Play, dear Boy!!

Disclaimer: This post may offend you. Don't believe me? Go ahead and read it then.

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Today, I stand in the twilight of my bachelor life and my singlehood. Two more years to go before I take the reluctant, suicidal plunge into matrimony (Dad says one year- but I’ve bargained for two). I’ve had an eventful life so far. In fact, looking at the types of misadventures I’ve had as a student and a bachelor, I can only thank my lucky stars and my pseudo- good boy image for not having been thrown into a prison cell or something. One of my regrets is that time has passed too quickly. The only other regret I have is that I feel I haven’t expressed my gratitude to people who’ve made my life special. I have always been guilty of taking people for granted, and I haven’t said enough thank you’s to the individuals who’ve made a positive difference in my life. The time has come to set things right.

Today, I want to take the opportunity to extend my heartfelt thank-you’s to two such people who in their own unique ways, have made a significant impact in my bachelor life. I want to say thank you to Hugh Hefner- the creator of Playboy and Tiffany Taylor- ex Playboy playmate and one of the finest soft-porn divas to grace the planet.

Statutory Warning: Careful! If you are in your office, then please do not Google for Tiffany right now. If you are at home staying with your folks, then wait until your folks go to sleep or step outside of the house, and then Google for her. Or else, make sure that you shut and latch the door of your room before opening her wallpapers. If you are a girl, you may not have met Tiffany before today, but I guess by now you may have already Wikied or Googled for her, driven by your standard why-is-this-man-complimenting-another-girl curiosity. Well, if you hadn’t Wikied/Googled already, then I know you will surely do it now! And if you are a man, then bastard, I know that you know all about her... you probably know her vital statistics better than your company’s Q3 earnings. :-)

Anyway, coming back to the point, Tiffany and I go back a very long way. In fact one of the first female tits that I ever saw properly during my adolescent life were hers. So therefore the bond that I share with Tiffany is deeper and more sentimental than the connection that I share with, say, an Alison Angel or a Priya Rai (again, look left, right, aagey, peeche before Googling for their images). As Generation-X boys, we attended high-school in an era when Internet and electronic media (CD’s, 8 GB USB drives, .avi files or high res- .jpeg images) were not as rampant as they are today. The access to free online streaming or downloadable porn- something as common as bread-butter-toast today- was like an unthinkable, unaffordable luxurious five-star meal for us ten years ago. In fact during my high-school days, the only sources of porn for us boys were a) biology textbooks b) torn and crumpled pages from Debonair or Playboy c) video cassettes of Mallu porn – showing blurred images of ugly, fat aunties making love to uglier fat uncles in a dingy room with Carnatic classical music for background score. (Ladies- I know you may be shocked, but you don’t exactly expect boys to be interested in dressing up pink Barbie dolls and playing with cushy little teddy bears do you?) .

Taking a nostalgic trip down the memory lane, today I laughingly recall the concept of ‘half-boob’ that was so popular in my high-school days. You see, in my tenth standard, we had about 35 boys in our class vying for a single copy of Playboy – the only legacy copy which we had ‘inherited’ from our seniors. We boys used to compete with each other- usually by organizing rounds of arm wrestling- with the winner taking home the grand bumper prize of the solitary Playboy copy for an entire night of ‘private viewing’ . But gradually, as the testosterone levels shot up and the demand outgrew supply, a single copy of Playboy was rendered utterly insufficient. That is when we came up with the ingenious concept of ‘half-boob’ – in which a single photo of a topless model was torn right at the centre of her cleavage into two pieces. The piece of paper with the left boob was handed to somebody and the piece with the right boob was handed over to someone else! That way, we ensured that most of our mates had at least one boob each at their disposal every day. And it didn’t stop here – you see if you’ve ever torn a topless model’s photo apart at her chest ( it used to break our hearts, but we had only one Playboy with us, so we had to do it) you’ll know that the other unimportant parts of her body like face and hair would be torn into half too. Unfortunately, this made the identification of the photos very difficult. So, being the teenaged geniuses that we were, we came up with the idea of code-labelling the boobs. For example, if it was Alicia’s boobs that were being divided, then each scrap of the photo was labelled Al. R (Alicia right) and Al. L (Alicia left) at the bottom right corner. Similarly Betty’s separated pair of assets were labelled Bet. R and Bet. L respectively and so on. We made sure that the labelling was done with a very thin lead-pencil and the letters were marked as small as possible and as much to the bottom-right edge of the photo as possible – to ensure that the attention was not diverted from the main showpiece content of the photo. You may be wondering what happened to the photos that had full nudity. Simple – unlike the topless photos that were bisected, these types of photos were trisected. I’ll leave the rest for errr... your imagination.

And it didn’t stop here. We were a very bright bunch of boys (most of us have grown up today to become successful techies, doctors, MBA grads, air force pilots and wizards in the creative field) and we had our logistics firmly in place. We maintained a centralized register that kept track of all the ‘half boobs’ that were being circulated. This register consisted of a table that listed the name of the left boob, name of the right boob, current owner of the left and right boobs, due-date when the lefts and rights were to be exchanged between the ‘boob-buddies’ ( for ex. The boys who owned, say, Al R. and Al. L on that particular day were boob-buddies, who were supposed to exchange their respective half boobs within the due-dates listed). This centralized register actually was a sheet, which we had torn right off from our official class attendance register- because the rows and columns with printed dates on them made them very convenient to maintain our boob inventory. The responsibility of maintaining this centralized register usually fell upon the brightest lad in our class- the class monitor. Come on, he was made the class monitor because he was the brightest lad, and we knew we could trust him with the logistics. The exchange of the half -boobs usually happened during our lunch-breaks, in a clandestine, synchronized operation. The scraps of paper with the half boobs were innocuously hidden inside our Maths classwork notebooks and exchanged between the respective boob-buddies. I remember being really excited about this exchange program.... it was my long-awaited turn to know if Betty’s right boob really looked any different from her left counterpart. Anyway, this is when I saw Tiffany Taylor (code Ti L. and Ti R.) for the first time. Unbelievable! I was overwhelmed by that woman... had she proposed to me, I would have readily said ‘Yes’ to her then and there. She was the epitome of beauty, so smoking-hot that a piece of butter dropped on her lissome body would have probably melted away in nanoseconds. Even though I found everyone else ‘nice’, I was especially partial to Ti L. and Ti. R. My kaminey friends had even nicknamed me as Tiffany Kumar. Some sense of humor they had, I tell you.

Everything went like clockwork for about 6 months or so. But it took just one afternoon for our entire porn infrastructure to collapse. You see, I happened to study in a co-ed school. We boys took painstaking care to cloak our self-built porn network in a thick veil of secrecy and ensure that none of the girls in our class got any wind of it. We boys were actually worried that the girls in our class were not as sexually erudite as us and would freak out like hell at the thought of half-boobs being exchanged in their presence. We were convinced that those girls didn’t even know how to spell ‘sex’. At that time, we believed our female classmates’ probable idea of reproduction was something like: “Man gets married to a woman. During the first night, man and woman shake hands with each other and poof! , a baby drops right down from the skies.” And to add fuel to our suspicion, girls in our class had the reputation of being cribby, complainy little twats who could not be trusted to keep secrets. Hence we ensured that our network of porn was only known to the ‘men of the class’.

But one fine fateful afternoon, shortly after we were done with our customary exchange program during the lunch break, it so happened that one of our boys had carelessly left a photo of Jessica’s left boob (Jes L.) unattended on his desk. One of our girl classmates, oblivious to this rare blip, was quietly having her lunch in a corner of the classroom. As luck would have it, a strong gust of wind came through the open window and blew the photo of Jessica’s boob right across the classroom and straight into the girl’s lunch box! “Aieeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!” . A bloodcurdling, high-pitched female scream echoed right through the classroom, sending shivers down the school corridors. That was it. The was the end of our story.

You need not be an Einstein to guess what happened next. But for the record- we boys were marched to Principal Sir’s chambers, made to stand in a line, and caned mercilessly on our bums until the brown cheeks turned scarlet red. Bloody Principal, he would have probably spent the whole of the previous night fondling his mistresses’ boobs, but if we students exchanged porn likewise, then it was a crime. Some justice, bah! Anyway, the punishment was pronounced and each one of us were suspended from school for 2 days (which we merrily spent playing cricket in the neighbourhood fields). However, the poor boy in the centre of the storm – the one who happened to own Jes L. at that point of time - didn’t have it so lucky. He was suspended from school for 5 days, a complaint letter was posted to his residential address, and was told that he would be allowed to re-join the school only if he summoned his Dad to the Principal’s chambers.

Let me tell you something- we boys were not the ones to take things lying down. We fifteen- year olds were all lust filled scumbags alright, but we were really feisty fifteen-year olds. We had tremendous guts, we were boys of integrity and we were united in our cause. We felt responsible for the poor guy who got caught, and so we set ourselves upon a path of redemption. Our first stop was the town post-office, where it took about 50 bucks to bribe the head postmaster, and about 5 minutes to nip the Principal’s letter from the postal room and tear it to shreds. Our next stop was at the neighbourhood pani-puri waala’s stall, where it took another 50 bucks to convince the paani-puri waala to pose as our friend’s Dad and meet the Principal. Man, you should’ve seen that guy’s performance at the Principal’s office- he would have won a Filmfare for sure!

We passed out of tenth standard soon after and dispersed into various colleges for our PUCs (equivalent to eleventh and twelfth standard-FYI) and subsequently to do our engineering/medicine/other stupid professional courses, and therefore our half boob network was unplugged naturally. My engineering college years (2001-2005) were pure bliss, I tell you. It makes me proud and patriotic to say that in any corner of our country, the words “male engineering student” and “porn aficionado” would count as true synonyms. In fact an engineering student is not considered to be an engineering student if he hasn’t seen a porn movie or two in his grad life (I am speaking only for the men. I have no clue about the female engineering students’ porn habits; you can probably enlighten me in the comments section). Engineering years were the time when technology around us truly changed trends. Internet became cheaper, faster and more accessible. No more half-boobs, we had the entire models for ourselves – movies, still-photos, wallpapers, animation, any category with any number of X’s – you name it, click, tap and presto there it was! The rickety 1.4 MB Sony floppies slowly made began to make way to CD RW’s and USB drives. But for people like me and most of my batch mates, who had an average of 10 GB porn stashed away in a hard-drive of 20 GB capacity (well, we used to save a couple of GB’s here and there for our engineering study files too) – those floppies, CD’s, pen drives- hen drives and other tiddly little pieces of storage junks were never sufficient. We generally used to take a screw-driver, dismantle the entire hard-disk drive from our CPUs, carry them over to friends’ places and exchange our files in bulk! Even during those days, Tiffany stayed close to me. Only now, I had the bonus of seeing her in 16-bit colour and various cinematic avatars.

The funniest part of engineering-day adventures was the way we guys stored and hid our files in our PCs. You see, during those days most of us lived with our folks at home and sometimes our folks happened to use our PC’s for browsing, checking mails etc. Therefore, we really had to take extra care and precaution in disguising our precious files. (Wish I had a personal laptop then, but back then laptops were not sold as cheap as bananas, as they are today). One of the common places to stash porn in was the Windows System32 folder. It was a perfect hiding place – trust me nobody other than you would have ever cared to peep in there, even by accident. And sometimes, if our personal hard-disks were packed to capacity, we stored the remaining of our colorful files in another safe hiding place – in the PC’s inside the computer labs of our college.

And then there were those innocent folder names that we came up with. For example I had all my Tiffany wallpapers and videos stored inside a hidden folder which was named as “Database_Project_Documentation”. Other folders that housed our sleazy bits-and-bytes were banally named as “System_Architecuture_Research” or “Java_Interview_Questions” or some other geeky name which would have never aroused the curiosity of non-computer savvy folks at home who shared the computer. And we were successful too. However, I knew one friend of mine, an absolute jackass, who stuffed all his hardcore triple-x videos into a folder, named it as “Devotional_Songs” and stored it, of all places, in “My Documents”. One day his Grandmother was apparently in the mood for some hari-bhajans and asked his Dad if he could play some religious music for her. The Dad escorted the Grandmother to the PC, straightaway opened “My Documents”, looked around and to his delight came up to this new “Devotional_Songs” folder which his son had created. Needless to say, he went on and double-clicked on the first available file. Well, I do not have the exact details of what happened next, but rumor had it that my friend spent the next two nights sleeping on a platform at the city railway station.

*Sigh*, those were the days. Time has marched on since then, in its own inexorable way. Today, I am a 26-year old who’s been there and seen that. Today, I live on my own, have a laptop, a broad-band connection and the goddamn liberty of doing whatever I wish to. But still, I miss those days, miss those crumpled sheets of half-boobs, miss those folder aliases and miss that clandestine, cat-and-mouse excitement that was such a part and parcel of my life. Just yesterday me and a friend of mine were casually browsing the Playboy site when we guys happened to chance upon an image of Tiffany. That brought all the wonderful mammaries memories flooding back. Today, as I stand in the twilight of my bachelor life, I want to pause and express my gratitude to these people who made a difference to me and million other men like me. Thank you Playboy, thank you Tiffany and thank you all other gorgeous divas for shedding your clothes and making a world of difference for me and millions of my ilk.

Until later,
Love,
Parry

P.S: For all you people who are itching to give me gyaan about how porn can be sheer gross and a manifestation of a sick mind and against the will of God and blah blah blah, you are welcome to go ahead and waste your time. You’ll only end up pissing on the wrong tree. :-)