A Bowl of Elusive

Ted and I spent the summer of ’09 in a small cottage by the beach. The rent was reasonable, the cottage was cramped and we spent 14 to 16 hours a day slogging at the Marriott Resort nearby. Summer Internship a.k.a Industrial Training, since we were 2nd Year Hotel Management students. Ted and I had been friends since the eighth grade and we stuck together till college. We got along very well in spite of being quite different from each other. He was universally liked and I was universally despised. He drank & I was a teetotaler. And that kind of sums it up, ha ha. We started out with our internships, all excited to be there. Posh hotel, flashy uniforms, big presence in the industry, we thought it would be LEGEN- wait for it -Dary!!! But soon, we realized that none of these things matter to the people getting into the premises from the staff entrance. A reasonable shift for an employee at an Indian Hotel is 9 to 10 hours, which includes breaks. But India being India, labor...

We are a country with over a billion people living extraordinarily mediocre lives. Many of us don’t know where our next meals will come from. We have so many real things that we need to worry about. Yet we can’t stop obsessing over little things like a young couple kissing in public. Protests rise against moral policing and we get caught up in the symbolism. Are we dumb enough to think that these protests are aimed at just making kissing in public legal? (By the way, it's already legal.) Have we forgotten about how couples have been getting thrashed for so much as holding hands in public? I see so many self-righteous “respected” grown-ups publicly shunning the “Kiss of Love” Movement, labeling it as Western Culture corrupting and degrading the Indian culture. How is this an effect of the Western culture? It's like watching a goldfish with its 3-second memory cycle. If you were to believe these gentlemen, Indians didn’t know about kissing before meeting foreigners and al...

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.                                                                -William Shakespeare (“Hamlet”, Act 1, Scene 5) Every now and then, we hear stories about ghosts, imps, angels, vampires and what not. Of course, we don’t believe any of those things exist. This is a time of great scientific advancement and our minds have no tolerance for the paranormal or the supernatural. And yet, there are people who swear they have seen, felt or experienced such elements in some way or the other. And quite expectedly, these people become the brunt of ridicule and laughter. Such people are called ignorant. And yet, with the tremendous advance in scientific research and discovery, we have learnt that there are n number of things in this world t...

Very few people realise how severely Sexual Abuse scars its victims. This is the last part of this article. I will be throwing some light on how deeply this heinous crime affects the lives of the children who go through it. Imagine a 7-year old boy being sodomized by a 30-year old man, bleeding and writhing in pain. If you think that is the worst thing a little boy could go through, you're mistaken. What's worse than the abuse itself is having to live with it. It changes people. And I am not talking just about the victims of violent sexual abuse like I described. Even milder forms of abuse leave their mark. We’re talking about little impressionable children here. Subjecting them to an intrusion of their privacy, coaxing them to cooperate with acts of perversion affects them in hundreds of little ways. It goes on to leave indelible dents on their personalities when they grown up. Don’t believe me? Read on. In the previous part of this article, I described...

As promised, here I am with the second part of this article. Let us talk about the sexual predator our kids face. We need to know what we are up against to fight it better. This is a sensitive topic and we need to eradicate all misinformation from our minds. I will sketch a character profile here, drawing inspiration from my own experiences and that of many people I know. There would be many readers who when they hear the phrase “Sexual Abuse of Children” will instantly imagine a pedophile. (A pedophile is a person who is sexually attracted to children.) But this isn't always the case with people who abuse children. To understand this better, we have to first get over the misconception that rape is committed out of lust. Rapists are almost never sex addicts, they are violent aggressive and disturbed people, and the purpose of rape is never just sexual gratification. Similarly, child abusers aren't always driven by attraction to children. Terrifying as it is, this means tha...

Having been a victim of sexual abuse myself, this was a topic I always wanted to discuss out loud. This is the first part of this series. I don’t expect these articles to change the lives of abuse victims out there, but at least they should enhance our understanding of it. This part is meant for parents. Almost all of you have faced some form of sexual abuse as a child. You might not talk about it, you might not report it or you might have blocked it from your conscious memory. But it has happened. Approximately 52.33% children report having faced some form of sexual abuse or the other. But seeing how sexually repressed our society is and how we condition our children to think of sex as something bad and alien, you can imagine how high that figure might actually be. Being a victim myself, I have always tried to make myself aware about this topic. I have spoken to a lot of peers about it, friends, colleagues, old flames, etc. And an alarmingly high percentage of the people...

“TRUTH“…Such a sublime concept, isn't it? And yet, its never absolute. No, this is not a lesson in philosophy. I am talking about a very practical aspect here. Because, we aren't a species that is driven solely on instincts and reflexes. We take time to analyse “the truth”, “the reality” and then act on it, as we see fit. And hence, the need for “truth” gets elevated several folds. And truth here should be absolute. As a lot depends on it. Sometimes life and death and at other times, a person’s identity. Coz what we believe makes us who we are. Thats the truth I am speaking of. Have you wondered why things are never absolutely true? If you start thinking about it, you'll realise that this ambiguity in the concept of truth exists only in things that are human or related to humans. For example, look at the sun or the moon. One is a star and the other, a satellite. Both of them are celestial bodies. That is the truth, the absolute truth. As its universally ...