Sex sells

The Erotic Engine: How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication from Gutenberg to Google (2011)
Author: Patchen Barss


Pornography has always been frowned upon as the destroyer of civilised societies. It has been put in the same decadent basket of other vices of man including cheating and gambling.

On the contrary, the idea of voyeurism goes back as far as our cavemen ancestors. They had been so fascinated with human anatomy, like excited schoolboys and toilet graffiti, that they decided to draw what they saw during the day on the wall of their dwellings. The early human civilisations were quite liberal with sexuality and nudity. Ancient sculptures of couples in various stages of undress and in acts of copulation are general knowledge. The Indian book of Kamasutra is the living proof of this. Even as late as the European Renaissance, the human body was immortalised in paintings.

Science and technology propelled the human race forward to meet various challenges. It helps Man to explore newer frontiers. Before the industrial revolution and the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press, books and illustrations were handwritten and drawn. It was expensive, and it catered for the rich, who was also coincidentally literate. The general populace could not read; hence, it did not matter what was written. The Books at that time were filled with erotica, but the learned were thought to be able to handle it.

© Roy Singh

The democratisation of printing opened this bag of worms to all. The middle class, who had their own moral standards, were ill-prepared to handle these. The Church which was the de-facto moral guardian of the masses intervened. The naked body became immoral, and its depiction against the law. Nevertheless, the interest never wanes but goes on underground. It created a new branch of a discipline called pornography to the masses but fine art to the high heeled.

The next wave of information dissemination came in the form of photography (pictures) and moving pictures (movies). Again the human body became the fascination of the makers and consumers alike. Peep shows, watching fuzzy pornographic plates became a cheap thrill. When a succession of photographs became cine, for the first time, people had the option of starring at a human body without raising the eyebrow of the other.

It was a godsend. To hide out in a dark theatre in anonymity watching ‘dirty picture’ in near lifelike visuals and audio.

Erotica continued tickling minds. The demand for it continued. It propelled advances in cinematographic techniques and optics to meet requests. Slowly explicit pictures made it to the mainstream. In the 80s, it became a norm for a Hollywood flick to have the mandatory flashing of breasts to hit it big in the box office.

Betamax - a relic of the past ©Yahoo

The video was the next thing to hit the market. Porn consumers were particularly enthralled. In the comfort of their homes with the company of a stag (or maybe mixed) party, in anonymity, they could watch all the smut they want to their heart’s content. The video was the in-thing in the 80s, creating trade wars and advances in the storage of visual data.

Computer games gave a shot in the arm towards this end. With interactive capabilities, the end user-provider barrier slowly starts to become interactive. Again and again, porn financed improvements in technology. VHS and Betamax graduated to LaserDisc and to DVD for that elusive high definition. UHF transmissions and cable TV were riding on pornography for profitability.

With time, silicon chips became a mode of the information revolution. Computer games gave users the freedom of creating their own avatars. It metamorphosed to their choice of a partner not only in the war games but something more intimate, like cybersex. From dirty talks using keyboards, it moved to joysticks and now the tip of the finger.

Next giant step in broadcasting must surely be the internet. Again, in its infancy, porn-related stuff was its best seller. It had an essential role in pushing the process of going on-line a breeze. For a seamless, uninterrupted flow of erotica, good bandwidth was needed. Poof, came protocol to this end. 


What is the meaning of all these if money cannot be collected properly? The model of consuming first and pay later is notoriously unreliable in the porn industry. As it is a shady business, its patrons, naturally act dishonestly. Hence, there needs to be a safe encrypted secure way of collecting money before consumption. This sole intention must have improved our current way of internet shopping and credit card transactions. The need for anonymity helped online privacy and data protection.

 Comfortably Numbed - VR © Slate.

To keep up with piracy of dirty pictures, the porn industry developed its own way of tracing the source of copying and protection of its 'intellectual property'. This was later found useful in tracking down paedophiles and serial rapists.

It appears like there is no limit in satisfying the demand for porn. Its consumers demand more even when newer avenues are made available. It seems that sensations acquired through virtual reality are insufficient. In the near future, the industry hopes to venture into the field of haptic stimulations. This technology tries to transfer temperature, texture, motion and pressure stimuli to its end-users to satisfy their ever-expanding sexual gratifications.

A deep link exists between pornography, the tools and techniques of human communication. Sexual depiction is a powerful source of creativity and a driving force in innovation. Many modern search engines, online retailers, video/photo sharing sites and media moguls owe their success to pornographic websites.   

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All with the same trajectory, the atoms and the Universe

Super Deluxe (2019)
Story and Direction: Thiagarajan Kumaraja

Gone are the days when Tamil movie stories were rather two-dimensional. It used to be that there was a bright, distinct demarcation between characters. Everything was black or white; they were either good people or bad. And poetic justice would prevail at the end of the film, proving once again that the dharmic principles of life would be upheld.

If you are one of those who is looking for a break from making daily-altering life questions to see gyrating bodies to soothing melodies nowadays, look elsewhere. I just happened to bump into this movie by chance as I was scrolling down the Netflix menu and saw one of my favourite actors, Ramya Krishnan in a leading role.

I got hooked from the first scene itself. A young wife calls her ex-boyfriend college mate over for some hokey-pokey for old times' sake as her husband out on errands. Soon after passionate lovemaking, the lady discovers her lover stiff hard, out cold and dead. Then starts the panic as her husband walks in with some unwelcomed guests. 

This story is told in concurrent with another two (or maybe three) other tales which somehow gets intertwined as we will see later in the movie. In another scene, a young boy, a tween, is waiting patiently for his estranged father to return home after years of leaving home. A taxi stops in front of the house as the excited extended family members wait in anticipation. An overdressed lady walks out. Hold behold, the father is now a transgender person. Then come the discrimination, the ridicule and the humiliation of the 'father' and the family members. 

In another related storyline, five teenage boys play truant to watch porn. After craftily getting a copy of an X-rated DVD, they watch the show in one of the boy's home. One of them gets a shock when the lead lady is actually his mother! In anger, he throws the beer bottle on the TV screen, shattering it. He runs home in rage to confront his mother, Leela (Ramya Krishnan). As he runs with a kitchen knife to harm his mother, the boy accidentally trips and stabs himself instead, critically. Hence, starts a commotion; getting emergency medical treatment, contacting the boy's father who has left home to be an evangelical pastor. The boy's father, a tsunami survivor, feels that he is chosen by God to help people as he was the only one in his circle who survived the catastrophe as he held on to a rock statue of Jesus.

Vijay Sethupathi - excellent as transgender.

Also opened the bag of worms why the role should be played

by a male and not a transgender actor. They assert that being 
transgender is not mere wearing of a wig and applying make-up.

The rest of the boys, on the other hand, desperate to replace the broken TV get into a comedy of errors to get the money towards this end. If this is not confusing enough, wait for alien visitation and corrupt police force to completely knock you bonkers. Just when you think it is getting all draggy and how all these things are going to be tied together, it then hits you. Only then it dawns upon you that every scene and story is detailed to precision to make this offering simply a masterpiece. It leaves a trail of philosophy and questions about human behaviours that yearn to be answered. 

We are responsible for our actions, whether the scriptures tell us or not. The two-timing wife has to face the music when it is discovered. She is responsible for her activity as it has repercussions on people around her, like her parents, husband and in-laws. If her lover dies in her hands, she has to face the consequences.

Doing what seems to be the right things may not always be a pleasant thing to do.  Like the transgender lady (Manikam @ Shilpa, played beautifully by Vijay Sethupathi)) realises, even though it is her right to express her inner desires, her action may affect the people around her. It is not always about oneself but of people around her.

Being naked in public is frown upon by modern society. It is all in context. Being half-naked is the norm at the beach but not at a philharmonic orchestra performance. It might have been alright to be undressed in prehistoric times or perhaps even in generations to come, but now we have laws to govern these.

Society likes to see what it wants to see. It creates a storm when an actress acts in a porn movie but fails to credit her in a positive role, as a Goddess role. It chides the pedlars of porn but not its consumers.

A person who has done not so virtuous things also cares for his family. He also wants to do the right thing. A seemingly righteous person will do a 'sinful' things if circumstances dictate.

Apparently, just as the pastor who was enlightened during the tsunami, so was the transgender character. She also held her life on to a rock. After the ordeal, she just disposed of the rock and did her thing. The pastor, however, saw the rock statue that he held was that of Jesus and was a sign from God to save mankind. To one, it was just a piece of rock. To another, it was a message from the Maker. Interesting.

We make rules by association. We put two and two together to come to conclusions about things around us. We see the sun in the morning, and we see the moon at night, and we draw a conclusion that one appears mutually exclusive of the other. We get confused when we see both of them together. This knowledge is used by the philandering wife and her husband to confuse the police when they dispose of the body. 

Ramya Krishnan

The Universe seems to have a prototype for all of its inventions. The electrons and the tiny charged particles which are seen at a microscopic level or the intergalactic celestial bodies which are spread over many million light-years away, they are governed by a single law.

Everything holds its purpose for its existence. Like a single cell on the elephant that makes an elephant an elephant, every individual on this planet has his purpose. He exerts his influence in one way or the other - in the present time or the future. Just like historical events affect the present. The question is whether your existence is merely to fulfil your primal needs or for the betterment of the human race on the whole.

The alien character encourages us to view the human race objectively and re-evaluate the human race and laugh at our follies.

It appears like every scene, every dialogue, and every character is crafted with a purpose. No clip is introduced for the sake of filling the gap. Each has a back story. There are plenty of hidden messages in the background - like a silhouette of a flying plane to denote the timeline of the story. The cinematography is avantgarde at best, following the path of master filmmakers like Ray, Kurosawa, De Sica and Hitchcock. In many scenes, much is left to the imagination. Sometimes, sounds and dialogue have more impact. A partly obscured view adds more drama to our visual experience. 

A clear 4.8/5 that makes you want to view it again.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Appearance not substance

I do not want to see the skyline. I want to know how the

background looks with me as the subject. It is all about me, 

myself and I. 

From a group of people who thought that peeking into a mirror was looking at the devil itself and that posing in front of a camera would drain a person's soul, we have come a long way. Our generation is easily the one that has the most access to how they look. Rather than posturing at their better side, they seem to want to see every angle of the body. They yearn to have the perfect photo-friendly display of the best that they have to offer. They want to be forever in portrait mode. Every passing moment is a potential Instagram moment, and they must be ready. They do not want to be caught in an awkward pose, opening the mouth too wide, with the hair unkempt or even with a face incongruent to the camera's angle. 

Their every second of their existence must be an 'insta' worthy moment!

Don't even preach that inner beauty is more important and that one has to be beautiful on the inside or that beauty is skin deep. It is easier to make a conclusion by perusing the outside. Exploring inner attraction is too tiring and cumbersome.

These are some of the thoughts that went through my mind as I witnessed a few events recently. Two of them were life-altering academic achievements, while the other was festival merriment. It seems to me that well-wishers who attended the function were there to sort of mark their attendance by pixellating their presence forever. Whether they were there to genuinely extend their felicitations is another question. Their preoccupation was to take pictures of the host in different combinations of friends and relatives like in a round-robin football match to pick out the team with the most goals. In this case, the person who appears most photogenic. Do they not realise that saying that one is photogenic means that he or she is ugly in real life but deceptively appealing in pictures.  

Amma used to say, "This world is about appearance, not substance. But with time, beauty will decay, but the matter will withstand the test of time."

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In the twilight years...

Kominsky Method (miniseries, Seasons 1 -2; 2018-19)
Netflix


People may have led different lives using separate yardsticks as guides to pave their journeys in life, but as they sail towards the tail-ends of their shelf lives, their concerns are the same. They worry about how they would spend the remnants of their human existence. Appreciating that end is nigh, every mild ailment is perceived as the coup de grâce. Many of the familiar faces grace the obituary column. They wonder whether the life that they led could have been better. Regrets start trickling in. So do guilt. The dilemma of 'what ifs' and 'if only' starts playing in their minds. After some soliloquy, they would probably realise that given the circumstances, that was the best they could do.

Invariably, the question of offspring would stream in. The elders would go all out to pave a safe path for the young to pursue. Unfortunately, Nature dictates that the next generation would rebel. Perhaps this is to ensure diversity within a gene pool. Maybe, growing in shielded environments removed the guard that the before had to survive trying times. This would invite frequent intergenerational loggerheads. Ego comes in the way for reconciliation.

Regrets of omissions will be a few. Over time with the experiences drilled by the Life's School of Hard Knock, it would be clear as water their stupid actions made in the spring of youth.  Rather than crying over spilt milk, they would come in terms with their deficiencies.

Growing old is difficult. The world is only for the young. It has no patience for the aged. Having the other half can sometimes help, but it may be a bane as well, especially if the significant other is a source of stress. With the ever-changing family dynamics, many end up alone in their twilight years. 

This sit-com starring Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin highlights the difficulties of growing old, the heartaches, the pain, the fear and the ailments. It pokes fun at many of the things that only the seniors would appreciate. Simple things like having a good stream of urine mean a lot to an old man. He cannot understand why being politically correct is so important. Why should everyone be so easily offended? When did cultural appropriation become a thing? Why don't the youngsters find their jokes funny? When they start a conversation with a young lady, they are labelled as 'dirty old man'. Their interaction with children is viewed as inappropriate.

The two seasons with eight half-an-hour episodes has had heads turning and a third season is in the pipeline.

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Something to talk about when I am old and grey.

Time is cruel! © DKLA

At the pinnacle of their career, the Beatles must have had an existential crisis. McCartney and Lennon must have wondered how they would be at 64. Their vision of a 64-year old man, from the lenses of a person in the 1960s, must have been quite depressing. With bad teeth, bad eyesight and bald, it must be a picture of melancholy.
 Luckily, growing old in the 21st century is bearable. The 60s is the new 40s. One can still lead a productive life in the senior citizen / geriatric age group provided the bus does not come to pick you up prematurely.

After completing 633 km of cycling from Seoul to Pusan in 5 days, we had a couple days to unwind in Pusan. Immersed in the euphoria of completing our gargantuan task, we thought that our feat must be something that we, the seven of us, would be talking for a long time including reminiscing about it in our twilight years. We would probably be savouring each photo that we took along the way, trying to remember each story attached with it; trying to tell it to anyone who would listen.

At the end of their voyage, if life had been kind, people would have many accomplishments to ponder as their moments in time.

I know a few who talk about a time when they were stoned drunk as their memorable bits to justify their existence. They would brag about their inborn ability to hold their drink and drive home safely with their alcohol levels hitting the ceiling many times over. Or perhaps boast in the glee of a lost weekend of intoxication.
There was once a lady's man who had the charm that would put James Bond to shame. He allegedly had bedded so many women in the prime of his youth. This, he told me unashamedly with pride with a gusto of a record-breaking marathon runner. He even boasted of having two dates on a single night in the same town. Living in the fast lane, walking on eggshells, he ended his night bedding both of them, separately. That must be the zenith of his raison d'être.

Others may find pride in satisfying their gustatory cravings. They claim pride in knowing the tastiest of dishes and culinary servings. They may narrate with passion, their food trails, their exotic spread of palatal teasers and perhaps some unusual delicacies. Well, whatever makes them happy.

I bet these photos may one day carve a smile at the angle of my mouth if ever I were comatose or unarousable.

Serenity max ©FG

Another bridge ©FG

Nature's palette ©FG

Peaceful easy feeling ©FG

Misty taste of Korea ©FG

Shades of blue ©FG

Sunset in Korea ©FG

Picture perfect ©FG

A bike motel ©FG

Busan finishing line ©FG

Our hideout in Busan ©FG

I see you ©FG

Korean garden ©FG

Atop Busan Tower ©FG

Jagalchi Fish Market - can see the original features of the Koreans.©FG

Songdo Beach ©FG

Sunset over at Sangdo ©FG

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Wisdom from the Upanishads

Ten Powerful Ideas from Ancient India - Wisdom from the Upanishads.
Roopa Pai

Secular in their content and universal in their appeal, these compositions have life-affirming secrets that contain ideas about life, the universe and everything relevant from the 700BCE to the 21st century. Computer engineer, journalist and children's author, Roopa Pai is the co-founder of Bangalore Walks and the winner of the Crossword Award for "The Gita for Children". She has published over 20 books, including the fantasy-adventure Taranauts. 

Easily the best TedTalk in a long time.

The journey towards Satchitananda...

The Bhagavad Gita (25th Anniversary Edition, 2009)
Translated by: Winthrop Sargeant

Bhagavad Gita, a part of the Indian epic Mahabharata, has been translated many times over the years. Every translation asserts that it gives the most accurate account of the text, which was written in Sanskrit. It was initially told in oral traditions only to be written in the 2nd century CE. Translations are no easy feat in any language, what more an ancient language. Take, for example, the word dharma. It can be translated as duty, law, righteousness, virtue, and honour depending on the context. For that same reason, only the Holy Quran in the Arabic script is acceptable as the authentic one.

Most people spent a lifetime trying to understand what is written in the Gita. It is said to give, in a narrative way, the meaning of life. It comprises stories of interwoven nature. Each subplot carries its own weight and is able to impart wisdom and answer moral dilemmas. 

The chapter on the setting of the Bhagavad Gita gives an excellent overview of the mythological beginning of time, the primordial darkness to the creation of things all through to Manu, the ancient Kings / Gods and finally to Hastinapura, Pandavas and Kaurava. This chapter also gives the backstory to the genesis of the Kurushetra War. It clears many of the uncertainties to the ignoramus new readers of the Gita; like how Karna, who is fighting on the Kaurava's side has the same mother as the Pandavas and the bond that links many characters in Mahabharata and Ramayana.

The eternal all-pervading consciousness is eternal, indestructible and the ultimate reality. We see this in man's extraordinary creativity, courage, endurance and boundless compassion. Why, we also see this in animals' acts of kindness.

There must surely be many ways to achieve spiritual realisation. People with different temperaments attain this in their own separate paths - by being active, reflective, affective and experimentative (karma, jnana, bhakti and raja yogas respectively). These paths unite the practitioner with Sat-Chit-Ananda (Truth, Consciousness and Bliss), the higher Intellect of the Universe, the single Unity.

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