porn

Men on the street frequently call me over to sit next to them. Depending on my mood, I either yell namaste and keep walking or I sit down. I am most fascinated by the ones who speak no English but insist on getting my phone number so we can hang out again. As much as I'd like to spend another hour sitting around looking at things while we talk to each other in an unknown language, I may have to pass.

At the end of these meetings, requests for camera phone pictures abound. Something about my white skin apparently just screams for immortalazation. After my last picture with a taxi driver and his Marathi speaking friends, he showed me some videos on his impressive Nokia mobile. After I expressed sincere admiration for the keen piece of tech, he starts a porn movie.

Now, I have not seen any porn in this country but I see it for sale often. I might buy some just to find out if its anything like what this taxi driver showed me. I think calling it soft porn does an injustice to honest breast baring softcore porn everywhere. I might classify this as foreplay porn (you would not believe how long I spent looking up the word foreplay, it's probably inverse to the time I spend on it). The couple kissed passionately for most of the movie while the camera zoomed in on their interlocking tongues. In the last minute, he removed her shirt and we got to see him caress her bare back in semi-darkness. That was it. Does the whole country watch stuff like this and get as excited as my new friend? I'm not sure I want to know.

However, the best porn story of all time came from the beautiful Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan. In the book, he described a novel written by his alter ego, Kilgore Trout (a frequent trick of his to describe crazy ideas that didn't have enough meat for a short story). He described a planet where all the vegetation had been consumed in the mad dash of capitalism. They only had petroleum byproducts left for nourishment. You could survive on this but it tasted terrible. The protagonist gets taken to a porn movie by his hosts. It started with a man eating an apple while the camera zoomed in on his mouth as it ripped and teared at the fruit. The grand finale showed a family sitting down to thanksgiving dinner. They had closeups of the bones ripped from the turkey, reveling in the mashed potatoes with simulated moans of pleasure (for this food was petroleum too and the actors faked their enjoyment) until they slowly licked their fingers clean of the delicious feast. Now that's porn.