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 Recently, as has been widely written in our news, a well-known Penguin publisher (now ex) of Indian origin, was accused of "wearing excessive cologne, having all his shirt buttons undone, and showing up at the hotel door of a Canadian colleague and proceeding to kiss her with tongue". Rumours, when the accusations are so salacious, especially amongst a milieu that live on selling stories, were rife. Ranging from the accuser's claim that she tried to jump off a window ledge but was pulled down and convinced into coitus, to gossip that his cologne was so strong that its vapours made her a bit faint, and therefore less focused on the ensuing role of the tongue.
The legal accusation has naturally been sexual harassment. His defence has been, as the media reports, that it was consensual, highlighted by this anecdote. When, during the golden era of their supposed congress, he inquired (and I paraphrase), "Do you like what I'm doing?" She supposedly responded in the positive.
This happened allegedly at the Franfurt Book Fair. It's a fair warning to first time novelists and agents looking for publishers at these places. You think you have him hooked with a gripping 900-page thriller set in war torn Chechnya, and he's looking engaged but Mr Publisher is distracted thinking of CK 1 and how his attractive female colleague might respond to his belly button.
As our urbane culturati discuss his moral responsibility, my mind wanders to two things: 1) The general virility of men in literature and 2) General libido of Indian men (to be clear, I don't often think about either of these two).
In the first one, the issue of randy men in literature, very little can be debated. In fact, world literature is littered with men that made out much more than they wrote and when they died, their great regrets were mostly waist down and very rarely intellectual. For consideration, DH Lawrence could not stand up, due to some debilitating degenerative leg disease, still managed to cheat on his wife 52 times. The perpetually paralysed Stephen Hawking's life partner has accused him of spending most of the day flirting with teenage girls online (which means, his thoughts on the future of our universe is his spare time, a true genius). If the Indian media are to be believed, Salman Rushdie has been married 600 times and is also simultaneously pleasing four hundred women in all continents, alive and fictional, present and historical, with a range as varied as B grade Bollywood to Catherine The Great. And if it were not true, you wouldn't know it because the protagonists in his novels are.
When Hemingway died, his last desire was not that he could have written one more great American novel but that the Cuban prostitute he had his eye on, always had some other customer.
Now on the issue of the virility of Indian men, there is very little to debate again, but mainly because it's a lost cause. Now, I am as patriotic as the next man and can defend my gender as called upon but the argument often goes, Latin men do the dark handsome salsa thing, Italian men have the flirting, French, the scarf-wearing sensitive poetry, British men the jokes, when in danger, Asian men will save you with martial art, black men are known for whatever they are known for, Middle Eastern men have the eyes, what do we have? To which I say, well, we are here, proximity should count for something.
And now, I can safely add, we have cologne. From the early days of safari suit wearing dads splashing Brut to today's Zegna man emitting Davidoff, the cologne has always been our literal secret potion, our evaporating arousal weapon. Little did we know that while we considered ourselves Lotharios in musk, the women considered filing a lawsuit.
Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year. Reach him at www.anuvabpal.com |
