The late 1960s was the last time a virile Bengali man was seen on the face of the earth. Coffee House in Kolkata had its own ozone layer of smoke from the hundreds of Charminars puffed in an attempt to answer life’s metaphysical questions. Joining Presidency College was the epitome of this intellectual life. Men would recite lines out of a Pablo Neruda poem at the drop of a hat and apparently Mary Jane wasn’t that popular. The last hunk from the community I have met was my father, whose friend was a model for Charminar in the 1980s. Back in the day, 17-year-olds listened to lectures that changed their lives, made them pack bags and lead political movements or maybe just simply spend endless hours at Coffee House discussing literature. Over-milked tea carried on through generations as the evolution of the Bengali men took a massive beating. They learned to play the guitar and God forbid, discovered Pink Floyd. Today, statistically you cannot meet a Bengali man in his late 20s who hasn’t spent his teens adulating the ‘gods of classic rock’ but clearly that didn’t make rockstars out of them. They discovered everything else that comes with the music, namely Mary Jane and jam sessions but they broke their relationship with virility completely somewhere on the way.

Today a get-together in Kolkata ushers in a gathering of male and female counterparts of our generation; twenty-something-year-olds meeting over a few drinks, a lot of cigarettes and some unforgettable Mary Jane. The female voices dwindle and the male laughter resonates through the old stone staircases and the teakwood beams. There are never more than two topics in discussion, Dada and Mithun-Da. The former stands for Sourav Ganguly whose name makes any modern Bengali man misty-eyed out of adulation and the latter is the quintessential disco dancer now turned Bengal’s Rajnikanth. Sometimes a stray mention of Ray’s movies brings forth a four minute dialogue quickly broken off by a gesticulating review of Ganguly’s new TV show. With discussions such as these, there is no place for literature, only Pink Floyd. Scowling at modern music, live bands and any other language besides Bengali, this prototype has re-established the love story with food. Double egg chicken roll, lebu cha (lemon tea), Sunday mutton lunches and chingri (prawns). The gastronomical love affair is always followed by a siesta, because the sun is too hot for their pot bellies and receding hairlines. Visually men and women from the community strangely seem to belong to different races, another reason we can’t base relationships on the laws of attraction in the former’s case. Already if you are cringing at the thought of these men turning into lean, mean, love machines, I will ask you to not stop cringing. They are neither lean nor mean and frighteningly effeminate. What is left of the intellectualism is the word pseudo and of maschimo? Nothing, nothing at all.

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