DinoCabraZilla

The Americans have Big Foot, the Irish have the Loch Ness monster, the Japanese have Godzilla. Indians? We have 'sex'. Or at least that's how things were when I was growing up. Sex wasn't just the elephant in the room it was a hybrid of a Dinosaur, chupacabra and the Loch Ness monster because as kids, we weren't really sure whether it was extinct or mythical, but we at least knew that it was dangerous. Why?

Well, for one we had parents who avoided the subject all together until they caught their daughter reading a Mills and Boons instead of solving Math problems like all good Indian children were supposed to. It was almost as if I could hear their brains self-destruct at that point from the sheer exhaustion of answering self-imposed questions like, How did she know..... about sex? Was it this book? Where did she get it from? OMG, has she had it? Will she fail math? So, all these years she was sitting there with her math book, she wasn't actually doing the math? What else did she lie about? Social Studies? Science????!!!!

Here's where I'd like to give them credit. My parents had done an impressive job of sex-proofing my childhood - by that, I don't just mean me "having" sex, but they made sure I never even "heard" the word, sex. They banned Star Movies right from the start. And then that evil, evil TV show Friends. Then, they told me all boys were 'rapists waiting to happen' so I never really wanted to be friends with one. Their twisted sociological experiment is now the root of several of my problems.

However, it wasn't just my parents who were doing this, thousands of middle-class Indian parents around the world were doing the exact same thing. The result was - that Sex became a DinoCabraZilla. We picked up Western literature, listened to the Backstreet Boys and watched the flowers mate in Bollywood films instead of the actors and actresses and thought, What the fuck is going on? My head was filled with all these weird theories, "Oh sex? It's that thing people do in the US. I think they might do it in Japan and China, definitely in Europe. Not so sure about Africa. Hmmm."

In 9th grade, one of our 'forward' friends told us about her first kiss. We were blown away. Indians kissed too? It was like a newsflash. We had presumed kissing wasn't in our destiny, unless we dated someone like Nick Carter or went to prom like that Nancy Drew chick. "I could never fall in love with an Indian guy." is something we told each other for this very reason.

 Love with an Indian boy would be like my love for Shah Rukh Khan. Which was weird, because well, I loved Shah Rukh in a weird, weird way. For starters, it began with a Stockholm syndrome-like attraction. I began to seriously dig SRK between the time I watched "Darr" and "Baazigar". He was a twisted stalker-killer in both. Not a bad boy, not a rebel - a full on psycho, borderline rapist freak. By the time he became the Yash Chopra poster-lover-boy, my dreams of SRK and me involved us running around a snow capped mountain. We never, ever kissed - because that would be so, SO gross.

 I don't think our generation is cool with people kissing in Bollywood movies, and we never will be. I can sit and watch Sex And The City with my mom but never Jism. The last time I had to watch an Indian couple kissing on screen, Aishwarya and Hrithik in Dhoom 3, my brain was manically yelling, WHERE ARE THE FLOWERS, SOMEBODY BRING IN THE GODDAMN FLOWERS.