rashmi-vasudeva.com

No, I didn’t take the cable car. I saw no snow. Obviously then, I didn’t ski. I didn’t exactly get any ‘mountain top breathtaking view’. Nah, didn’t buy watches either. Eating Swiss chocolates and cheese were the only concession I was willing to give for being in Switzerland. And it paid off.

Never on my list of must-see places, Geneva is the kind of surprise you get when you go there not expecting to see heaven. It is then that you are willing to ignore the clinical affluence of the place, steer clear of its famed haute couture and wander instead into an eye-poppingly green park. First you hear the laughter; and then you see cliques of youngsters dotted all over the park, some just giggling and a few others trying to play the bass guitar. A few feet away, completely oblivious to this exuberant din, are very formally dressed men (whose age I am conservatively estimating to be between 80 and 90) sternly planning moves on a giant chessboard installed in the park. Their completely un-mock seriousness in playing the game makes it obvious that they belong to Geneva as much as we hapless tourists don’t.
After I get the third nasty stare for trying to get a little too near to the massive chessboard (I wanted to kick the pieces around) I decide to give them a wide berth and walk down further with the limp sun, the still wet grass and the cool breeze enough to offset all kinds of stares.

The park is below one of Geneva’s best known monuments, Le Monument de La Reformation, which  was built in early 20th century along a 16th century rampart beneath Geneva’s old town. It is a dedication to the famous four Geneva reformers — Knox, Calvin, Theodore de Beze and Guillaume Farel. All four look down sternly on the aforementioned sterner players of life-size chess. This is the best place to lie on the grass, leisurely lick a fat tub of creamy yoghurt clean and breathe in life.

That’s the thing about Geneva. Its air. It's so shockingly pure that it makes you want to take great gulps in and store it somewhere; to be summoned up when the next auto farts black smoke into your face. Truly green, Geneva, it seems, has as many parks as it has international organisations. It is also home to the Red Cross Museum that not only traces the history of the humanitarian organisation but organises fantastic photo exhibitions regularly. It is a stark, dark place though; long corridors full of carefully filed and indexed archives, grainy world war footage and exhibits about suffering and valour. Your nose expects a musty smell, but since this is Switzerland, what it gets instead is the smell of thoroughly vacuumed carpets. 

From here, you can either choose to duck inside the typically officious-looking UN headquarters (squat and square building, lots of flags, inscribed lettering) or take the leisurely tram back to the quay. Walk along the promenade, which offers you stunning views of Lake Geneva, one of western Europe’s largest lakes with its trademark fountain that throws water some 400-odd feet into the air. Why is a fountain so fascinating? Is it because it mirrors our own lives, constant and relentless till somebody switches it off?
The promenade is also a great place for making further inroads into your observation of human nature. It is almost as if its long stone benches, the accompanying gardens, the quiet gazebos next to the pebbly brooks, are all designed to encourage you to do just that — observe how our fellow beings tackle life and wonder why tourists are enamoured by a silly clock made of flowers.

Better still, don’t wonder. Don’t read up about Geneva before you land there. Give randomness a chance and it might lead you to a suburb just outside the city where uneven streets criss-cross each other, Mediterranean style houses look down on cute (there’s no other word for it) gardens and where you instantly smell a general air of bohemia so unlike the Swiss that you turn into the tourist you don’t want to be. Carouge was apparently a township that was gifted to the King of Sardenia in 1754. He wanted it to, well, look Mediterranean. So he got architects to give the town a ‘chessboard design’ (the official website tells me) and wooden houses with compact gardens of their own.
The suburb still retains most of that striking architecture though the houses have now mostly been converted into old-worldly but fashionable cafes, antique galleries and curio shops. 

And then, just when you think you have had enough of such serendipity, you are enticed to climb what feels like 800 steps up Geneva’s oldest cathedral, to just look at its ancient, corroded tower bell. For your efforts, while climbing down the precariously spiralling stairs in near-complete darkness, you are gifted with a single slant of sunlight that cuts through you. Perfectly, diagonally. 

Published in Sunday Herald on 09.01.11
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/127454/old-world-charm.html

I hated that game, 'pass the buck'. I used to quake in fear awaiting my turn, the few times I played it when I was a teen. That painful shyness had the power to still tingle over me while I gazed at a FB photo my aunt uploaded of us playing the game in 1991. All I wanted to do was to become invisible. Or go home. I never dreamt then that in 2010, I would be finally and fully convinced that I come of a gypsy stock; that my heart is bohemian; that home is nowhere. Or everywhere.

This year I have seen plump suns, reds, crimsons and inky blues without having to move out of my room in Amsterdam.
I have walked beside a canal frozen stiff, on a road three feet wide with only a treacle-thick fog for company.
I have sat on a plateau on a hill in Geneva and looked long at an yellow weed unnerved and proud amidst the stupendous green.
I have known what it means to walk out of a metro station and find the 2000-year-old Colosseum at its footstep.
I have seen Venice but better still I saw Monet's Venice in Cardiff that is more Venice than Venice could ever be. Light is indeed like water.
I have stood in an abandoned graveyard in Bordeaux and plucked the most beautiful wild pink flowers all the while gurgling with happiness. The sky was blue.
I have also stood in a bathroom of a concentration camp. No comprehension was possible. The sky was still blue though.
And I have gone back to Brydges Place to stare and sigh about that little piece of heart that London has stolen from me.

This year has extravagantly displayed to me the charms of impermanence. It has taught me much about the notion of home, which can be an open road thick with snow with only my flat- footed marks or it can be watching 'The Musik' with a reluctant Siddharth, sitting cross-legged on our blue faux-divan. I know that far from having no home at all, I have many. And they are all neatly sectioned, filed and indexed within me.

The journey is endless. It is also beginning-less. I know now that we create imaginary places that we call our own. To feel at home is to look up and down an empty road and not get daunted; to feel at home is to skype endlessly with a dear friend from another continent and realise that its our faith, our loves and our passions that bind us and nothing else can ever; it is to carry snapshots of classrooms, streets, faces, laughter and memories of swinging chandeliers with you wherever you go; it is to shed tears because of having stumbled across music that clutches at your soul; it is to determine deep inside not to anchor anywhere no matter how beautiful the island.

At the end of this hyperbolic year that took me physically to 13 or more cities of the world and spiritually to the sneakiest corners of my mind and made me dust them, I am on unsure footing. And liberatingly enough, that is damn exciting.

I don't know where I will go from here. I do know I want to shout that out with a kind of glowy happiness that cannot be fathomed. I don't know what's in store but I do know I have a "small back-room" in my mind where I can fully be myself. (Thanks, Simpson.) 

I do know there are paths before me, all beckoning but I also know that none of them are neatly laid out.

At long last, it feels providential. I never had a chance to work out what I wanted to do with my life. Now, I have. I hear the cadence of the world, the rhythm of life. I soak it in when Tina Sani sings 'zindagi ki leh ussi ke dam sey hein' I can pause and rewind without fear. I am empty and I am filled up to the brim. I am at the beginning.

It was a dark, stormy night. The alley was narrow and twisted; the bridge led nowhere, the water beneath, thick and murky, was midnight blue. We were lost. And worried. And happy. And nervous.
And giggly. And we were in Venice.

Sometimes the worst cliches of a bad novel play out in life and lets you discover a few un-cliched truths. Like being as geographically challenged as I am can be liberating in at least one city in the world. And that getting lost can translate to finding yourself.

Drifty, dreamy Venice does that to you. It seamlessly merges fact and fiction; all that you have read about this magical city is true. Both the good and the bad. Oh yes, there are lots of both. Venice's tourists are so many that they have scared the locals into hiding. Or so it seems.

This much-written about city has all the trappings of a beauty uglified by PR brochures. There are meant-for-tourists lanes, showy, tacky and overcrowded. At every corner on these lanes, you will meet an open-mouthed backpacker clutching a map in one hand (quite useless in Venice, but we will come to that later) and eating a fake gelato with another. They abound in Venice. Fake gelatos that is. And fake Murano glass art. And fake Venetian masks. Never mind the dour stickers on the display window of every second shop warning tourists against buying "Chinese glass". One pleads in broken English: "Buying Chinese glass kill Murano."

Then there are 'real' Venetian lanes. Like there are stunning real masks and beautifully intricate glass art. But it takes a practiced eye to spot them amidst the clutter.

That really is your cue to get yourself adrift on this little island, which feels more like water than land. The buildings seem to bend down too...perhaps they are in search of their feet mostly immersed in the water? I did tell you that Venice makes you dreamy, didn't I?

It also makes you dizzy. No vehicles are allowed to ply here. Nope, not even cycles. So you walk like everybody else. How democratic! And yes, leave that map behind. It is of no use in Venice's mostly unnamed streets which invariably lead you to a dead-end or to another narrow unnamed street which you eagerly take to er.. end up in the street you originally started walking from.

There are basically only two directions in Venice -- one pointing 'per' (towards) San Rialto, the 1,000-year-old ornamental bridge and another 'Per' San Marco, the island's central piazza. But, but. These two signs are everywhere and in many places, pointing towards opposite ends! And worse, mischievous graffiti writers have added their own authentic-looking 'Per San Marco' and 'Per San Rialto' signs!

In Venice apparently, mailing addresses do not contain street names. They only have some cryptic-looking numbers and district names. Poor postmen! The New York Times also informs me that Gondoliers take a tough three-month navigation course. And many fail the first time round.

I am thoroughly unsurprised. What surprised me though was what getting lost does to you. Especially if it is progressively getting darker and lonelier. You tend to look at your hands and feet deeply, as if you will discover a map hidden there somewhere; weirdly, you become acutely conscious of your short-sightedness. Don't ask why. You keep spotting bridges and buildings that look familiar but are not; you feel eerily aware of the stillness of the night. (Yeah, yeah just like in those badly written novels.)

And then it all fades away. The fear, the anxiety, the worry. And warmth and a strange happiness settles in. Like how the real Venice is lost to most people, you too are really, truly lost. And that unshackles you. You hold hands tightly and start looking out for the moon; for the odd shapes the sagging buildings make, for the sound of the water lapping lazily, for the lone gondola floating away serenely.

And then you keep walking. Now you are sure you will end up finding.

Published in Sunday Herald on 10.10.10
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/103557/uncliched-truths.html

The Europeans might not share the same world view, never mind the EU, but mention Brussels and eight times out of ten, you will see a lip curl, or an eye roll and lots of nudge-nudge snigger-snigger. The other two times, you probably met either a flag-holding Belgian or Hercule Poirot.

Apparently, Brussels' image woes are so bad that it routinely wins the tag of “most boring European city” in online surveys. That mother of Preen, Paris, is half an hour away by speed train while that mecca of bonhomie, Amsterdam, is not too far either. Brussels is thus most often ignored by the average tourist determined to ‘do’ Paris and then breathlessly ‘do’ The Dam as well. The odd offbeat tourist who does visit Brussels for a day or so, more often than not, is directed by the tourist office to a miserable little statue of a peeing boy, astonishingly Brussels' most famous monument ‘Mannekin Pis'.  Or he is told enthusiastically to visit one of Brussels' many sidewalk cafes and have a bowl of mussels, which at best is an acquired taste and at worst, tastes like mushrooms that died two weeks ago in the freezer. And of course, it doesn't help at all that Brussels is the capital of the EU —the city seems to be resignedly bearing the brunt of the Union's reflected un-glory.

All this sadly means most tourists miss out on the dark delights of Brussels. Belgium is right on top of the heap when it comes to production of chocolate and we are talking fine chocolate here, not your Mars and Snickers bars. Chocolate with aroma; chocolate that is neither too sweet nor too bitter; chocolate that neither flakes nor hardens; chocolate that melts exactly when it kisses your tongue; chocolate that inspires such an unabashedly maudlin paragraph.

Of course, the French and the Swiss claim they do it better (whether or not French and Swiss chocolates are of better quality is another matter, their PR machinery is definitely sharper). But there is no other place in the world except the compact city of Brussels where you can take a leisurely walk in the quaint, cobbled historic town square, full of gilt-edged enormous neo-classical structures and encounter some of the world's finest producers of chocolate.

First stop, the justly famous Leonidas, one of the greatest Belgian chocolate names. If you are wondering why a Belgian chocolate shop sounds like a Greek ship company, don't blame yourself. It was began by Leonidas Kestikedes, a young Greek who came to Brussels to take part in the ‘Universal exhibition of Brussels' in 1913 and hence the name. He won not only the bronze medal for his handmade chocolates at the exhibition but also the heart of a Belgian lady and decided to settle down in Brussels. Originally, the chocolates were sold in small tea rooms through the famed ‘guillotine window' (windows that slid up and down), remnants of which barely exist in today's Brussels. In 1935, the actual company was established by Leonidas' nephew and today, there are Leonidas outlets every few metres in central Brussels and it still remains one of the largest chocolate producers of Belgium and yet, one of the very few affordable ones for slurpy-tongued hungry-eyed poor mortals like me. Here you can buy pralines by weight and extraordinarily cute house-boxes full of chocolates.
 
Walk a few metres and you will reach Galeries St Hubert, said to be the first “covered shopping area of the world". Simply put, the shopping mall of the 19th Century. A complete charmer of a neo-classical building, all stately grace and golden elegance, it will make you wish every modern glass and steel shopping mall went retro. Here is housed the famed Neuhaus confectionary, still sitting snugly where it was originally started in 1846! Again, Neuhaus has a fascinating history.

Founded by a Swiss immigrant Jean Neuhaus who originally began the store as a medicine shop that sold the odd candy, it was later inherited by Neuhaus' grandson who is credited with inventing pralines. The chocolatiers have regal status today and hold the ‘Royal Warrant'. Meaning they are the suppliers of those fine chocolates that the Belgian royalty undoubtedly enjoys. 

Walk into the blinding sunshine from the marble-cold mall and you will reach the Plac du Grande Sablon. If the name of the square sounds grand, the chocolate producers that surround it are grandiose. Here you will find within kissing distance of each other, flagship outlets of world class chocolatiers Marcolini, Wittamer, Godiva and Valrhona. All these companies zealously guard their cocoa secrets. For instance, Valrhona creates vintage dark chocolate from cocoa beans of a specific year's harvest from a specific heavily guarded plantation; Marcolini is famed for its use of completely natural ingredients like real vanilla.  If you have a thick enough skin, walk into these shops even if you cannot afford a single praline; there are often free tastings and in some of them, you can even watch the chocolates being hand made right in the shop.
 
I did walk in, thin skin and all. Tasted the pralines for free. Smiled sheepishly at everybody and walked out, finally and humbly accepting that chocolate is my lord and master. And that, like Belgium's very own Poirot, I should stop resisting and drink creme de menthe every evening.

Published in Sunday Herald on 22.07.10
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/90397/dark-delightful.html

I don't really know how this is going to pan out but the inspiration came out of the most cliched of sources -  a fat, perfectly shaped, thickly coloured rainbow. Not every spring of my life will be spent waking up to a blue-tinged dawn that slowly dissolves into a pink stain over contemplative indigo. Is it darkest before dawn? Yes and No. Depends on what colour passion is for you. Nor would every winter be spent being woken up by thudding whooshing sounds that take your feet to the window to see outside a white that is both screaming and silent. Snow has an element of evil in it. Apparently I have synesthesia of sorts. I just discovered today. I attribute sounds to colours and colours to smells. Vangibath smells are russet coloured; morning mouth smells are teal; the smell of brewing tea is undoubtedly cream.. well I can go on.  I have always done it as a lazy mental hobby but apparently it is one of the several abnormalities I seem to have :P

So taking advantage of this newest discovery and the growing knowledge that nothing lasts forever, I decided to write a photo poem.
P.S: A friend who hates to be named in blogs would recognise where the nickname pink and brown came from. :D

P.P.S: All photographs are views from my window, mostly in Amsterdam, a few in Aarhus. Photos are mostly taken by me except where mentioned. For me, every two lines of the poem corresponds  to a particular picture (and they are in the same order). But of course, you are welcome to read it however you like.

A line of verse for every image
A spring like this every year
Who can predict what will make you gaze

Look, how serenely trickles in love. Fear
for its transience; it will break your heart

Like how this tree, lingering and bare
And me, will always be far apart

Colours of kindness, pink blue and grey
That stop me from hurrying to somewhere else

I've looked out of the window
and I have learnt to float

Darkness before dawn too is a half-pretence
It preens likewise even before dusk, note.

There is always a rainbow
Only if you care enough

But that too will fade into the night
Just hold nothing too tight.

I had a strange reluctance to write this piece. Travelling and reading. Two most intensely personal, exhaustingly selfish pursuits. One never knows whether one can really put down what happens when the two fuse (do they, can they?) and worse, one has no clue whether the person who cares to read what is put down will connect somewhere, if at all.

Two things have to be made clear here. By travelling I don’t mean taking the four-day bus tour of the Golden Triangle. By reading I don’t mean the flight safety booklet or that ‘Stardust’ you picked up at Warangal junction just because the train had stopped for longer than you liked.

And I definitely don’t mean travelling with aunts and uncles and a brood of kids. I agree, there is a lot of reading to be done here outside of a book. Which brings us to a boring aside of a confession. I cannot read a book while I travel; that is while I am actually moving from place A to place B. I am the kind who reads after reaching. When there is movement, there can only be music. But I do carry a book with me. It gives me a strange sense of security. When there is any unease, I can duck and hide into it. A book is your very own tortoise shell. Always handy. 

But there are millions who do. First up on my mind is a friend who matter-of-factly said she reads even while she walks (to her college that is) as if that was the most natural thing to do. “It passes time and if the road is mapped out in your head and does not have too many bumps, it is comforting.” Those were her exact words. And she has even read Alice in Wonderland while walking! Just think, I would have definitely stumbled into a rabbit hole myself if I ever attempted this.

There are those who buy Lonely Planets by its weight and swot it by heart by the time they reach Prague or Tokyo. And there are the kinds who believe that when they are travelling, they should read travel literature. Which is quite stupid if you ask me. Most travel literature is wonderfully happy experiences, full of joyous endings, amazing discoveries, written in descriptive splendour. You will only end up feeling miserable and envious because you lost your way in a smelly dingy alley in London while your exuberant writer had effusively described London as being infested with magical rabbit paths or when you clearly don’t feel as spiritual as the author when the Ganga comes into sight in Varanasi.

If you ask me, I would rather read fiction set in the place I am going to. I wish I had read Alexandar McCall Smith’s brilliantly evocative mystery series — ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’ before visiting Edinburgh; or one of Kurt Wallander mysteries that are getting so popular in India before stepping into Stockholm. I have read William Darlymple’s City of Djinns twice in the hope of falling in love with Delhi the next time I go. I haven’t. Yet. And there are so many books set in London and New York that most book lovers feel eerily at home in these cities.

There is another way to do this. Go travelling in search of things to read. There is nothing more pleasurable than finding yourself in a new city, a map sitting snugly in your pocket, mind open, bright sunshine and the prospect of browsing through second hand bookstores in the hope of serendipity.

That is why travelling is reading and reading is travelling.
Have you noticed the irrational warmth that eccentric bookworms feel for one another? Or that flash of grudging liking that solitary travellers convey, and to be sentimentally literary here, “when they pass each other in the night”?

All are signs of acknowledgement — of indulgence; of a primordial love for the self and funnily enough, a kind of convivial tolerance for humanity. These two magnificent pursuits are always merging, in a hazy, hard-to-define way. Travelling is reading the world and yourself and reading is travelling around the world and into yourself. But for this to really occur, you should be willing to love yourself fiercely and love humanity equally strongly. Both need what an author whose name I now forget calls ‘imaginative generosity of the heart’; both are curiously passive activities that require all your heart and soul and energy and passion to make them worthwhile.

Unfortunately, this cannot be explained further. For one, I have not understood it completely and I hope I never will. For those who understand, explanations are unnecessary. Bon Voyage!

Published in Sunday Herald on 14.02.10
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/52439/book-rack.html

The cover never did excite me. Neither did the title. For a 12-year-old drunk on Ned and Nancy, Fatty, Bets, Buster and the like, these were important criteria. But then, that was when my school was right opposite what was then actually a fine library for children. The city central library opposite National High School. Now it is dead and buried. I carry the burden of its bitter-sweet memories. 


The book, like many other things, stared its way into my life. The cover was brownish with a black and white photo of a smiling Anne and that legend below: Anne Frank: The diary of a young girl. All that appealed to me was the word diary.I had always had one in which I wrote in all seriousness 'my edicts' (did you ever think a history lesson on Ashoka's edicts could affect somebody so much? hehehe) and really bad rhyming poetry. 


I remember everything about reading it. I remember waiting for amma to go to office and then immediately springing up from my seat, putting on the radio and grabbing it. It was one of the first books that made it physically difficult for me to stop reading it, when I had to eat or when I had to go to school. I even read it in class, hiding it behind a textbook. This, despite not knowing a thing about holocaust, not knowing who Jews were, not being able to pronounce in my head all the different names. In my mind, I only saw Anne as myself like thousands of other children did probably. I only saw a young girl, imprisoned in a 'secret annexe' behind a bookcase, having a sweet romance with a young boy and having some slight trouble with bad Germans. Somewhere at the back of my mind was what our history teacher HVR had told us about the holocaust in his first class. To a conservative, shocked group of young girls and boys, he had described men and women being marched naked to barracks to be killed later. And that was all that I knew.
And All that mattered to me then was that I was Anne Frank and Anne Frank was me. Stuff for daydreams.


Thankfully, I revisited the book two more times, years later. It was later that I felt the bookcase in my hand, understood what Otto Frank meant when he said, the rooms might appear spacious to you now, you visitors, but when we were there, there was fear living with us and saw with Anne what she saw from the attic -- a patch of blue sky, some blooms and some white birds. And go to Auschwitz as Anne several times.  


So it was that when I came to Amsterdam, it had to be Anne Frank house that I first went to. And feel the bookcase for real. Be in Anne's room. Climb the narrow stairs. See the attic. And find absolutely no words to write in the visitors book.


Oh, I had one too. My Target Diary. Who was my imaginary friend. Whom I used to call in cheap imitation of Anne's 'Dearest Kitty', 'Dear DD'.  And it was a boy. With whom I shared all my little lies, convincing myself and him that they were the truth. It was what I considered my sweet revenge against the world. I did write the truth as well occasionally. Oh I was a messed up little kid in many ways -- I would build a fabricated portrayal of myself in the diary.. all the good that happened to me were just that -- good; but all the 'bad' that happened to me were the EVIL world plotting against me. But I still had my DD with me; to console me; play with me and be my pet dog, soulmate and romantic boyfriend.
When I first acknowledged these memories and actions to myself, I felt quite unique and extraordinary. Does this happen to everybody? Am I special? Only after years (of which three were spent studying psychology) did I realise how normal they were. How very ordinary. And that realisation spinned me back into DD's whorl from where I wanted to but could not escape. If you really let yourself go, and I mean 'let yourself go' in its most deepest, most primaeval sense, like I did with my DD, you end up inside yourself, struggling to come up for air. But once you rescue yourself from it, you can never go back. It has been a firm 'Goodbye DD' for a long time now. The Anne in me rests. 

There ain’t any guilt any more. Only pleasure.  And status updates.
 
Come now, think. Are you feeling all pleasurable inside because you licked off a pot of hazelnut cream? Feeling full, tickled, embarrassed and gross? Yes, we know what you will do next. Login to Facebook and assuage all those feelings by a simple status update. “I just licked clean a pot of cream.” Friends will rush to like it, some will give banal advice, some will put up smileys. End of pleasure.
 
Aren’t we all guilty as charged?
 
Even Michigan researchers agree with me. Their new research on ‘guilty pleasures’ suggests that when we are actually doing what pleasures us, our brain, unsurprisingly, is only thinking of the pleasure and not its moral overtones or undertones. It is only later when we think back on our action that we associate with it feelings of guilt or embarrassment.
 
Consider for an instant that in a moment of abandon, you completely enjoyed a Himesh Reshammiya number (now, admit it, you were hooked to Jhalak Dhiklaja.) While you were singing along, you were only happy and satiated. It is only later when you tell your friend how much you hate Reshammiya’s singing that you start feeling ‘guilty’ for having experienced the pleasure of singing along to that catchy number. From that moment your brain ‘remembers’ your guilt even though originally there was none.
 
Fashion and celeb magazines looking for fillers have quite neatly murdered the impact of the phrase ‘guilty pleasures’ by asking all and sundry to list out their guilty pleasure reads, guilty pleasure movies, guilty pleasure foods blah blah, day in and day out. The phrase has become so clichéd that when you ask people what their guilty pleasure is, they list the most innocent of acts like eating an extra piece of chocolate in the night, listening to ABBA, reading Jane Austen, taking unplanned breaks, skimming through fashion blogs and taking “slightly over-budgeted” holidays as pleasures that make them feel guilty. I swear I am not making these up. Since when did humans become so morally uptight that mundane overeating and inane indulging started to make them feel guilty?
 
When I asked around for more such guilty pleasures and chided people for acting so innocent, somewhat more interesting ones tumbled out. (Nobody minded spilling out their secrets but nobody wanted to be identified – its ‘guilty pleasures’ after all!)
 
A  friend says her guiltiest indulgence is “sitting in the toilet for you-know-what for ever”. She says her pleasure at prolonging this holiest of rituals is almost “sensual”. Another says his guilty pleasure was fantasizing in lurid detail about making love to a cousin. My another acquaintance says his first thought was to confess about trawling the internet for porn. “But then, I don’t feel guilty at all doing it. So that’s not guilty pleasure, is it?”
 
Nope, it is not. Such not-so-guilty pleasures abound. The majority of them are either food-related or sex-related. Sometimes, it is stealing a smoke when parents are around and sometimes it is stealing money to buy alcohol. But mostly it is dreaming of making love to somebody, watching “outdoor porn” whatever that is, scanning agony aunt columns for sex-related queries, masturbating, dreaming of and I quote, “an incense-filled room full of wind chimes, with a lovely hunk massaging my entire body with purifying oils” or eating pot noodles raw, midnight fridge raids, chocolate, chocolate and chocolate.
 
Oh yes, there is a third category as well. The not-so-guilty but oh-so-gross pleasures category. Under this come confessions such as “getting a thrill by removing goo from my ear and smelling it”, “sniffing my underarms to smell the sweat and liking the smell” “going stealthily into the bathroom every morning to eat aspirin and toothpaste together because it was a delicious combo”, “picking my navel while watching TV” and “plucking my chest hair to pass the time.”
 
Such pleasures so inspired eight women from St Louis in the US that they actually got together to write a book of essays titled “Guilty Pleasures: Indulgences, Addictions and Obsessions.” The eight women remain anonymous but share intensely personal stuff in their essays and cover a wide range of indulgences from sleeping with married men to taking anti-depressants to extorting money from parents. The women call their effort ‘an anti-self-improvement book’!
 
But like always, the Germans can be relied upon to come up with a slightly weightier (more sinister?) interpretation of the concept. They have a military-sounding word for it too, no offence intended! ‘Schadenfreude’, they call it. There’s no exact translation but roughly it means ‘malicious joy’ or pleasure felt at the misfortune of others. 
 
Now, that’s more like it. If you tell me, the person who sat next to you on a bus irrigating his nose inspired hate in you for no apparent reason but the fact that he was torturing his own nose and you felt hyena-like laughter bubbling inside you when he missed his stop, I would call that guilty pleasure. More seriously, this is perhaps what prompts a collective roar of approval when a matador is pierced in his stomach by a charging bull or inspires shouts of support you hear in the background in grainy YouTube videos showing the Taliban stoning a young woman.
 
Orhan Pamuk in his delectable autobiography ‘Istanbul’ describes a feeling not dissimilar to ‘Schadenfreude’ but more akin to the Latin phrase ‘delectatio morosa’ or ‘the habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts.” He narrates how he would cheer himself up when he was all of six, by imagining he was killing people. He coolly recounts how he would lavish affection on a cat, only to strike it cruelly the next instant and emerge from that moment with a bout of laughter that would make him so ashamed that he would shower the cat with love again. Did I hear sadism?
 
You don’t exactly need a scientific study to trace the root of such joys. But studies have been conducted and they confirm that our brains are basically shit stations. When we see others going through ill-luck, we feel happy about ourselves. And scientists add that this happens more with people who have a low opinion of themselves.  Worse, the joy multiplies (and the pleasure centre in our brain actually ‘lights up’) when we see misfortune visit those whom we envy.
 
It takes a Mahatma Gandhi to turn this concept on its head and add a dash of piety with his famous advice to feel blessed by looking at those who are worse off than you rather than envy those who are better off than you.
 
Gandhi might have given a pious twist to this guilt business but it is to Oscar Wilde’s advice that human nature actually responds to. In his iconic work ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (which is by itself a paean to pleasure and guilt), Henry, Dorian’s friend and guide counsels the hero with this classic line: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
 
There. That’s why it is remarkably easy for me to confess my very own once guilt-ridden pleasure. I confess to always, always keeping an eye out for men’s eyelashes. The longer they are, the more curved they are, the more pleasure I get. It is an obsessive but now guiltless pleasure. After all, Wilde did tell us all what to do, didn’t he? When you give in to the temptation, the guilt is assuaged.
 
He would have approved of status updates.

Published in Sunday Herald on 30.11.09
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/38391/guilty-pleasures-forbidden-fruit.html