Sex and the City

Technorati Tags: ‘sex’,cinema,people watching

This blog has seen very little activity of late, and I’m reliably assured by numerous well wishers that this has been no great loss to the cultural capital of our generation. This is of course, precisely the encouragement one needs to write once more. Its the same sort of self destructive creative impulse as has driven the birth of modern day cinematic masterpieces such as Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag.

Obligatory self deprecating cynicism having been completed, there is a story to tell. A couple of days ago I found myself sitting in the midst of a quite charming movie theatre, all the necessary creature comforts at hand – comfortable seat, popcorn, something to drink. To the proverbial fly on the wall, all would have seemed well – unless that is, said fly happened to look into my eyes, where she might have spied a look of quiet desperation. The sort of despair that comes when resignation has set in, but the pain has not yet numbed and memories of happier times still remain fresh and clear. A glance up at the huge screen would have explained much of this suffering. Just about then, the charming Sarah Jessica Parker was dancing out of a closet, clad in a frilly little white dress that looked like something a ten year old would flatly refuse to wear to a friend’s birthday party. And watching the lovely Carrie, her three other eternally youthful friends. Like a sort of ghastly schoolgirl house party being held 40 years too late. The truly ironic part of course was that they all loved the dress, which for a movie obsessed with fashion would seem to be rather a gigantic mistake to make.

But the unique experience of watching Sex and the City from a male perspective has been documented elsewhere. Read Anthony Lane in the New Yorker for instance. And to be honest, I was never going to get it, something only reinforced by the fact that I had been trying desperately to watch Kung-Fu Panda instead (and it must be said, it takes a special kind of genius to make a movie about a kung-fu master who’s also a panda bear, weighing hundreds of pounds, living in ancient china, serving noodle soup for a living and with a duck for a father). If you love the panda bear, I guess you can hardly complain about the realism of a 50 year old female character who is apparently still irresistibly attractive to male super-models half her age. Of course once you’ve gone and watched it you can either shut up and avoid being teased mercilessly. Or you can choose to reclaim the night so to speak, and write about it instead.

Going to see Sex and the City was fascinating though, more for the folks filing in with me. There seemed to be primarily two kinds of people watching. There were the groups of girls, hunting in packs of three or four, all excitedly dissecting season six of the TV series. Then there were the women who had dragged alongside squirming men to watch with them – boyfriends or just an unfortunate and available surrogate (as I was). I believe there is a school of thought that holds that there is an exquisite pleasure to be gained from watching that movie with a cringing male companion or two. Anyhow, it was interesting to observe that all the men sported identical expressions – a sort of shifty, ‘I’m not really here and I hope I don’t see anyone I know’ look. And afterwards, in conversation with their female friends, all the usual suspects. Feigned interest, over-compensating rants, grudging admissions to not having completely died in there, and a heartfelt concern for the the retrogressive portrayals of the fabulous four. Incredible how many critics and male viewers alike (see Lane again) would have apparently loved the movie had it only been about a different flavour of liberated woman. In much the same way as all of democrat America is now busily convincing itself that really, the reason Hillary Clinton did not win was not that she was a woman, but simply that she was the wrong sort of woman.

Deep thoughts expressed in deathless prose

Like many of my contemporaries, I’ve lived my life so far as the intellectual equivalent of the idle rich. Lucky enough to go to an undergrad university that opens doors because of what its called (independent of anything that might be taught or learned), I have since proceeded to drift determinedly from one place to another. Things kicked off with some initial jumping up and down as I pondered whether to become, what in IIT Delhi lingo was called a ‘Consulteer’. That morphed into a near escape from philosophy at oxford. Finally I ended up in a masters programme in engineering, funded largely by research on India’s population (don’t ask – this is grad school).

The masters degree was enjoyable, but one particularly miserable winter spent watching the rain drip slowly off eucalyptus trees in funereal Escondido Village was enough to generate a sort of black, unadulterated dissatisfaction with life and unhealthy amounts of soul searching and angst. The natural reaction was to go back to India and engage in save the world activities instead. This involves a few clearly laid out steps^

1. Pick a cause. I chose energy and environment. Why? As a certain professor of mine used to say – “There is no good reason for anything”*
2. Pick an NGO (a non-profit). Make sure its beautifully located in a big city. This is because the best grassroots work gets done in New Delhi or Bombay and real change always comes from the top.
3. Find a nice part of the moral high ground, pitch your tent there and practice a patronizing smile. Once you’ve got the smile down pat you can use it to great effect on management students, consultants, and of course i-bankers. The smile is often accompanied by the words ‘how interesting’ when you ask what they do, but if you’re really good you shouldn’t even have to say anything. Plus if you ever go on to become a PhD student you can continue to use this on those same three groups. So the investment pays off.
4. Become strongly left liberal. Of course it helps if you truly believe the ideology you espouse, but its not particularly important, and would probably make you something of a minority. A few simple rules make this part easy. Anti big-dams, pro tribal rights, pro reservations (an Indian variant of affirmative action), feminist (bonus points if you’re male and still go around claiming to be feminist), anti ‘war in Iraq’, anti Indian military action in the North East etc etc. I think you’re allowed to be libertarian though, so long as you’re pro social security of some kind for the downtrodden.
5. Dress appropriately. Kurtas and jeans are ideal for most days, though theres some leeway. If you’re female, carry a jhola. Indulge in kajal. And remember that bright colours are good.

I never quite made it to the perfect kind of NGO, having joined something that suspiciously resembled a big think tank / environmental consultancy instead but came close enough. Then found myself drifting again – this time into a PhD degree – more save the world stuff, to be precise ‘energy and climate policy’.The point however is this. A few days ago I decided to go skiing or, more accurately, to learn skiing. And as I cut my way down a gentle green at Kirkwood, gathering a fair amount of speed and coming to a smooth stop using my well honed technique (namely falling down extremely hard on my back and missing someone else by inches), I realized that there’s this common thread running through all these career shifts. Its this moment when you look around and hear everyone talking earnestly about something, and you listen to yourself say the same things, and you realize you don’t believe yourself, and the guy next to you doesn’t believe what he’s saying and even the paper you’re discussing is rich with the inner skepticism of the authorial voice. Its a much milder phenomenon in the sciences but its not non-existent, especially when you’re working on an epsilon importance problem and having to make it sound like a matter of life and death. If you’re in the field of climate change its particularly bad since you’re constantly having to battle the sinking feeling that no one is going to make major lifestyle changes, carbon emissions are not going to drop to stabilization levels and if there is light at the end of the tunnel it lies in either being wrong, getting lucky, or toughing it out and surviving as best we can. You can’t say this of course and so reams of paper are spent discussing targets, and options, and wedge based reductions and costs and being optimistic in general.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t doing anything life changing and wouldn’t know it if we were. So this constant need to play up the value of research or work to gain funding, tenure, recognition, admission to b-schools, and so on is really rather silly. With which deep insight I shall return to my work. Its forgettable, certainly not life changing, very possibly wrong but still satisfying while it lasts and better than average. Definitely worth a PhD and funding for a number of years no?

*NB: As you can imagine this particular teacher never had any trouble answering questions in class.

^Ok, so this is hopelessly cynical and obviously only half true. But it is half true.