I will kiss every inch of your baby

So Ganesh Puja is drawing near, my favorite display of male Indian homosociability, and the construction of pandals is getting me super excited about Durga Puja-- a huge week long Hindu festival in early October where neighborhoods all around the city build shrines depicting the story of Durga (the mother goddess) returning home with her children. There's all sorts of dancing and fun and carnival rides and it's an all around good time, the highlight of which (at least for me) being the marriage of a statue of Ganesh to a banana tree, dressed in a wedding sari and everything. No one has ever been able to explain to me why this happens.

Through Laura I've met some more American friends, which has been lovely. Last night we had dinner and hookah, and I learned that HQ for the gay community in south Kolkata is a coffee shop really close to my house. Apparently once this guy told a Bengali friend of his here that he's gay, she gave him these phone numbers to call, one of which belonging to a person he described as the "overlord" of the south Kolkata gay community. If I were a gay man I would make it my mission to date this person, but apparently the overlord already has a boyfriend in Germany, natch.

Another guy I know here has been asked to edit the English translation of a book written by a prominent babu (permanent boyfriend, client, sometimes pimpish figure of a sex worker in the red light district here) about babu culture, and the thing has totally fucked things to say about gender roles, rape, Indian men reaching puberty at the age of 18, women only enjoying sex if men enjoy it, etc. Some major NGO is planning on publishing this English version as some authoritative acount of sex work in Kolkata, apparently, which could be kind of a disaster for several reasons. I reeeeally want to read this book.

Today I have tentative plans to go visit the Coffee House at College Street, which is hugely famous as a center of Kolkata's commie artsy intellectualism... it's been around for decades, and was regularly patronized by Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Subhas Chandra Bose, Amartya Sen, Aparna Sen, etc. Every saturday there's a "Marxist reading room" (where a bunch of people get together and read Mao, actually) and a mostly nutty weekly called "Liberation" you can pick up. These are things that delight me. Based on a hilarious map of India drawn by a friend of Lea's and mine (hi, Amy!) I almost titled this blog "Notes from the Pit of Socialist Pretension." This is why.