Why men will be boys

Like Newton and the apple, sometimes it takes a thump on the head to make you realize that you are after all -despite all efforts to ensure it does not happen, again -forever falling. Unlike Newton, my own epiphany happened in the aftermath of a bar brawl. The actual sequence of events is unclear in my mind, coated as they were with generous helpings of whiskey and weed. I do remember it was set off by my reversing into an Opel Corsa in the parking lot. I remember the almost silent crunch of a headlight cracking, the security guard gesturing wildly, the owner of the car cursing loudly.

They were in a big group - two cars and six middle-aged men, out for a night of banter and excess. I had stayed back till closing time in a desperate bid to hold on to a few more moments of solitude before the inevitable cacophony of parents and toddlers and news channels and telephones re-claimed ownership of my existence. Unfortunately, I had picked an unlikely setting for such a noble pursuit.

Men who drink only to get drunk, if granted the opportunity, will indulge in acts of incivility. If they're in a group, they will go looking for trouble. The sight of a younger man -smaller, well-dressed and harbinger of fender-benders - is about as irresistible to them as procasturbation is to unpublished writers. I didn't just back into the gentleman's car last night; I had rear-ended their collective masculinity. And collective rear-ending will always have consequences.

Bloody lip, three stitches to the back of the head and a police-complaint (filed by them, funnily enough) later, I can only think of the incident in terms of a general 21st century affliction - the "manchild". While Todd Phillips and Judd Apatow may well be responsible for making the phenomenon an accepted 'type' of our times, the concept itself is no stranger to popular culture dating from Joey Tribbiani and Kurt Cobain all the way back to Adolph Hitler, Sigmund  Freud and Epicurus in varying degrees.

The archetypal man-child is of course Jesus Christ: the son of "God" who turned water into wine, was never gainfully employed, befriended prostitutes, hung out with low-lives (whom he actively encouraged to quit their Mcjobs and stick it to the Man) and lived with his mother till he took off on a 'mission' to spread the Word- all classic symptoms of what we now know and love as the Mid-life Crisis.

What, I wonder, makes middle-aged men sport soul patches and flashy tee-shirts and shout racist chants at football games and incite drunken violence at Oasis concerts when they should be home with their women and children. Is it the white picket fence and warm meals that put them off growing up? Why do bearded, thirty-year-odd men spend large chunks of their lives playing videogames and surfing pornography? Is a world with traffic laws and pubic hair really that appalling?

I say this not in judgment, but because I'm faced with a similar crisis myself. At twenty-seven, I'm still clinging to fast-fading memories of student-life and freedom and lack of purpose. I find it impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction, youth and adulthood, to leave things behind. The realities of work and settling down and tax returns are just a little too real.

Sitting on the curb last night, sweaty, bloody and hung-over, I thought I caught a glimpse in their eyes of what it might be like to grow up. The celebratory air of a fight well-fought, the childish delight at having avenged the tarnishing of a favorite toy,  the joy of giving in to the feral demands of their domesticated bodies. They glowed with the satisfaction of a dog that has been let out for a walk and a piss in the open after a long day of confinement between the walls of its owner's home.

And in that moment, I knew. I knew what it must be like to be chained, to be tied down by marital and familial constraints and commitments. I almost felt a pride swell up inside me that I was in a small way responsible for their release, no matter how temporary. And I smiled as I watched the leader of the pack rub his shin where I had managed to land a weak kick just before the blows rained down on me.

Sex and Candy

I was in a hurry, so I picked up the only bottle of deodorant in the store. I'm not much of a brand-loyalist anyway. Only product I've re-purchased out of loyalty (as opposed to utility) are Converse Chucks - and that phase ended when I belatedly found out about the Nike affair. Why am I always the last to know I'm with the local whore? But that's a story for another day.

Back to the deo. The copy on the packaging declared that it was "more difficult to resist than chocolate". Which is fine, I thought, if you actually have expectations about that sort of thing. I'm just wary of BO. But the bloody thing actually smells like chocolate. What kind of grown man wants to smell like chocolate? Stupid fat kid at the cinema today took a bite off my ankle. 

Run Shahrukh, Run!

An excerpt from my novel, COUGH SYRUP SURREALISM (2013), Fingerprint! Publishing 

We could be soulmates. Meaning, we weren’t, yet. Meaning, there was a chance that we were soul mates, but she really wasn’t sure. This was disturbing news. And things have been going so well lately. Sure we’d had the proverbial ups and downs, but the last couple of weeks had been especially kind, with lots of private time, and intimate conversations that lasted late into the night and all the way till early morning, and eating stuff off each other’s bodies. “We could?” I asked. I waited impatiently for her to turn around and rephrase. On screen, Preity Zinta continued a monologue on the intricacies of the indigenous Bollywood love triangle. “Of course we could,” she said, and squeezed my arm, her eyes still on the screen. Wherefore art thou Optimistic Charlie?

The moment he was diagnosed with some kind of heart disease, I knew Shahrukh Khan would die a painfully slow, cliché-ridden, glisterine-powered, brave-smile-and-funny-comment-in-response-to-mommy’s-tears death, and hand over the love of his life to his best friend. But the damn movie still kept you on tenterhooks: will she still love him? will he really die? kal ho na hoo? I remembered reading a review in Outlook magazine that noted that Shahrukh Khan shone throughout the movie with stellar brightness, and that much was admittedly true. There may have been a lot of things wrong with his films, but there were two things Shahrukh Khan did admirably well – (1) appeal to the woman in you, and (2) run.

Watching his films was like doing one of those get-in-touch-with-your-feminine-side exercises in Cosmo; SRK was King and Queen of Indian kitsch. He could pull off the most feminine things with almost-boyish charm, and you almost didn’t notice, and when you did, it didn’t matter, not so much.  Which other Indian man was going to shoot an ad sitting in a bathtub surrounded by rose petals and bubbles? As for the running, I’d never seen anybody run better; he had this patented, slow-mo run – shoulders slanted, a briefcase or a bag in one hand, hair flying in the wind (there was always a wind), open overcoat, eyebrows doing their thing, all in all sexy, very sexy. I had watched him do the run in at least five films over the last few days- multiple times, mind – but this was his best one yet. I had to physically restrain myself from jumping up and cheering as he took off with his ticker on its last legs -heart ailing, body flailing- across heavy traffic and through crowds of indifferent New Yorkers  to see his love one last time. Not plausible necessarily, but certainly vital, vital because it was an SRK movie, and run was what SRK did best, run was what we were all there to see. So with the jhankar beats in crescendo, and the under-dog gut-wrenchingly close to victory - run Shahrukh, RUN! - straightened hair and manicured hands and plucked eyebrows all over the screen, I choked back a tear. All these drugs are FUCKING me up!

It wasn’t just the movie, I knew. Or the coke. I wanted what they had in the movie – I wanted a lover chasing after me, death chasing after her. Whether we admit it or not, it’s what we all want – we want a Shahrukh Khan romance where the girl’s dad and his cronies beat you up mercilessly for loving her, but she loves you anyway, despite your ineptness at being a manly man and standing up to them. Shahrukh Khan is not just a matinee idol; he’s an urban, metrosexual aspiration. This is NOT constructive. This is not cool! I had to pull myself together. I tried to put in practice a piece of Buddhist philosophy I picked up from a Chuck Norris movie many years ago. Become the master of your self. Focus on the part of your body that hurts, accept it and find solace in the good health of the rest. A question of mind over matter. Easy-peasy. We lit up a couple of cigarettes and headed home on foot.

Self-publish or Perish ?

So I've recently bought into the whole social networking malarkey. Few days in, and I'm sold. As always, it started as a purely selfish interest borne out of a friend's recommendation as a possible remedy to my continuing difficulty in finding a publisher for my first novel.  Basically, I have now spoken to four publishers, one of whom declined outright. I've grown considerably older waiting on the others.

In the meantime, my manuscript has been doing the rounds among friends, family and anybody kind enough to indicate mild interest really. Poor thing's been had for free by so many strangers -in the loo, in bed, on the kitchen table, under office desks- I'm surprised she doesn't spend all day crying in the shower. It did however help me regain a modicum of self-respect after the emotional hammer-blow that was my first (and so far, only) rejection. A few of them offered to help out in the guises of editing, design, layout and marketing if I were to wander down the self-publishing route.

My friend's own suggestion was to get with the times, start tweeting, facebooking, what-not, as a way to meet fellow sufferers and the odd breaketh-througher-of-writerly-shackles. I dutifully adopted a twitter handle (@icyhighs) and made the technological leap of faith.

While I'm no nearer to that promised land of the published writer, the experience has been rewarding. I'm still new at it, but it has certainly opened my eyes to it's endless possibilities. I had no idea so many people relentlessly take time and effort to recommend pages and retweet and upload and recycle. I'm slowly reading up on the self-publishing phenomenon and constantly amazed by how strong a community there is built around it.

I'm still not entirely convinced self-publishing is the way to go -  the final lap to victory of the underdog is an image etched permanently in my mind thanks to a religious childhood fixation with sports-movies, one I cannot help aspiring to. On the other hand, publishing, promoting and marketing one's own work seems altogether too entrepreneurial and up-and-at-'em and not  nearly as romantic as the notion of the struggling writer.

But my minimal interactions with writers who have rolled up their sleeves and taken the e-gamble has taught me that the road is just as fraught with failure and dejection and non-recognition as waiting endlessly for that miraculous phone call/email/text from knocked-off-feet agent/publisher, that the fact that these brave people at least tried to do something about their dreams on their own initiative is something to be lauded.

This presents me with a dilemma : self-publish or (possibly) perish? Haste or wait?

If I do decide to self-publish, it will of course have to be after months, maybe even a year of proper research, hard work and dedication. I simply don't know enough about the industry to go wading into it without the necessary safety equipment. That decision will have to wait, till next Friday which is when one of the publishers I spoke to- one who seemed to be more interested than the others- has promised to get back to me. What I have decided however is that the journey itself- whether I get there or not- is one worth cataloging, if only in appreciation of the numerous bloggers and netizens whose own tales of publishing trials and tribulations have helped me so much in the last few days in gaining some perspective.

Truth is it's nice to know you're not alone. That's perhaps the greatest gift the internet has to offer - proof that there's always somebody going through the exact same situation, irrespective of how unique it may seem to you. I'll have to learn how to tag keywords in my posts, which forums and communities are helpful and which ones are not etc but I'll get there. I think. And if I don't, at least I won't be the last to know.