The Big Ban Theory

If banning stuff is the new ‘in’ thing, then here’s my own wish list

In case you haven’t noticed, this is the season of bans. Beef has been banned in Maharashtra; anyone found in possession of it or selling it will be jailed for five years and fined Rs 10,000. The Central Board of Film Certification issued a list of all the ‘bad’ words that would henceforth be banned in the movies (though there has been some furious back-pedalling on the issue since). The movie, Fifty Shades Of Grey, based on the best-selling erotic novel of the same name, has been banned as well, in case it corrupted our morals. And, most famously, the Government of India has banned the documentary, India’s Daughter, made by Leslee Udwin, on the December 2012 gang rape in Delhi (though a defiant BBC went ahead and aired it anyway, and millions have since seen it on the Internet).

On a visceral level, I am opposed to the banning of anything, whether it is The Satanic Verses or M.F. Husain’s nude portraitures of Hindu goddesses. Freedom of expression is meaningless if it does not come with the right to offend. That is why even those who did not necessarily agree with the views of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists chose to march the streets with placards proclaiming Je Suis Charlie. The fact that you disagree with a point of view – as expressed in a painting, a cartoon, a book, a movie, or a documentary – is not reason enough to ban it. Look away if it offends you; but defend the rights of those who choose to do otherwise.

But given that bans seem to be the flavor of the month, I decided to follow that old maxim: if you can’t beat them, join them. So here, for the kind consideration of the Government of India, are just some of the things I would like banned. I would be much obliged if the same could be taken under its kind consideration (that’s proper bureaucratic-speak, in case you’re wondering, so that the babus can do the needful!).

• Let’s ban all netas from commenting on rape. That way we would be spared such gems as: “How can you hang someone for rape; boys make mistakes sometimes” (Mulayam Singh Yadav, SP leader). Or “rape cases are on the rise because men and women interact with each other more freely now” (Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal chief minister). Or “If a girl is dressed decently, a boy will not look at her in the way wrong way. If they (women) want freedom, why don’t they just roam around naked” (Manohar Lal Khattar, Haryana chief minister). I could go on, but this is depressing enough.
• A ban should also be imposed on all those who would interfere with women’s reproductive rights. So, no more Sakshi Maharajs telling us that Hindu women should produce at least four children. Or Shymal Goswami (BJP leader from West Bengal) increasing the count to five. And certainly, no raising the limit to ten kids, as the Shankaracharya of Badrikashram, did recently. How many kids she has is up to every individual woman; whether the count is 0 or 10 is entirely up to her.
• If you are going to ban beef then you have a moral obligation to ban tofu too. It’s Chinese in origin, tastes of nothing, destroys every dish it comes into contact with, and did I mention that it is Chinese? No good can come of tofu; let’s get rid of it from our shops, our tables, our restaurants, our shores. Let’s give paneer a chance, instead.
• Ban cell phones in movie theatres. No, turning on the silent mode is not enough. The odds are that some self-important sod will neglect to do so, and his phone will emit a shrill ring just as a crucial scene of the movie is playing. Then, he will take ages to answer, ignoring all the baleful looks cast in his direction, until he finally picks up to stage-whisper, “Sorry, can’t talk now. Am watching a movie.” And sorry, but even phones that have been silenced are a complete nuisance. They flash incessantly through the movie, with new messages and calls coming through, quite ruining the theatre-going experience.
• High heels must go. They are just instruments of torture, inflicted on women for centuries now. And alas, we are such suckers for punishment that we have clasped them to our soles and refuse to let go, never mind those aching backs and painful knees (not to mention the bunions). If you tried to sell men shoes that made walking – let alone running – an exercise in pain, they would laugh in your face. So, why don’t women just say ‘no’ when it comes to high heels? Well, never mind. Just ban the horrid things already. 
• Ban all fairy tales that teach young girls that they need rescuing. That their only salvation lies in a handsome young prince who will come riding up on a shining white horse and save them from an unhappy fate. And that they will then live happily ever after. Stop telling them these stories; you are just setting them up for disappointment.

The End

Do you always get there? Or are you the kind who has no problems abandoning a book half-way through?

So, to which author falls the distinction of having written a book that heads the list of the top five most abandoned – as in left unread till the end – titles? I am sure it will come as a shock for you to learn that it is none other than J.K. Rowling. But before you keel over, let me tell it is not for her Harry Potter series, but for the first ‘grown-up’ book she wrote. And the top reason people gave for abandoning The Casual Vacancy? Well, it wasn’t exactly Harry Potter, was it?

Well, as someone who has never read a single word that Rowling ever wrote (I am sorry but all that magic-Muggles stuff is just lost on me), I am really not qualified to comment. But the next book on the list of top five most abandoned titles makes perfect sense to me. It is Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, but more on that later.

After that, the list gets a bit mystifying. The next title that most people gave up on is Eat Pray Love (which I loved from the word go; and long before it became something of a cult book) on the grounds that the heroine was too ‘whiny’ and ‘self-obsessed’ followed by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which many found too much of a slow starter to persist with.

Well, I don’t know about you but I firmly believe that when it comes to books, the world is divided into two kinds of people. The first group believes in the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ line and ploughs through to the (sometimes bitter) end while the second just wearily intones ‘Life is too short…” and gives up the moment boredom sets in.

Sadly, I happen to belong to the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ school so I have wasted years of my life battling through to the last page of books that were best left unfinished. But somehow, as far as I am concerned, to give up in the middle seems to smack of failure. And while at a rational level, I know that the failure is that of the writer and not mine, the reader’s, I am still reluctant to put the book away. So, there it lies, languishing on my bedside table, so that I can administer a sop to my uneasy conscience by reading a few pages every night before turning in. That way, at least, it serves a purpose: it puts me to sleep like no page-turner would.

Of late, though, I have begun to wonder if boring, unreadable books are really worth all that effort (not to mention the self-flagellation involved). The thought first crossed my mind when I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey. Sado-masochistic bondage or Deviant Romances are not really my cup of coffee (I am more of a Regency Romance-Georgette Heyer kind of girl) but given that everyone was talking about it and that it behoves a columnist to be au fait with popular culture, I tried to give it a shot.

Honest to God, I tried. In fact, I tried three times to get beyond page 150 before throwing the book down in disgust and flouncing off to read something – anything! – else. No, it wasn’t the erotica that put me off (frankly, I didn’t find it the least bit erotic) but the sheer banality of it all. Not to mention the utterly execrable writing. (Though what really made me weep was the thought that this book had topped the best-selling charts and made its author a millionaire many times over.)

But I treated Fifty Shades of Grey as a one-off. It was just one of those freak books that you either loved or loathed; and I just happened to be one of those who loathed it.

That was before I downloaded Dan Brown’s Inferno on my Ipad before setting off on holiday. Now, I am the kind of person who loves long-haul flights for exactly one reason: you can read a nice, fat, fast-paced thriller uninterrupted for eight hours and, with a bit of luck, finish it in one greedy mouthful. And I had loved Dan Brown’s last page-turners, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol, so I thought I was all set for the flight.

Not quite. About ten minutes into the book, I was beginning to get worried. Half an hour later, I knew I was in serious trouble. There was no way I was wading through this bilge for the next seven hours. Well, not without losing the will to live. Which would be rather ironic given the plot of the novel: a mad scientist tries to infect the world with a deadly plague and succeeds. But then, it turns out that it’s not really a deadly plague after all…ah well, never mind.

Suffice it to say that it took me not eight hours, but five weeks to finish the book. And by the end, even I couldn’t quite figure out why I was persisting with the damn thing. I couldn’t be bothered about what happened next. I didn’t care if Professor Robert Langdon was finally killed off. Hell, I didn’t care if Dan Brown killed off the entire human race in his parallel universe.

But still, I persisted until the very last page. Only to ask myself why I had bothered. Maybe the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ argument has run its course and it is time to remember that life is, indeed, too short.

How? Why? What?

An examination of some of the abiding mysteries of life

You know all those abiding mysteries of life that people lie awake and think about? As in: how did the world come into being? Why are we here? What is it all about? Is there such a being as God? Well, I don’t really waste much sleep over them. Instead, I am constantly mystified by people and the baffling things some of them get up to.

I mean, how do you explain the fact that there are some women who apply toner after cleansing their faces and before moisturising? Who are these women and how do they have the time – not to mention the energy and the patience – to undertake this three-step cleansing routine twice a day? I feel incredibly pleased with myself for smearing on a spot of sunscreen in the morning and managing to clean my teeth before collapsing into bed. And there are apparently women out there who actually manage to not just cleanse and moisturise, but also ‘tone’ their skin? I know these mythical creatures must exist (or else how would you explain the sales of toner?) even though I have never met any of them. But I can’t help being mystified by their devotion to cleansing rituals nonetheless.

Of late, I have been puzzling over another abiding mystery of our time. Who are all these women who find Fifty Shades of Grey (not to mention Fifty Shades Darker and whatever the other Fifty-something book is called) so ‘erotic’ that they are have turned it into the best-selling title of all time, outselling even J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series? No matter where you go these days – the bookstore, the supermarket, the grocery shop, the airport – you find a wall of blue-grey covers staring balefully at you, daring you to pick up your daily dose of porn in full view of the public. But even if you ignore the troublesome issue of the mainstreaming of pornography as it were, how do you explain that enough people find this kind of puerile writing sexy and exciting? As someone who has tried reading the book and given up after a 100 pages (yes, even before the ‘sexy’ bits begin), I certainly can’t. How could anyone find this risible prose remotely arousing? And yet, astonishingly enough, they do.

And while we are on the subject of kinky sex, are there really any women out there who are applying ‘whitening’ and ‘tightening’ creams to their lady bits in the hope of improving their sex life? Actually, on second thought, even if these creatures do exist, I really don’t want to know.

As the cliché goes, it takes all sorts to make up the world but even so, there are some people – and some kinds of behaviour – that remain unfathomable (to me, at least). Those folks, for instance, who actually enjoy getting up at the crack of dawn, pulling on their sneakers, and pounding the pavements until the sun comes up, and then spend the day banging on about their ‘endorphin high’. If you ask me, never mind their hamstrings, it’s their heads that need examining.

Then, there are those strange creatures that our fashion glossies write for. You know the ones I mean. Those who are happy to junk their wardrobes every few months or so and run off to stock up on the ‘new season’ look. Those who spend hours stuffing tissue paper into the sleeves of their jackets and dresses before packing them so that they don’t crease (have these people not heard of a steam-iron? Or laundry services?). Or those who treat a summer vacation as an excuse to exfoliate, wax and embark on a new diet.

And don’t get me started on those intrepid souls who dare to negotiate the perils of airport check-ins and air travel in vertigo-inducing high heels. Do these women have no pain threshold? Have the soles of their feet no sensation left after years of systematic abuse? Or have they been brainwashed by Fifty Shades of Junk to believe that pain equals pleasure?

There are many things that mystify me when I check into a hotel but top of the list is the horror known as the mini-bar. No matter where in the world I am, the prices listed on the mini-bar list leave me dumbstruck. Who can possibly afford to pay these rates? And yet, apparently, there are people who do just that. Drop the equivalent of a cool Rs 500 for a miniature bottle of whiskey. Spend around Rs 150 for a bottle of water. Or Rs 200 bucks for a packet of crisps. Or Rs 300 for a packet of peanuts (I’m sorry, but that’s just plain nuts!)

While we are on the subject of crisps, though, who are these people who can open a packet and then just stop at one, two or even ten? Do they really exist? Or are they just the stuff of urban legend?

And don’t even get me started on those who can stop at the last chapter of a spy thriller or a good murder mystery, slip in a book-mark, turn off the lights and then go off to sleep. Don’t they want to know how the damn thing ends? How can anyone drift off to sleep without reading the denouement, especially when it is just a few pages away? Quite honestly, it beggars belief.