t actually tested the test, so to speak, but that is because I can find no volunteers. Not one of the Jesustanis I have discussed this scientific inquiry with you, you see, was willing to stand in front of Patriots Plaza and deliver an oration on just what a fine fellow Osama bin Laden actually was. Mind, I wouldn’t volunteer either – I’m just a traveler, after all, not a suicide-bomber.

The Garden of Eden

2005-02-07T13:25:00.000-05:00

Jesustan, I learn, has reconstructed the Garden of Eden. A convenient two-hour drive from Dallas, Texas, you can find Barasingha and Russian boar, Giraffe and Guar, Wildebeest and White-tailed Deer, Ibex and Oryx, Aoudad and Zebra. According to an article in The Washington Post’s Sunday magazine, there are 200,000 especially-reared exotic animals spread out over 1,000-odd facilities in Texas, Maine and Florida. The exotic-animal safari park industry is believed to generate annual revenues of US$ 120 million a year.

In these Gardens of Eden, though, the lion does not cohabit with the lamb. The lion doth slay the lamb, which is the proper Jesustani way, and as it should be. You visit these zoos, you see, armed with a hunting rifle, not a camera.

Now, this may upset Ms. Maneka Gandhi, and I am sorry for that, but I cannot help but admire the sheer ingenuity of the enterprise. You no longer have to travel to darkest Africa or Asia to hunt down big game. Moreover, given the state of the third-world environment, you would be most unlikely to find such big game even if you went somewhere where the water is dodgy and the toilet paper, indignity of indignities, is rough. Then, by doing away with rapacious airline operators and blood-sucking hotel owners, the until-now elitist pursuit of big-game hunting has been rendered totally egalitarian.

Best of all, the damn animals can’t run away – or not too far, anyway.

What sense do we make of this? You see, there are two kinds of Jesustanis. There are the internationalists, who believe it is their duty to travel to exotic places, see exotic people, and shoot them. Then, there are the Jesustan Kicks Ass! types, who do not want to travel beyond Wal-Mart TM and most certainly do not want to see exotic people (although they do not mind the exotic people being shot). The internationalists believe the world is their backyard; the America-First wallahs believe their backyard is the world (there are also some Jesustanis who think their backsides are the world, but more on that subject anon).

Both visions of the world, some liberal reading this despatch is certain to bleat, are imperialist. Yes, but so what? Many Hindustanis, I learn, are only too happy to be colonised. My friend D, a.k.a. The Goddess, recently sent me news of a shoe store in New Delhi which has a voice-activated dispensing system rather than salespersons. If you call out “Black, Size 7”, for example, shoes of that colour and size will appear. If only the world, she sighed, could be rebuilt in this fashion. Well, thanks to Jesustani imperialism, it soon will be.

Me, I have no desire to live in the Garden of Eden. You see, I have a grudge:

Jithe Adam Noon Dhake Mare,
Mein Nahin Janaan Us Diware;
Bund Vich Le Le Kanak Da Daana
Mein Nahin Teri Jannat Janan

I don’t want to go to the gates
Through which Adam was cast out;
Stick that grain of wheat up your arse,
I don’t want to go to your paradise!

[Thanks to MS, the Foreign Minister of Sindh;
or Bhaluchistan; or anywhere else that will have him]

A Tale of Two Mummys

2005-01-29T17:23:00.000-05:00

In tragedy is contained truth.

The magnificent Ms. O, an emblem of the finest, free-spirited flower of Jesustani womanhood, approached me with a tale of woe that froze my blood. Aided ably (or otherwise) by her boyfriend, Ms. O had been attempting for some time to become pregnant. Recently, she succeeded – at which point, the boyfriend fled.

Ho, hum, I hear you say. A garden-variety drama. Wait, read on.

As the overwrought are wont to do, Ms. O responded to this unanticipated crisis by writing to her boyfriend’s mother, asking for solidarity. The mother, let us call her Mummy, responded by claiming Ms. O had laid a horrible trap for her poor innocent son. Mummy claimed that Ms. O was a trashy harlot, solely responsible for her fate. Ms. O was inconsolable.

Ho, hum, I hear you say. A garden-variety drama. Wait, read on.

Some years ago, the magnificent Ms. O had been a similar situation with a desi boyfriend. On that occasion, as on this one, she wrote for help to the mother of the munda, let us call her Mummy-Ji. Mummy-Ji had reacted by claiming that Ms. O had laid a horrible trap for her poor innocent son. Mummy-Ji claimed that Ms. O was a trashy harlot solely responsible for her fate. Like any desi kudi, Ms. O was inconsolable.

Intellectuals could, I am certain, draw many illuminating lessons from this affair. Leftists might say that her tale illustrates that Marx was right; that history does repeat itself. Rightists might say that her tale illustrates that Marx was wrong; that while history might repeat itself, it most certainly does not do so as farce. It is not for me, described very accurately by Mrs. Gupta in Class III as a lafanga and duffer, to draw learned judgment.

What I can see, though, is that no matter how many million kos I wander, people – and the pain they suffer – are much the same. Gora boyfriend is much like desi boyfriend. Gori mem is much like desi kudi. And, of course, Mummy and Mummy-Ji, appalled as they might be by the thought, are true sisters under the skin.

The Explicit Truth

2005-01-26T17:05:00.000-05:00

The truth, I have always believed, will out. All right, at least some of the truth will sometimes out.

A tsunami of self-loathing has washed over the progressives of Jesustan after a new psychological test revealed that they are not as free of bias as they chose to believe. Available online at https://implicit.harvard.edu, the Project Implicit shows that the overwhelming majority of people, black and white, gay and straight, male and female, rich and poor, harbour racist, sexist and homophobic sentiments (as well as every other conceivable form of bigotry – anti-Muslim hatred, for example, or disdain for people who like sex with small, furry animals).

I find three aspects of the tamasha particularly entertaining. First, the uproar seems confined to over-educated liberals alone. Either garden-variety Jesustanis do not read the Sunday supplements of The Washington Post (in general, a wise move), or, in the alternate, do not need a test to tell them they are racist, sexist and homophobic. Second, Jesustani progressives seem desperately desirous of self-flagellation. Flooded with traffic generated by self-hating Jesustanis, Project Implicit’s website has had to suspend offering all but a few basic options.

Most important of all, though, the carnage inflicted by the tests suggests an alarming disregard of the self-evident among liberal Jesustanis. To anyone with their eyes open – and to even those like me, who have under-powered spectacles – it should be clear that prejudice is a central part of the prevailing culture of Jesustan. Washington DC metro train lines heading south-east at rush hour are full of black people; those heading north-west full of white people. White people head to one set of nightclubs; black people to another. A publicly-funded office I frequent, set up with the purpose of bringing democracy and tolerance to the benighted heathen of the world, has precisely three habshis working at it – the receptionist, the odd-jobs-man, and the resident flunkey.

Self delusion is more than simply a human failing, though; it is a core part of the Jesustani ideological project. It is called political correctness. We live in colonial times, and political correctness has, like Coca Cola, McDonalds and Hollywood, now been exported to each corner of the world. It has created a most peculiar form of dementia. As long as you call churas Dalits, invite your slaves to the household Diwali party, insist bundus are exercising a sexual choice, or dignify randis by renaming them commercial sex workers, it doesn’t matter how you treat them. Extreme variants of this disease are also evident. An acquaintance in Hindustan, for example, married a Muslim, not because she loved her spouse, but because she was striking a blow for religious coexistence.

Its all about labels: a triumph of brand over content, of text over truth.

A post-script: this week’s racist-sexist-homophobic joke award, bearing a grand prize of US$ 0.99, goes to my friend Dr. A. A newly-wed Pathan gazes longingly at his wife, sighing intermittently. “What are you thinking, sahib”, she finally asks? “You are so, so, beautiful”, he replies, quietly, “as beautiful as the stars and the skies. How beautiful your brother must be”.

A malicious slur? Ask the little boys paraded through certain bazaars near Peshawar, their eyes lined with kohl and their cheeks covered with rouge, while the bidders lining the streets cheer.

Utopia

2005-01-16T13:42:00.000-05:00

Inauguration Week: the horror, the horror.

For the past few weeks, unable to sleep amidst the fractious natives’ loud cries of ‘Hail The Chief’ and ‘Hail The Thief’, I have become increasingly sensitive to the ubiquitous presence of national flags across the length and breadth of Jesustan. Like portraits of the Beloved Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the emblems of the Third Reich, Jesustan’s official logo cannot be avoided. It flies from every third building, it is emblazoned on shop displays, plastered on the bumpers of cars, and scrawled on anti-war banners.

For someone from Hindustan, where a certain irreverence pervades public consciousness, these displays are, well, somewhat embarrassing. When Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Praise Be Upon Him, put up patriotic slogans on the streets of New Delhi, it became a cause for merriment. One, a very curvaceous representation of the warrior queen of the city of Jhansi proclaiming ‘mein apni Jhansi nahi doongi’ – “I will not surrender my Jhansi” – was reinvented, at least among those of us who were in high school at the time, as a lament for our unhappy treatment at the hands of girlfriends who refused to unlock their chastity belts.

Few in Jesustan, however, mock their national symbols. Patriotism, my native guide tells me by way of explanation, admixed in equal part with religious fundamentalism. But what religion? It is most certainly not Christianity; of that much I am sure. Jesustan is too divided on this score. On the road from Baltimore to central Pennsylvania, for example, billboards proclaiming “Jesus Saves” and “XXX Adult Emporium” occur with roughly equal frequency. A little time with those who put them makes clear the sponsors of both believe they represent what the natives call “the Jesustani way”.

In a recent book, The Bullet’s Song, William Pfaff points to what he sees as a shared characteristic of fascism and communism, their belief in an earthly heaven – one, of course, based on exclusionism; the other on universalism. He is honest enough, unlike most intellectuals in Jesustan, to see the similarities between this and the vision of the neo-conservatives who now rule this land. Pfaff, like Isiah Berlin, seems to believe that all efforts to find collective solutions to the human condition are fated to end in tragedy.

Perhaps Pfaff is right; perhaps not. What I am certain of is that he does not go nearly far enough. Neo-conservatives are not the only ones in Jesustan who see it as a laboratory in which paradise is being manufactured; radicals and liberals, greens and black activists, anarchists and sitters-on-the-fence all share the same perception. To go to war in Iraq, an appeal must be made to the idea of Jesustan; to oppose it, too, that very idea must be invoked. Abortion is repugnant to the values of Jesustan; the right to an abortion, too, draws on the same values. Ditto the death sentence and democracy; fast food and free trade: to either oppose or support the project, the Jesustani must draw on the idea of Jesustan.

Not, of course, that this is unique to Jesustan. Pakistan is a case in point. Most reasonable people know that the Shariat’s most ardent advocates practice it in a way that would, let us say, raise a few divine eyebrows on judgment day. We have, for example, the luminous example of the famous Maulana Sandwich, whose loud declamations about fighting for the true faith ought to be tempered, in the minds of his audience, by the knowledge that the gentleman’s own preferred field of battle is in his bed, with a Houri on the one side and Adonis on the other (“Across the river sits a boy with buttocks like a peach”, goes the ancient poem, “but, Alas! I cannot swim”. Maulana Sahib, we know, most certainly can). None the less, the armies of the Jihad do verily multiply.

And this points us, I believe, towards a fundamental truth: of all the utopian projects of the twentieth century, Jesustan and the Islamic Jihad are the only two which still survive – the one because happiness can be purchased right now, right here, off the shelf; the other because it offers a gift certificate usable only in the hereafter. There is more to the mortal combat Jesustan and the Jihad are now locked in, methinks, than meets the eye. It is the battle of brother against brother, the most elemental and bitter kind of war there can possibly be.

Jannat ki haqeeqat hum ko bhi maloom hai lekin, Ghalib, dil behlane ke liye khayal acchha hai: I, too, know what the reality of paradise is, Ghalib, but the idea is still useful to while away the time.

A Map to Paradise

2005-01-15T15:07:00.000-05:00

The only people who have ever asked me for directions in DC are other foreigners.

When we want to find our way to someplace in Hindustan, we do it the simple way: we ask someone. In Jesustan, the natives grapple with maps instead. Herein lies one of our profound cultural differences.

I’ve long suspected maps aren’t just guides to geography. Maps are, rather, an opiate to numb us to the uncertainties of life; a means to pretend that we are not in fact lost; an instrument of revelation, if you like. Like their idea of god, maps perpetuate the illusion that the lives of Jesustanis have some profound purpose, and that there is reward for virtue and punishment for sin.

No coincidence, then, that Jesustanis have maps for almost everything. Young E., an enthusiast for international peace who recently finished her undergraduate degree, told me she intends to solve at least three of the world’s problems before the age of thirty, and then get married and have two children. Already, at twenty-one, she has a map. So do most people in Jesustan. E., like most people in Jesustan, will more likely than not, be bitter and hard-edged; few maps, as those of us who travel the world know, actually correspond to the realities on ground.

Mapmaking is a major industry in Jesustan. Consider, for example, the business of getting married. Barnes and Noble in Georgetown has an entire section devoted to marriage-planning magazines and books. Today’s Washington Post Magazine quotes one map-maker as saying “taking lessons before your wedding gives you confidence and can reduce stress”. He wasn’t sadly, talking about new brides’ alleged terror of the one-eyed snake, those unhappy days having, fortunately, long passed us by. He was discussing, instead the virtues of mapping life before walking its course. Of course, all the proliferation of maps doesn’t stop one in two marriages from ending in divorce.

Eventually, I’m told, maps will be rendered redundant by Global Positioning Systems, which will mark a triumph of science over mumbo-jumbo. Already, schools in the District of Colombia are tracking not just the movement of their buses, but the precise times their young passengers get on and off. Parents are assigned codes which enable them to monitor the movements of their children online. Several companies are attempting to use GPS to monitor the ways in which their employees spend their time; workers, quite understandably in my opinion, resent this effort to eradicate that most important activity, slacking off.

Radicals in Jesustan claim all this is a sign of the coming of The Monster State. Perhaps. More likely, it is merely a manifestation of the profound belief in the existence heaven, a place where happiness is constant and uninterrupted if only you can find your way there. Witness the proliferation of internet matchmaking services, enhance-your-self-esteem books, make-your-first-million guides, and body-part-enhancement shops. A map to paradise? To most of us in Hindustan, I suspect this would sound as credible as the penis-enlargement oil sold at Dhabas on the Ambala-Delhi highway. Not so for the residents in Jesustan: here, they call it their national project.

The Pursuit of Happiness

2005-01-08T15:06:00.000-05:00

Last week, I had the privilege of listening to a Pakistani taxi driver complaining bitterly about life in Jesustan. He had just paid $2,500.00 for a root canal treatment, a price, he pointed out, would have bought him a bypass surgery in Bangalore. His daughter had turned into a gora-style slut. His son used hair gel. Worst of all, his wife had taken to watching the Oprah Winfrey show, and no longer made Pakoras on cold winter nights.

All of this begged the question of just why he chose to live in Jesustan, instead of Pakistan.

He said: “in this country, everyone is happy”.

Hmmm….

Some weeks ago, I met J., who had recently committed himself to the tender mercies of a shrink. J. is in a new relationship and, according to what I’ve been told, is enjoying the high-grade sex and higher-grade humour his girlfriend offers him. Yet, just like the Pakistani taxi driver, he is not at peace. J.’s problem is that he does not know whether he is happy or unhappy. He truly does not know, and the answer is important enough to him to seek professional help. Some discreet inquiries conducted by my native guide suggest that the lucrative Jesustani trade of psycho-babbling is founded, for the most part, on people like J.

Man was born free, Karl Marx had written, but everywhere he is in chains. I’m starting to think there is some truth in this, but perhaps not in the way the Prophet intended. In Hindustan, or in Pakistan, people are poor, for the most part politically oppressed and sexually repressed. As a result, they are miserable. In Jesustan, people are relatively rich, and have too many television shows to watch and to much shopping to do to have time to worry about politics. They have sexual freedom, or something that passes for it, anyhow. Like us little brown people, they too are miserable.

To my mind, this opens up two possibilities. Either Prozac is, in fact, the solution to the human condition, or, in the alternate, the pursuit of happiness is a waste of time. I suspect the latter proposition is closer to the truth. Indoctrinated from an early age to believe that the attainment of happiness is the purpose of life, Jesustanis are willing to go to the most extraordinary lengths to find it. The problem is, no one knows what this thing called happiness is, and therefore have no idea whether they have it or not. Little brown people, on the other hand, have simply given up, and consoled themselves with the thought that god is, after all, a white man.

Can happiness be found? Stand atop Mount Kailash, and flap your killi in the wind. See if Madhuri Dixit appears and grabs it. Stranger things have, of course, happened – but the odds, I think you will agree, are low.

Shopping, Santa, and a Scrotum

2004-12-07T22:23:00.000-05:00

Jesustan is awash with rubbish this festive season.

A Hershey Kiss Singing Candy Dish or Talking Shrek Cookie Jar is $19.99; a Floor Standing Fogger, whatever it might be, is Great Value at $29.99; Nice n’Fluffy Fabric Conditioner is $ 1.99. Everything seems to cost something ninety-nine.

It’s a lot to pay for self-delusion. Back in Hindustan, that much money would fetch a decent amount of weed. Weed, unlike shopping, for the most part does what its meant to do. Neither Cialis nor sexy lingerie will save the failing and tedious marriages most of those who signed up for conjugal bliss are trapped in. The Floor Standing Fogger may indeed temporarily transport them from their living rooms to the middle of the North Atlantic, but the illusion will, sadly, be temporary.

But this year, it turns out, Santa has something on offer of real value. It was a considerable relief when my native guide, after long days of foraging, brought me a catalogue which offered a 6-inch by 7-inch bully bag made from a bull’s scrotum, very thoughtfully “coated and sealed with polyethylene”. Crafted by experts, the bag costs just $39 and, here is the biggest relief of all, 97 –yes, 97 – cents. For the same amount of money, you can buy a bull’s penis, either crafted into a walking stick or a golf club, which, the catalogue notes, is “guaranteed to improve your concentration”.

The natives are, I often think, inscrutable. Who on earth would walk through the greens twirling a bull’s penis? Even if some merriment might be had – the retired bureaucrat at the sixth hole might became hot, then sweaty and be finally overcome by a paralysing frenzy of lust – what would the caddies think? And what use could a bull’s scrotum, lined with polyethylene as it might be, possibly be, especially since the bull’s penis has long passed its effervescent stage?

As is true of most mysteries, there is an answer. Consider the enormous anxiety and psychological trauma inflicted by the search for mates in Jesustan. Now, imagine the savings in cash and intellectual energy if its population could dispense with the tedious mating rituals of dinner and conversation. Instead, men could just whip out their trusty bull-penis golf stick, thwack it hard on the table, and, once the object of their affection has finished pulling out the pinewood shards from his or her face, ask: “you likee this”? It would all be simple and elegant. There would be yes or no answers, not bullshit.

Of course, there is the risk that the shrapnel might cause irreparable damage – or that they might for some other reason have tired of the object of their affection. Fear not! Capitalism has the answer. All they would have to do is shove his or her head inside the polyurethane-lined bull scrotum, and leave him or her to gag to death while they walked away, casually twirling their bull penis walking stick (even if someone saw them doing the dirty, no one fucks with a man packing a bull’s killi).

Real Hindustani Men, I am sure, would understand me. Goras have yet to discover arranged marriages – and the fact that there is no un-mating method quicker than a nylon sari ($ 86.99) and a litre of kerosene (free from the friendly neighbourhood Desi petrol-pump wallah).

Heera Mandi On The Highway

2004-12-05T13:25:00.000-05:00

Before spending the night at a truck stop in Jesustan, you may see fit to arm yourself with one of two stickers. The first proclaims: ‘No Lot Lizards’. The other reads: ‘I Am A Trucker’s wife, Not A Lot Lizard’.

A Lot Lizard, in case you haven’t guessed, is a very special kind of prostitute, whore, commercial sex worker, ho, lady of the highway, take your pick. Lot Lizards operate exclusively in the overnight truck parking lots that dot the highways of Jesustan. This explains the ‘Lot’ appellation; as for ‘Lizard’, search me.

The first sticker is for men who wish to signal their unwillingness to engage in carnal acts with a Lot Lizard. The second is for women who wish to signal to men wishing to engage in carnal acts that they are not Lot Lizards. Not a little embarrassment and misunderstanding in the lots would have been avoided over the years if only travellers had seen fit to purchase these very finely-made stickers, available both online and at all major stores.

Much to my surprise, there is a considerable volume of fine scholarly and investigative work available on the subject of Lot Lizards. It turns out that some quick nookie with a Lot Lizard is available at just $25 a pop, an absolute steal when compared with the going rates in the metropolitan centres of Jesustan. The price, honestly, takes my breath away. If Outlook.com is to be believed, a night of passion at the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi starts at the current dollar equivalent of Rs. 20,000 and a couple of bottles of their finest.

Not surprisingly, a Lot Lizard’s life is, well, ahem, hard. A Lot Lizard must find at least twelve paying customers a night, I am told, just to make ends meet. Inflation, it would seem, has reared its ugly head even in rural Jesustan. I am sure the breakdown of social security and the sad lack of public healthcare have not helped matters. Bear in mind that most of these customers are men who have been driving several days on the trot, and thus have not had time for baths.

Among the truckers of Jesustan, there is considerable agonised discussion of the Lot Lizard phenomenon. Disease, not just of relatively manageable type caused by breakdowns in personal hygiene, is rampant. Some truckers also believe there are moral issues involved. I would imagine there are also questions of personal safety. Many truckers carry guns, and hitting on a Lot Lizard who turns out to be a trucker’s wife could have health consequences far more immediate than any disease you might pick up.

In all despair, however, there is opportunity. The proverbial silver lining is that the Lot Lizards offer a golden opportunity to address the concerns of Jesustanis on the trade imbalances and job losses caused by outsourcing. Hindustan currently imports large numbers of sex workers from obscure central Asian countries at high costs, to feed the insatiable desire of the brown man for the white woman. If it instead starts importing Lot Lizards from Jesustan, there will be several wondrous consequences:

§ The lot lizards will receive better remuneration; also, the environs of the Imperial are an infinitely more commodious work environment than a smelly truck cab.

§ Desi sahibs will receive the services of the gori mem at reasonable prices. This, in turn, will help build an egalitarian society.

§ Room occupancy in upmarket Delhi hotels will improve. The Tourism Minister of Hindustan, Renuka Chowdhury, will be eternally grateful.

§ Last, but by no means least, the Jesustan trade deficit will become a little bit more manageable. As such, the future of all those sad Hindustani men in San Jose will be secure.

Interested, anyone?

Faith and Freedom

2004-11-30T11:41:00.000-05:00

Up the road from my cave lies a Masonic temple. And a Yoga and Meditation place. Three churches. I am sure there are Masjids and Gurudwaras within easy driving distance.

Every kind of faith flourishes in Jesustan. One way of seeing this is that Jesustan is true to the wishes of its founding fathers. Another is that this is fertile soil for freaks of all descriptions.

What particularly intrigues me is the way in which this cornucopia of faiths has manifested itself on ground. Thus, the landscape of urban Jesustan is dotted with replicas of Baroque cathedrals that stand in Europe. Natives of Hindustan who have emigrated here build Hindu temples inspired by the marvels of Mahbalipuram, but cast in concrete, not hewn from stone. Mosques, similarly, aspire to make the faithful believe that a fifteen-minute drive through some back lane of Jesustan will transport them into Riyadh.

In other words, the structural manifestations of faith here are transcriptions of religious tradition, as distinct from tradition. Their message is that tradition can be constructed with cash, much like Subway sandwich – its all a question of slapping together things picked up from a vast array of choices. Faith is just like shopping: you just have to pick the right one off the menu of choices available. If you fuck up, there is always a 30-day return period.

To be honest, I am not sure this attitude is a bad thing. A lot of people in Jesustan mutter darkly about slaughtering the infidel, but the fact is television and shopping leaves them too little time to actually go do it. So far, at least, the land has been free from the orgies of holy blood-letting we in Hindustan periodically indulge in. Aesthetes can also look at it another way. Building some monstrous carbon copy of the Sistine Chapel is a lot better than demolishing the Bamiyan Buddhas – an extreme act of architectural criticism, if there was ever one.

It would be interesting, though, to tests the limits of this tolerance. How, for example, would Jesustan react to the construction of a concrete replica of the Khajuraho temples in Dupont Circle? What would happen if the temple was sold to a renegade Christian sect, who renamed it Our Lady Of The Enormous Boobies (or, Our Lady Of The Literally Rock-Solid Pants)? And would someone get a PhD out of claiming that the suspend-from-the-ceiling sex in the Kama Sutra was pre-Christian representation of the immaculate conception?

Any volunteers?

Heretics And Their Follies

2004-11-28T11:24:00.000-05:00

The natives of Jesustan are inscrutable.

A couple of days ago, The Washington Post had an article on a movement to reject consumerism and predatory global capitalism. Some people, apparently, do so by refusing to shop at the sales on the day after Thanksgiving. Much of the article consisted of the views of a young woman on the subject; readers were also treated to a photograph of her in the process of rejecting capitalism. This took the form of working on an Apple notebook ($ 2,300,394,837,987.99 before taxes) while sipping coffee at Starbucks (starts at $ 9,384,498,879,223,387.99).

Neither the newspaper, nor evidently the young lady in concern, saw anything strange about this. I am sure there is code here to be decrypted, which will then unlock a larger understanding of Jesustan. As things stand, however, the graven image of the young lady at the Starbucks in Tenleytown, Washington DC, seems to me to be symptomatic of a certain malaise that afflicts heretics in Jesustan. You can save the environment by shopping more, they seem to think, only shopping differently. You can live healthy even if you eat helpings of the same size they give for lunch to elephants at New Delhi zoo, as long as it comes from Whole Foods and has a label marked organic (what exactly is an inorganic cucumber and where is it to be found? And can you play deviant games with it?).

For these heretics, salvation lies within the official faith of Jesustan; its just that they think the holy relics ought not come out of a can. Personally, give me the can any day. At least you can use it for target practice. Now, if the lady really wanted to subvert the system, she should have ripped off her clothes and started casually playing with herself whilst seated at Starbucks. I'm not sure The Washington Post would then have carried an article on the subject, but rest assured, a fair few would-be shoppers would most certain have paused to think. Alright, someone would have stopped for the sheer prurient pleasure, but someone, I'm sure, would have found the spectacle reflection-inducing.

Our Lady Of The Highway

2004-11-27T23:22:00.000-05:00

On a scouting expedition into the interiors of Jesustan, CF reports sighting an enormous statue of the Virgin Mary with a neon sign proclaiming her to be ‘Our Lady of the Highway’.

Coming as I do from a city in Hindustan where large numbers of temples are engaged in bitter competition over who can build the largest, most luridly-coloured concrete monkey to grace its portals, I at first failed to see just why my native guide even found the statue remarkable.

But then, the image turned around inside my normally idle mind. I put aside my first thought -- which was to have the native flogged for wasting my time -- and allowed some questions to form.

First, there is something, lets face it, disturbing about a statue to a sacred virgin standing on a highway at a locale of the kind normally reserved for sex workers or, perhaps, the exceptionally slutty. If anyone reading this knows if bordellos in Catholic countries have statues Our Lady Of The Quick, Cash-Only Bang-Bang, please do let me know.

Second, the highways in Jesustan, compared with those in my own nation, can only be described as mundane. That someone would seek divine protection for a drive on these roads seemed timorous in the extreme, inconsistent with a nation which is engaged in sending out hordes of warriors to almost all corners of the known world.

Third, and most important, there is something a little unsettling about a tribute to divinity when it is surrounded by hundreds of other neon signs, celebrating fast food and cholesterol control pills; Miller Lite and driving-under-the-influence lawyers.

Then, it hit me. The location of Our Lady among the snarl of advertising makes perfect sense. The advertisements are not, as the crude would have it, simply propaganda to feed supermarket cash tills. Both Our Lady and the signboards are advertisements, advertisements not for the specific idea or project they represent, but for a system of belief. Both Our Lady and McDonalds comfort and reassure, in these ever so distressing times, that all is in fact well with Jesustan.

Bondage For Beginners

2004-11-27T19:32:00.000-05:00

A few days after I arrived in Jesustan, Oppie di Mummy drew my attention to a wonderful catalogue offering a 'Bondage for Beginners' kit. I spent more time than a sane, well-adjusted adult ought to have trying to discover if there was an 'Intermediate Bondage' and 'Advanced Bondage' kit.

And then, an epiphany: Bondage for Beginners is not a toy. It is an epistomological tool.

Piety, central to the culture of Jesustan, expresses itself through the incessant collection of sacramental relics, objects of veneration, and sacred bric-a-brac. Of these, again against my better judgment, I already have several of these: a toothbrush powered by two batteries which spins around manically; advertisements for a gadget which enables the more efficient grilling of beer-butt chicken, made by roasting a chicken with a half-empty can of Miller Lite stuck up its innards; tea made by a California-based Sikh mystic which is claimed to cure depression; and, of course, a catalogue which contains a convenient toll-free number where I can, if I so choose, order the Bondage for Beginners kit.

Without knowing it, and just weeks into a subterranean life in Jesustan, I am a convert. Chosen. Or bonded. Take your pick.

A footnote on the toothbrush: it does have its redeeming features. My landlord is convinced by its loud whirring that I am a sexual deviant, and therefore best avoided; my parents, who visited some time ago, that I care for my teeth and can therefore be left alone to care for my life. All is well in Jesustan.