More on Marriage

Yes. To continue with the marriage bit. The recent scandal about Mr.Spitzer was delicious. A high ranking politician in the US, from a rich, educated family, a law graduate, in short, a leader of the conservative society of the leading country of the world is caught with a prostitute! My. My. Isn't that something. The news reports show him (I couldn't find a better casting for the devil, sunken eyes and no eyebrows, jaws of a bulldog) and his wife, once pretty, vulnerable, open, just the sort of woman waiting to be taken for a ride by a hustler. And she was. She was persuaded not to practice law after she graduated from the same law school. And now look at her. She has to stand and be photographed beside her husband defending his right to go to a prostitute! That is marriage for you.

The second interesting bit of news is about the teenage British girl who was raped and killed in Goa and about which the Goa police initially said it was death due to drowning till her not too virtuous mother screamed foul from roof tops. The interesting bit is from the diary of the unfortunate girl, which was unearthed to put pressure on the mother who was accusing even the home minister of the State of complicity in suppressing the crime. The girl is sixteen and she says going without sex for more than two days stresses her out. Thats a truth society has never acknowledged. And has no solution to. That a teenager needs sex. There is no outlet for this strongest force in young people. Society has no solution and prefers to sit and pretend it doesn't exist and go about being mindlessly engaged in making money.

So we tell our children be a good boy and girl and in time you will find a good girl and boy. We tell them the virtues of virginity. You shall enjoy it more. It is sacred. Or else you will get Aids or worse. And show them hell and heaven. Keep quiet. Keep quiet. But the body will not be kept quiet. It needs sex just as it needs food.

But now for the poem promised in the previous post.

Love and Romance
Romance is in the dreams
Pleasure is in desiring
Togetherness
is summer rain.

The incomplete is complete
The unfulfilled fulfilled
The fulfilled wasted
It always ends in pain.

Copyright : Tapas Bandyopadhyaya

This was written in Dec., 1998. Now Amy Winehouse sings on a similar vein in 'Love is a Losing Game'.