Experiences

Hammering it in Circa 1987; Thiruvananthapuram A sunny late afternoon I was at school. To be more precise, I was on a stool, in my classroom, hammering in a banner, at school. A sexagenarian schoolmaster stopped short at this sight. “ Pattathi kuttiyalle (aren’t you a brahmin girl)?” he asked. “How come you are doing this?” My jaw dropped at this question. I was a 14-year old proto-feminist, struggling with Gandhian philosophy and passionate about Communism, but none of these had a bearing on my being so occupied that afternoon. I was working on the following uncomplicated logic: there was the banner, a few nails, a hammer, a stool, need for the banner to be aloft, no volunteers, and yours sincerely, able-bodied. Ergo. I suppose the master’s question could be rationalized—he was, after all, a provincial schoolmaster, on his post-retirement second stint, a representative of a crazy age that was on its kamikaze way of being irrelevant. It was just ironic that he was objec...

I confess to an overwhelming curiosity and an adolescent "Heh heh!" in my head that made me linger at the "erotica" section at Borders this weekend and buy my first ever book in this genre. I don't know what I expected from an anthology of short stories on "women's erotic fantasies," but nothing prepared me for the enthusiastic and "in-your-face" form of uber-feminism that I encountered. This was a far cry from sleaze and perversion that I was half-expecting (one wonders where those notions came from)--these were 19 expertly crafted stories by obviously intelligent women authors. Among them are doctors, poets, a medievalist, a comedy writer, and one who thinks it's her "civic duty to write smut!" And as the editor puts it, "These fantasies are fierce, fearless, unapologetic..." The editor is more fascinating--Violet Blue (not to be confused with a porn star of the same name) appears to be a celebrity (I saw he...