My friend Shakeel writes about asses in one of his latest posts. Like all men who have fire in their loins, he too loves watching asses. And so he is courteous--opens doors for ladies, walks a few steps behind them to take a good view of their backroom assests. Staircases and escalators are good places to watch asses at eye level, he says.
He says Chinese women don't have asses.
The Indians are generally over endowed in this department(I guess Shakeel had Punjabis in mind).
The Malays fall here and there.
For raunchier details, go read his blog (meltingglass.blogspot.com).
Shakeel's discussion on asses reminded me of a passage in Rushdie's Fury. The novel is a flop but Professor Solanka is a damn interesting character. At one point, Solanka talks about Blow Jobs in the US and in UK. In the US, Bjs are integral to the act of congress, mostly pre-coital acts. In UK, it is the opposite. One, it is rare. Two, it is post-coital. In the UK, a bj is an expression of deeper intimacy. It is beyond coitus.
Didn't know this. Anyone to corroborate or contradict Rushdie on this?
In Singapore, there is a massage parlour in the vicinity of Geylang, the (in)famous red light district. Know what is it called? "BJ Massage Parlour." Can you get more suggestive?
Anyway, today the Man Booker Prize has been announced (or was it last night?). The winner is Alan Hollinghurst. He got it for his satire of the 1980s Tory government, The Line of Beauty. The novel also explores the gay scene in the 80s in UK. I am looking forward to read this novel which has been praised in no uncertain terms: "The search for love, sex and beauty is rarely so exquisitely done". Impressive!
I haven't read the Russian writer Lermontov but my interest was piqued in his work by an essay by Ravi Vyas. He discusses Lermontov's novel A Hero of Our Time. A passage about the novel says exactly what I too wrote in my first novel.
"At the age of 25 (as he is in the book) he has experienced all that life has to offer and found nothing that gives him more than a passing satisfaction or interest. He sees that life has let him down, failed to provide for him some cause that would be worthy of his superior powers."
I had expressed a similar view. My hero didn't find anything interesting in the world after 25. After walking on the earth for a qaurter of a century, all you get is repeats. Life becomes a burden, a bag of repeats and returns. There is no wonder left.
That is the tragedy of life after 25.
Vyas has made a nice character study. Pechorin, the hero of Lermontov's classic novel, A Hero of Our Time is that typical Russian character whose pursuit of an inner life in the ardent pursuit of knowledge for its own sake makes him a "superfluous man" — a man whose superior talents set him apart from the mediocre society but doomed to waste his life partly through lack of opportunity but because he lacks any real purpose or strength of will.
Pechorin, the hero, is a strong, silent man with a poetic soul who, either from shyness or a contempt for the herd, especially the aristocratic herd, assumes the mask of a snob and a bully. Unlike the classic type of "superfluous men" who opt out of society, Pechorin is a strong character at odds with the world. He is proud, ambitious, strong-willed but having found that life does not measure up to his expectation of it, he has grown embittered, cynical and bored. At the age of 25 (as he is in the book) he has experienced all that life has to offer and found nothing that gives him more than a passing satisfaction or interest. He sees that life has let him down, failed to provide for him some cause that would be worthy of his superior powers. So, he is reduced to dissipating his considerable energies to petty adventures. And he embarks on his adventures with no illusions that he was doing no more than a temporary escape from boredom.
The only comfort Pechorin has is his conviction of his own perfect knowledge and mastery over life. You could call it intellectual arrogance; he therefore despises emotions and prides himself on the supremacy of his intellect over his feelings. "The turmoil of life has left me with few ideas, but no feelings," he tells his friend, Dr. Werner and to prove it he rides roughshod over the feelings of other people. His total insensitivity for the comfort and happiness of other people is repeatedly demonstrated in the novel and his victims are lucky if they get off with a broken heart (as Vera and Princess Mary), the less fortunate (Bela and Grushniksky) pay with their lives.
The essay ends with these words:
Pechorin-type figures can be found everywhere, past, present and future. "This is how the hero of our time must be," Lermontov wrote. "He will be characterised either by decisive inaction, or else by futile inactivity." You can find them here if you look closely. Intellectuals, bureaucrats, politicians — the power elite who follow closely the grand conspiracy of Pechorin style: "Each side tells the other what the other wants to hear." So nothing happens.
Nothing happens. That's the truth.
"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." ― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
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