Thursday, September 30, 2010

Has Toilet Humor Died?

The other night some of my friends & I were chatting & randomly the topic about Toilet Humor came up. By toilet humor I mean the rude-obscene graphics & comments people would leave behind in school, public, train toilets. There was this time in life when we could not just avoid it. Some jokes/comments which were so dirty yet so funny that you would uncontrollably giggle at them & share them with you girl-friends in hushed voices. Then the trip to the that specific loo would start. The one liners like "apna bhavishya apne hathon mein lo," or others were surely one of the wittiest line one could come up while pee-ing.
I remember once, I was traveling by train from Pune along with some of my friends & my friend went to the sleeper class train toilet & came back with a surprised expression on her face. She whispered hurriedly in my ears saying, someone has made a comment about her in the train toilet. I rushed to go to the left Indian style one. I went in locked the door & hurriedly for that one comment. All I found was "this is for the girl in the red t-shirt, my phone number is this & my D*** size is a perfect fit for you. I stared with a furious expression & abused 'man-stupid-horny-kind.' As I was stomping my way back to my seat, I gave the most hateful looks to all the guys like I was punishing them just through my eyes. Suddenly, a red block. A tall really tall girl wearing a red t-shirt was standing in front of me & she was a bit older than we were & much better to look at. I was so happy to see her for that second that I forgot that how stupid me & my friend were being. I literally ran back to my friend who was so upset & the first thing I told her was "there are other better looking older girls in the train wearing red t-shirts, I just three girls in shades of red..." she gave me this happy look & we continued our journey without worrying about the train toilet.

When I look back, I find the whole thing really amusing & a lot of these images of trian toilets, school & public toilets, train & bus seats & the wooden frames cross my mind with so many of such messages & I Love Yous. I try & recollect the last time I saw one of these & obviously fail to find anything in the recent past. I wonder, if toilet humour has died its own, slow, natural death?

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Dried Flowers

Dried flowers have a quality of their own. They suddenly remind us of some forgotten moment we once experienced, the memory of which still lingers, like the remembrances of a lonely sea shore.

Out of nowhere, when you are reading an old book or a diary you will come across this dried piece of a flower stuck to page 159 leaving almost an incomprehensible stain on some words & an even fainter smell of how the flower once smelled. Then you are literally forced to go down memory lane thinking about the moment in which you were young & someone loved you enough to give you just one wild flower, & was naive & innocent enough to not care how one wild flower compared to a decorated bouquet of gardened flowers. That kind of innocence is inevitably lost when you enter your 25-26+. Love is no longer the moment of spontaneity but it turns to something more trained & practiced. Frankly, I never got a bouquet in my life, except for once, to appreciate what a bouquet of lilies or something more extravagant would make you feel, but I miss the times when suddenly out of the blue my childhood buddy would pick me a wild lilac looking bush from the side of the street just cause he felt I should know how it smelt & to admire the walk we were glad to have from our way back from school. I miss the moment when my little brother bicycled in the scorching sun to show me this bright yellow (yellow is my fav. colour) flower that he had found in one of the playgrounds he was playing.

Perhaps its the end of an era where wild absurd flowers will find their way to random books. No one will ever suddenly find an old dried flower on a lazy afternoon while re-reading one of their old favorites.