There will be many amongst us who will celebrate Valentine’s Day on Friday with the same oomph and pomp we observe many other festivals in this country: by going bar hopping in Thamel. (This week’s column is proudly sponsored by a liquor brand which comes in a small brown bottle, but shall remain nameless. Statutory Warning: reading this column while under the influence is illegal in some states. Hic.) The International Day of Love and Lust, however, is a good time to remind ourselves of our ancestors’ obsession with sex. They left ample evidence of this hoary past in the temple struts and other erections in the Kathmandu Valley as proof of the outstanding and upright people we once were.
We didn’t beat around the bush when it came to birds and bees in those days, we got straight to the point. Much of the corpus of invaluable ornithological and apiarian data has been carefully preserved in temple eaves of the three Darbar Squares so that posterity could retroactively learn from these 3-D interactive displays of holy erotica.?
All you need is a pair of powerful binoculars for education fieldtrips to learn from our architecture (From Sanskrit: “archi”= dirty, and “tecture”= stuff). It is obvious from a cursory perusal of the temples that many of these fun and games our ancestors indulged in are now extinct. Just as well because it looks like what our forebears did in the intimacy of their homes was more like Greco-Roman wrestling than knoodling.
Some temple struts look like they are straight out of a manual of the World Wrestling Federation and depict manoeuvre like ‘Reversal’ (which earns the player three bonus points) in which the man underneath completely reverses his position and comes to the top position. Another move is called the ‘Crotch-lift’, the aggressor executes a hold with his or her arms and legs, leading to front head-lock with amplitude.
We don’t know what the final outcome of these bouts were, but our ancestors left graphic evidence that they also loved to wrestle with sheep, water buffalo, and other semi-mythical fauna in order to test their strength and stamina. In fact, they were such eager sportsmen that they wrestled in groups, and sometimes they even wrestled with themselves. Warning to parents: some of these temples may not be suitable for minors and have been declared PG18 by the Director General of Copulation and Family Planning.
Following this grand tradition, it is important for us this Valentine’s Day to value and preserve our grand traditions by paying silent homage to the acrobats who laid the groundwork of the society we are now proud to call our own. Without their seminal contribution, we would not be here today to pen these lines of tribute.
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And now we can get back to a subject we are all much more comfortable with: political knoodling. Comrade Leftist God came out of nowhere to be the most powerful man in the UML and after a pact with Comrade Oily, secured a commitment to be his party’s candidate for Homely Minister.
What Bum Dave hadn’t bargained for, however, is that he’d be stabbed in the back by Makunay and Jhal Gnat who secretly sent word to Jhusil that having such a tainted man as Homework Minister would sully his (PM’s) Mr Clean image. Hence the hitch.
Jhusil Da’s main headache is not the UML commies, however, it is his own clan, in particular Suzie Q. The ex-First Dotter has been badgering Uncle Swoosh for Vice-Premier and Foreigner Minister when her only qualification for the post seems to be that she is married to a farang.