I think this is a shocking story—on two levels.
One, two consenting adults get together in a room to make a transaction, and both are arrested because the state knows better than them how they should live their lives. Their mugshots end up on the website linked to above, as they are publicly humiliated for a private act that harmed nobody.
Two, part of the payment for the woman’s services was made “with a $100 Speedway gas card,” and that predictably becomes the headline for the story: “Sex for Gas.” Is that supposed to be funny?
The story says: “A local prosecutor noted that it was sad to see someone selling their body for gas, in this case about 25 gallons worth.”
Given that she chose that option over all others available to her, is it not even sadder that we condemn her to worse? It’s a disturbing story, for I do not see the difference between me and that woman, selling her services for a living, or that man, satisfying his needs peacefully without infringing anyone’s rights. Who are we to tower in judgement over them?
Some earlier pieces:
Don’t Punish Victimless Crimes (March 29, 2007)
A Choice to Sell Sex (September 11, 2007)
Laws Against Victimless Crimes Should Be Scrapped (May 4, 2008)
(Link via email from Srini Sitaraman.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 03 July, 2008 in
Freedom |
Journalism |
Media |
WTF
The Times of India informs us, with a suitable exclamation mark at the end of the headline: “Watermelon is nature’s Viagra!”
Now, lest you boys go rushing out to eat some healthy fruit, as your momma always told you to (naughty momma!), note that the article also says that “[w]atermelon may not be as organ specific as Viagra.” So don’t stare at your crotch in anger after every bite. And enjoy the taste, it isn’t medicine.
Posted by Amit Varma on 03 July, 2008 in
Miscellaneous
First he gets waxed. Then he is waterboarded.
The picture in that first piece is horrifying, perhaps even a legitimate torture device by itself. (“If you do not make us your Facebook friends, we will hold your eyes open with calipers and make you look at this picture. Hoo ha ha ha hoo ha.”) And speaking of torture, here’s what Hitchens has to say in the second piece:
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
It’s a relief that both John McCain and Barack Obama agree with that view, with McCain having stuck to a principled stand against torture in the primaries despite that position being unpopular in his party’s base. Perhaps it helped that he had first-hand knowledge of the subject. And now Hitch has it as well, having been waterboarded and waxed. To think he volunteered for both…
(Links via email from Manish Vij.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 03 July, 2008 in
Miscellaneous
Dear Indian nationalists
Is Shilpa Shetty correct? Is it true that kisses are against Indian culture but pecks on the cheek are not? If so, why? Saliva?
I request that you consider this matter carefully. Even the Kama Sutra does not mention pecks; no pecks are depicted in Khajuraho; pecks can damage the fabric of our nation.
Regards
Amit Varma
*
More open letters here.
Posted by Amit Varma on 03 July, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment |
News
For some reason, this story moves me:
Police: Woman Held Cat For Ransom After Losing Dog
I feel sorry for both the woman and the cat, actually. There’s sadness all around in the story, and there wouldn’t have been any if the blasted woman just got herself a teddy bear instead of a dog in the first place. You know what I mean. Still, we’re human…
(Link via email from The Not So Talkative Man.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 03 July, 2008 in
Miscellaneous |
WTF
A believer would put it down to karma. On Saturday morning, as a bunch of friends and I were sitting in a cafe at Dadar about to head off to Pune, we devised a game inspired by P Sainath. The game went thus: pick up the newspaper and after every headline, add the words “while farmers die in Vidarbha.” So, for example, you’d have “India ready with climate action plan while farmers die in Vidarbha.” Or “Anne Hathaway’s love secrets, revealed, while farmers die in Vidarbha.”
We amused ourselves in this pathetic way for a few minutes before one of us opened the page to Dr Mahinder Vatsa’s sex advice column in Mumbai Mirror. (My earlier posts on it: 1, 2.) We then modified our game to read out each question beginning with the words “I am a farmer dying in Vidarbha.” So, for example, you would have a question that went: “I am a farmer dying in Vidarbha. Whenever I get sexually excited, I experience an excruciating pain in my testicles...” Or: “I am a farmer dying in Vidarbha. I am 19 years old. My weight is 48 kilos. My problem is that I have small breasts.”
I don’t need to elaborate that what we were doing was very, very wrong. It was made even more wrong by the fact that farmers were probably dying in Vidarbha as we played this game. Punishment was due—and the wrath of the gods duly come our way.
*
When we were about 40 minutes outside Pune’s city limits, the cab I was in slowed down behind a truck. Gaspode and I were sitting in the back seat. Suddenly, there was a loud noise, something banged my head, and fragments of glass lay all around me. We turned around: a truck had hit the back of our car; the windscreen at the back was shattered; its frame had disappeared; and, to my immense relief, my book was fine. I’d kept a copy of Paul Auster’s “Timbuktu” behind me, and I retrieved that and tumbled out of the car.
I wish I could dramatize the moment, but there really was no great drama to it. By the time I realised I was in an accident, the accident was over and I was obviously fine, as was Gaspode. It could have been much worse had we been resting our heads against the seat and napping, as we had been a few minutes before this. We were also lucky that the windscreen was made of the kind of glass that, as a safety feature, crumbles into tiny, harmless bits—Gaspode was taking out some of them from his hair for more than an hour.
So now all we had to do was get to Pune. We thanked the great Omniscient Sainath for not punishing our blasphemy with something worse, and hailed down one of those large tempo-type autos. We cast a regretful last look at our cab, below which much petrol had leaked. Sadly, we were carrying no matches.
*
The tempo-type auto was empty when we got in, and offered to drop us to the outskirts of Pune. But once we were inside, it started picking up people. Two women and a baby; a young man who looked like Amitabh Bachchan in Deewar; three more women, all of whom looked like Nirupa Roy; two burly farmers, perhaps from Vidarbha; and a man with a goat.
Actually, I’m exaggerating about the goat. There was no goat that tried to give Gaspode a blowjob, so that part of the narrative must be omitted. But I don’t exaggerate one bit when I say that when all of the aforementioned people were in the vehicle—one of the ladies almost on my lap—we were overtaken by a bicycle. It was a surreal morning.
*
The afternoon was worse. We attended a quiz by Derek O’Brien and the questions, many of them multiple choice, were horrendous. A sample: “Which of these is better for fighting bad breath: mint or chewing gum?” You know the kind of quiz I like : this was worse than any monster truck.
*
Wait, it isn’t over. We took a cab back in the evening and almost got hustled off the road by a truck behind us. Our driver yelled something at the truck driver and made him stop on the side of the road. Then he got down, walked over to the truck, pulled the driver out and slapped him three times. Then he charged back in and gave us a smile.
“Boss, why did you have to do that?” I said in Hindi. “What if he comes after us and bangs his truck into the car?”
“Ha,” said the driver. “That never happens.”
*
The next day, I was in Bangalore to take part in a quiz conducted by the KQA as part of their 25th anniversary celebrations. (My team reached the final, ahead of some terrific quizzers, but we were outclassed there. This quiz was excellent.) In the evening, I was at a party at Madhu ‘MadMan’ Menon’s house, where I was spending the night. I was pooped after the traumatic events of the last two days, and drunk far more than I normally do. Then, at 10.30, I realised that the party was over and everyone had left.
“What’s up, why did everyone leave so early?” I asked Madhu.
“What’s the time?”
I looked over at his big wall clock. “It’s 10.30,” I said.
“No,” said Madhu. “It’s 1.30 in the morning. That’s my party clock. It always says 10.30. That way, nobody leaves. At 11.30 they look at the clock, think it’s only 10.30, and they hang on. Isn’t it brilliant?”
I had to agree it was brilliant.
*
The next evening, Madhu and I were hanging out with an extremely smart lady of tender years. She told us the latest Savita Bhabhi storyline and then gave us tips on how to search for porn on the net. I remarked:
“You know, I find this so strange. There are two men and one woman at this table, and it’s the woman who’s giving all the advice on surfing porn.”
“Amit, it’s not about which gender you belong to,” she said. “It’s about which generation you belong to.”
Madhu and I, 32 and 34 respectively, looked at each other with great nostalgia. I’m telling you, it felt like my life was over.
*
There is one memory of the trip I will always cherish, though. That came when Madhu, asked to sing opera, which he does exceedingly well, instead sang “Chidiya Choo Choo Karti Hai.” He said that he’d first seen the song when he was eight years old, and it was the first WTF moment of his life. Indeed, it is remarkable: Watch this!
My favourite bits are Jeetendra’s armpit sweat when he does “Happy Birthday to Me”, and the necking camels just after. But there is much to choose from. Such a masterpiece.
Posted by Amit Varma on 02 July, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment |
Personal |
WTF
This piece of mine was published on Sunday (June 29) in Mail Today.
It’s Sunday, and you’ve had enough of boring op-eds and opinion pieces all week. So let me start this piece with a quiz question about cards: In Texas Hold’em Poker, which hand is known as ‘six tits’?
If you don’t know the answer, I encourage you not to shift your eyes to the end of the piece, where I reveal all. Just look at the question one more time: as the Beatles would say, you can work it out.
Every two Sundays, a diverse group of people meet in an office in a Mumbai suburb and ask each other questions like this. They are the Bombay Quiz Club (BQC), a group I co-founded on April Fool’s Day, 2006. Most Indian cities have clubs with a much older pedigree – the Karnataka Quiz Association of Bangalore celebrates its 25th anniversary today, and the K Circle of Hyderabad predates that by a decade. But the kind of quizzing all these clubs do is rather different from what most Indians understand of the term.
Workoutable
To most Indians, quizzing is about knowledge. You are asked a question: you either know it or you don’t. If you don’t, the quiz is terribly boring. There might be drama about who is winning or losing, but beyond that narrative, your brain isn’t being made to work. You might as well watch a soap opera.
But attend a quiz by the BQC or by any of these other quizzing clubs and you’ll find a different dynamic at play. You will find that the quizzing they do is not so much about knowledge but about problem solving. Even if you don’t know a question, you can still work it out by clues given in the question. Sure, you still need to know things: but if you’re intelligent and have a basic interest in the world, you have a crack at solving any question. A 100-question quiz then becomes not a boring event where you know some things and are clueless about others, but a challenge in which you try to solve 100 brainteasers, often with the help of team-mates in a collaborative process that is immense fun.
For example, here’s a question I asked in a quiz last year: “X is a unit of hype. One kiloX is equal to 10.42 days. One MegaX is equal to 28.5 years. What is X, and why is it so called?”
When I asked this question, I also advised the teams to use their calculators. The team that cracked it was the one that figured out that X was equal to 15 minutes. The answer, then, was obviously Warhol, who had famously said: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Now think of what a boring question this would have been if I had simply asked: “What is the unit of hype?”
Eureka!
Every well-framed quiz question should lead to a Eureka moment. You are asked a question, you search it for clues, one teammate suggests one strand of thought, another suggests an alternative, you rack your brains and suddenly it all falls into place. My friend J Ramanand, the last man to win Mastermind India, expressed it beautifully when he wrote: “Working out answers is sometimes like tugging at the loose thread in a sweater. A decent yank & the whole thing unravels magically.”
To illustrate this, here’s a question framed by the quizzer Arun Simha: “H0H 0H0” is a postal code used by Canada Post for routing letters sent in Canada to which person?”
The question is bewildering – until one notices that H0H 0H0 can also be read as Ho Ho Ho. Yank that and you come to Santa Claus. (Jabba the Hutt is also associated with that laugh, but any reasonable quizzer would eliminate that option, for why would Canada Post care about Jabba the Hutt?)
Here’s another question, framed by a BQC quizzer, Sumant Srivathsan: “If ‘three short - three long - three short’ (. . . - - - . . .) is Morse code for SOS, where would you be most likely to come across ‘three short - two long - three short’?”
The ‘three-shorts’ are the clue. Clearly the second code stands for S-something-S, and when you work that out, you start thinking of what the missing letter could be. M? SMS? And then you remember the default Nokia ringtone for incoming messages (“beep-beep-beep, beeeep-beeeep, beep-beep-beep”) and the answer falls into place.
Imagine how boring the question would be if it was framed thus: “In morse code, which letter does ‘two long’ stand for?” Or “What is the default Nokia ringtone for incoming messages inspired by?”
I was recently asked by a friend, whose only acquaintance with quizzing is via Kaun Banega Crorepati, how I prepare for a quiz. The answer, of course, is that one can’t prepare for this kind of quizzing. Schoolkids may buy Malayalam Manorama and learn capitals and currencies, but the best quizzers are simply people who live life fully. They show an interest in the world around them; they read a lot; they watch films and listen to music; they are culturally aware; they keep in touch with the news. And when quiz questions pop up that touch on any of those areas, they have a chance at cracking it, even if they don’t know the funda behind the question.
Ah, fundas! Quizzers use that term a lot. What does it mean? Loosely speaking, a funda is an interesting fact at the heart of a question. Every good question contains a little nugget that tells you something you didn’t know already. Sometimes this is trivial, sometimes not. But the net effect of a good quiz with solid fundas is that you end the quiz not just entertained by it, but also more knowledgeable about the world in a meaningful way.
Connect
A connect question in a quiz is one in which you are asked to find the common thread running between a few different elements: four visuals, say, or a video, an audio and a picture, and so on. But, in a way, all of quizzing is about connecting. We look for something in the question that we are asked that we can connect with the world we know. And when a funda is new to us, it expands that world. If it’s interesting, it might even increase out interest in a particular area of knowledge. We might finish a quiz wanting to see a certain film or read a particular book, or simply looking at something in an entirely new way. To extend Ramanand’s analogy, after we yank the thread and the sweater unravels, we find other uses for that wool.
So the next time you’re playing poker on a Sunday and your opponent beats you with a hand that has three queens in it, congratulate him (or her) for holding six tits. Then walk right out and find a good quiz to take part in. It’ll be worth your while.
* * *
I’ve earlier written on this subject here: The Joys of Quizzing. Also check out this three part primer by J Ramanand and Niranjan Pednekar: 1, 2, 3.
I do all my quizzing at quizzes organised by the Bombay Quiz Club, and if you’re in this city and would like to try out quizzing, please do. For other cities, check out the KQA (Bangalore), K Circle (Hyderabad), Boat Club Quiz Club (Pune), QFI (Chennai) and the Qutab Quiz Club (Delhi).
More more essays and op-eds by me, click here.
Posted by Amit Varma on 02 July, 2008 in
Essays and Op-Eds |
Personal
The rumours are partly true: a truck did crash into a car I was travelling in on Saturday; but that is not the cause of this hiatus in posts. I’ve been travelling, making sure Pune is doing okay, confirming reports that Bangalore is getting by, and I return to Mumbai this evening before despair floods the city. By tomorrow, I shall resume blogging at my usual pace and reveal all.
And even if, FSM forbid, the accident had taken me out, it wouldn’t have stopped me. I would have become India’s first Zombie Blogger. Some things just can’t be stopped. So be patient…
Teaser to tomorrow’s posts: Chidiya Choo Choo Karti Hai…
Posted by Amit Varma on 01 July, 2008 in
Personal
This is the best headline in the history of headlines this week:
Thackerays can’t bear mosquito bites anymore
How it must hurt their ego, no? Marathi manoos helpless against Marathi machhar.
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 June, 2008 in
India |
News |
Politics |
WTF
The WTF quote of the day comes from Shoaib Malik, who, when asked about “Pakistan’s recent performances and whether morale is down,” says:
Are you sitting in my heart? The Pakistan team is famous for comebacks. My form if it wasn’t good, at least I am still the best allrounder as far as I know.
I want Freddie Flintoff to visit Malik someday and sit on his head. Malik should then ask him: “Why are you sitting on my head?” And Freddie should reply: “So should I sit in your heart then? Huh? Best allrounder?”
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 June, 2008 in
Sport |
WTF
