Your Mother...

I loved this story: Your Mother

*****
Your mother hated being photographed. She had romantic notions of how perfect her body looked at certain angles and to have them crushed by the awkward reality of a still life was simply unbearable. So I learned to capture moments using words and silences.

On this day, she sat perched on the first floor balcony’s platformed railing. Our room overlooked the magnificent Bay of Bengal – swollen & angry. We’d mistimed our vacation and landed up at Chinnakalpet in the middle of the Tamil Nadu monsoon. Swimming in the choppy sea was out of the question & even when it wasn’t raining, the weather was spectacularly wild. Earlier in the afternoon I’d run my hands through her hair and lightly kissed her neck as we looked at the stunning view afforded us by the balcony. When I’d asked her if she wanted to walk along the beach with me, she’d pushed me out of the room – “We don’t have to do everything together, do we?” And she was right. I took off with my camera.

With every step, my feet sank deeper into the golden sand. The effort it took to take the next step reminded me of how we were both getting older and how my body was beginning to express its tiredness. We had tried, your mother & I, to have children over the past two years but two miscarriages later she decided we needed to stop. “I have run out of tears, Arun,” she said. Instead, we decided to get into our tiny car and head off anywhere the wind would take us (her words, not mine).

The wind had led me here and if I wasn’t careful, it would sweep me further into the Bay. “Hold on to your hat, man!” cried a man coming at me from the opposite side. Considering he was the one wearing the hat and not me, I found him amusing.
“Nice weather we’re having, aren’t we?” I joked.
“Absolute perfection. I hope you’re bracing yourself for Cyclone Leela!”
“What? No! I mean, I haven’t even heard about it. My wife & I here on vacation.”
“Vacation?!! That’s rich, dear chap! I’d turn my ship right round and head back for shore. Nigel Forman, by the way.”
“Arun Desai.”
“Pleasure to bump into you, Arun. You will not be soon forgotten. Good bye & good tidings!”

And off he went, striding strongly, pushing back against the strong winds. I stood and watched the strange old man as he climbed the slippery rocks leading into the ocean. When he reached the farthest rock he opened his arms out wide, embracing the elements: the violent spray of the sea, the full force of the wind & the unending sky before him. You might say he had a few screws loose but in that moment I envied him his freedom.

I walked further, clicking photographs along the way. Perfect little seashells, fishing boats making their way back to the beach and the odd little picture that our resort’s quaint cottages made on that stormy evening. I began to miss your mother and so I turned back.

I took the cobbled stone path to our room. Along the way, I came upon the family that was staying across the hall from us. They were out on the lawn taking advantage of the few rainless hours. Two little girls played in the dirt as their parents relaxed over a cup of coffee. The younger of the two was an independent spirit. Barely 3 or 4, she wandered off repeatedly on her own, digging holes in the ground en route. Her mother would call out for her at regular intervals, but she wouldn’t listen. She would carry on on her quest; now a flower to be dissected, now a butterfly to be chased. And then there was the matter of jumping into that puddle. Eventually, the mother caught up with her little imp and hoisted her over the shoulder. Both mother & daughter, laughing, disappeared into the bushes and then out of sight.

I don’t know what made me do it, but I looked up at that very instant and caught your mother looking right at me. There she was, seated cross-legged on our balcony’s platformed railing. She had wrapped a dupatta around herself, one end of which was flying unrestrained in the wind like her uncombed hair. She had never looked more beautiful. I instinctively lifted my camera to capture her breathtaking image. But in the very next instant, I changed my mind and there I was, running up the stairs as quickly as I could. The door was open, I rushed right through it and scooped her up in my embrace. We held each other so tight that not even the cyclonic winds churning up outside could have torn us apart.
The next morning, we admitted defeat in the face of Cylcone Leela, packed our backs and returned home. Not long after that your mother announced that she was pregnant with you.

From, Aquatic Static. Do visit the blog, one of my favourites.

*****
Stories like these make it so hard to come back to the real life, no? Sigh.

Marge, This Is Magic!

Just what I needed to hear today!

Oh! The Places You'll Go!

All The Wonderful Places You'll Go! :)
*****
And what a brilliant video! :)

Oh! The Places You'll Go!

Where's My Gaurdian Angel?

You want a job, a vacation, heath insurance, validation, a back rub, a scalp massage at the place where you get your haircut, people who are jealous of you, an ex who won’t stop texting you when they’re drunk, Twitter followers, happiness maybe sorta, someone to buy you lunch at a fancy restaurant, a mentor who can tell you what the hell to do with your life, a reliable internet connection, a reliable human connection, a gift card to the grocery store, dinner parties with friends where everyone will pretend to have their crap together for just one night, a nice flirty text message to wake up to every morning for the rest of your life, for everyone to like you even if you don’t like anyone, and one of those nights that doesn’t end till 9 AM and reminds you what it feels like to be young and alive. Oh, and $$$. That’s all. Think you can get that for me?

From ThoughtCatalog: What 20-somethings want.


And this is what the ones approaching 30 want:

You want a career that makes you feel like you're doing something good with your life, not just some job that pays your bills, something really meaningful. You want a great mentor who'll guide you how to make more money while having that mythical work-life balance. You want to come home to loved ones. You want a happy family, lots of cousins, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces. You want a happy marriage. You want to stay close to your parents and be closer to your in-laws. You want a partner who accepts and understands you and loves you. You want friends to stay closer to you, or atleast one plane-hop away. You want vacations. And you want travel. You want time to read important books and cook your favourite meals and you want time to do nothing. You want to learn something new every month if not every week. You want to be able to save handsomely for your retirement. You want a healthy body, a clear mind, soft skin and a head full of glossy hair. You want drunken nights out with friends and you want get-togethers where conversations go on till 9AM. You want reliable human connection and someone who'll make you laugh. You want a pet. You want to have your act together and not need any validation from outside. You want lots of energy to do all those things, to keep everyone around you happy and work towards your own happiness. You want to feel that the past was good, but the future is going to be better.

That’s all. Think you can get that for me?

Where Did That Word Disappear?

Go on, I dare you. I can see you looking at me the way you are, just like that. What are you going to do with it then? Yes I’m challenging you; look at me standing here, I’m not budging, it’s your move. I’m an elven Liv Tyler steeling against a wraith—if you want me, you can come and claim me. I’m not even packing Hobbit over here, I’m just waiting casually for you to cross whatever obstacle you see in your path. See, I’m tired of touching your thigh just this way, or placing my hand over yours just so; I want you to romance me.

Now you know I’m not one for gender stereotypes, I’ve asked guys out in the past and I’ll do it again. I’ve paid for their drinks and their dinners and I don’t care. I’ve changed their light globes. I’ve been strong for them when they’ve been emotional. I don’t like it when people say women are so-and-so or men are so-and-so, but goddamn it I am tired of this realism. I don’t want to be politically correct any more, I just want you to romance me. I am empowered, educated, and aware, and now, just for a moment, I want to be the princess you think is worth slaying dragons over.

I want you, once you’re done awkwardly avoiding catching my eye, once you’re done pretending you don’t notice me, once you’re done with insecurely waiting for me to make the first move, to ask me out. I don’t want you to text me or email me. I want you to say it to my face. I want you say it in a moment that will catch me completely off guard, and I want you to stumble over your words and I want you to blush, and I want to do the exact same as I accept.

Or you could just skip all the formalities and just kiss me. When we’re laughing the way we do, you should just kiss me. It doesn’t need to be in the rain or with fireworks exploding in the background. It can be at the bar or in a crowded street or anywhere, I don’t care—just kiss me you fool. And let’s both be gleefully embarrassed afterwards and hold hands in silence for a moment while we both digest the euphoria of our first kiss.

I want you to not let anything stand in your way. I want you to come for me, to sweep me off my feet with a simple look. I want you to want me in this grand, clichéd way, but without doing any of those grand cliché things. We can just watch a movie and drink some wine, as long as you let me snuggle into your side while we do it. And then, because you listen to me when we’re talking and you’re getting to know me so well, I want you to let me have the last slice of pizza, or the last bite of cake (but I’ll insist that we share it anyway, because I’ll know you are romancing me).

You should be impulsive when you’re romancing me. You shouldn’t wait the requisite 3 days to call or text me, you should just do it when it hits you. When your desire for me, to see me, to smell me, to hear my voice is so compelling there’s nothing else for you to do. I want you to be constantly thinking about me, and to do innocuous little things that to me, are loaded with meaning because they reflect the ways in which you are learning me. I want you to be reckless and passionate and I want you to let me be reckless and passionate too. I want you to disengage your baggage for me, and I want you to romance me like you’ve never romanced before.

And when you’re romancing me, I want you to challenge me and argue with me about my opinions. I want you to romance me in this dangerous haphazard way which screams of imperfection—which makes everything all the more romantic, because it’s so wildly flawed, and present and LOUD. I want you to look at me like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen when I’m at my worst, and I want you to embrace all the sides of me as you get to know them, as part of some ineffable creature you can’t untangle. I want you to romance me because when you think about it, you really can’t see any other way.

From, Thought Catalog.

Bubble...

It's going to be interesting to see how this turns out. I can see the same thing happening here in Mumbai. Big real estate developers building these big luxurious houses, some even come with their own private swimming pools, and although, Mumbai -the city of extremes- has that kind of money, there are also those who can't afford even an one room-kitchen in Mumbai. And so confused, I asked a friend what happens to those who can't afford multi-crore flats, and then she told me about Virar.

Anyway, back to China, knowing the Chinese, I shouldn't have been surprised:

The second, a Beijing municipal regulation restricting families to owning one apartment each has also failed because, as Chovanec said, “People got around [it] by getting divorced.”

Read, China’s Empty Apartments: Part1 and Part2.

And, Chinese hit by over-inflated house prices. 

Promises...

From, Thought Catalog:

During the crystalline nights of winter, summer held an almost indecent promise. The kind of promise composed of hands resting lightly on bare shoulders, sliding off a thin slip of a strap from a cotton dress. A time of lying lazily in the grass hoping for a slight breeze to skim your face, of kisses in the kind of cold bars that had dark corners with wooden tables, and of picnics near-forgotten in a whiskey lemonade drenched haze. Afternoons of hazardously licking melting ice cream cones while riding bikes across bridges and nights of telling secrets on roof tops still steaming from the hot sun.

It was the kind of promise that keeps you sane, hopeful, and young.

But instead, summer became sad summer. The kind of a season where the thick, heavy air weighs you down—not with the heat from a storm about to break—but with the mistakes you’ve made, with harshly lingering regret. A time that feels full of significance you can’t come back from, of adulthood no longer pending but here. Gone is that childish wonder. Moments of almost incomprehensible glee find you fleetingly and slip quickly through your grasping fingers, disappearing.

Summer became a broken promise.

Now you sit, hours after midnight, chasing tumblers of whiskey with more whiskey, spinning sentences full of meaningful adjectives with your favorite companion in hyperbole. Each of you half in the moment, half inside your heads, claiming—wondering—if autumn turned to winter will hold a different promise you can reach for. If somehow once you stop running barefoot in the grass, unable to capture that same enthusiastic momentum you once had, you’ll be able to find some sense of peace in where you’ve stopped. That somehow months from now, your previous heartaches will be something contained only in memory instead of your everyday breath, constantly reminding you that your recovery time is no longer as fast.

But even to you that promise holds false.

You know winter holds gray days that take you to dark places, brief bits of laughter book-ended by melancholy. That you’ll find yourself silent, listening to the strains of the National on repeat, exile, vilify, wishing it was still summer because even if your heart was heavy, you felt light. That winter has stolen all the sunshine you once twirled beneath. And that snow will fall on your darkest day, burying you. But staring at that white perfection free of foot prints, you’ll smile. You’ll remember one magical night of stumbling, tumbling, falling tipsily through the drifts. And you’ll feel wistful for those icy days when the wind chills you to the bone and conversation brings you comforting warmth that no fire can provide.

Perhaps the promise of a promise is enough.

The Greenness Of Your Grass...

"Chances are, you’re not going to be alone forever. You might joke about being a spinster—about getting cats with diamante collars or maybe an obnoxious Cockatoo you can teach dirty words—but inside you, somewhere deep in your bowel, nestled beneath your utmost fears and insecurities, there’s a little scrap of knowing that tells you that one day, somehow, you’ll have someone by your side...

...start spending more time with you. Laugh at your own jokes. Luxuriate in solitary silence. Walk. Read. Pamper yourself. Be as filthy and disgusting as you please. Learn the comfort of your own embrace. It’s a cliché but it’s true—you will love better once you’ve fallen in love with you. Sleep sprawled on the bed. Snore. When you wake up make eggs and bacon and eat them in bed on your own. Find things—big and small—that you love doing and do them everyday.

Focus on your job. Find a hobby. Do whatever the hell you want. Because when that day comes—the secret day you hold onto in the hidden recesses of your guts—you will have to compromise. You will have to think of someone else whenever you make a decision. You will have to share your bacon, and maybe they wont like it crispy besides, and you’ll have to adapt. You will have to sleep wedged between someone’s limbs. It wont be better and it wont be worse; it will be different, and you’ll have to learn to love it too."

From, Thought Catalog. 

Jazbaat...

There will be that conversation you’ve been putting off for as long as you’ve known you’ve needed to have it. There will be those words that you’ve rehearsed over and over–in your car, in front of your mirror, in your bed in total darkness while staring at your ceiling–that tumble out of your mouth inelegantly, tripping over each other to make it out just so you can get this over with. There will be that ugly ball of thoughts that hangs in front of you, the thick, opaque cloud of words that formed in between you, through which you cannot breathe. There will be that moment where you try and scoot away, wanting to disown everything you’ve just said, ready to scream at the top of your lungs just to cut the silence.

And there will be that moment, that brutally delayed moment, where they respond with a shrug, a sigh, a casual dismissal of all that you just implied. They will demonstrate with unintentional precision just how uninvolved they are, how little they have emotionally invested, just how very little this has all mattered to them. There will be the moment you struggle to physically scoop up every humiliating statement you made and all their brutal implications and cram them, hurriedly, back in your mouth. You’ll fight back tears as your cheeks fill, blotchy and red, like a veteran alcoholic. You’ll linger on the cusp of wailing, of running in any direction until your lungs ache–but you won’t. You’ll shrug and vaguely shake your head, pitifully mumbling something along the lines of, “Oh, of course…right. No, no, that’s cool.”

But it will pass.

And everything else too...it always does.

Broken Women...

Is buying sex a better way to help Cambodian women than buying a T-shirt?

Read the comments too.

What's the way out?

The Unkindly Ones...

I have read and heard about the hijra community before. The book Beautiful Thing talks about it in quite a detail. But today I read this, and I wondered about the human struggle to be something else...

It seems that, most of us, are fighting to be something else. Struggling to be someone else. There are people like Mona, born male, but wanting to be female. There are females, who don manly clothes, walk with a swagger and expect the world to look at them with fear. And then there are people like you and me, comfortable in our maleness and femaleness, but still struggling to free ourselves. Still fighting with ourselves, with our families, with the society.

And while the hijras need a sex-change to be what they want to be, it's never too late for us to drop the past baggage and be what we want to be.

Everyone has a chance to be what they wish to be.

I need to remember that often. 

It's Been So Long...

Dude, what is this?! How can this be?! 

I can understand Congo, Ghana, even Italy, but China?

My womanly Indian heart is in pieces! *sniff sniff*

A Casualty...

With each passing year, my list of favourite people grows smaller. Sad.

*****
 Is sexiness a lost art to the happily married?

After marriage, the whole equation changes. Sexiness becomes muted. Those navel-baring miniskirts that seemed perfect for the nightclub when you were 20 somehow appear pathetic and desperate when you wear them post 40. Those fishnet stockings that were perfect for your office when you were a rookie, now appear gaudy when you wear them as the boss.
It isn’t just about clothes, though. It is also about morphing equations with the whole notion of sexiness. You want to appear attractive but also want to be perceived as dignified. You want to appear desirable but only to a bandwidth of people that keeps getting narrower with every passing year. You don’t seek catcalls from hunks or come-hither looks from interns. You want—oh, I don’t know—class, maybe? You may enjoy being checked out, but you want their respect and admiration.

And it's not limited to just marriage.

*****
Once you turn a certain number on your age graph, things begin to change; your perspectives, ideas about life. Some gentler, kinder changes take place, some as subtle as Govinda's dressing. But thing to remember is that it's all good. And in time, you'll learn to accept these changes with the grace, and even, one might hope, joy.

*****

“It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”

Don't beat yourself on the head if you don't know what you want to do with your life just yet. Yep, it's normal. Treasure hunt by Alain De Botton.

Would You Like Some Fries With That?

I normally analyse(like every other small and big thing in my life) my dreams, atleast the ones I remember vividly. And I wondered why I dreamt about dinosaurs coming back to life. I am sure it has something to do with the fact that I am reading Germs, Guns & Steel these days.

And that made me wonder about evolution.

Evolution is a slow process, but still, one does wonder, if we humans ourselves, have stopped evolving.


Here's a wonderful documentary by BBC: Are We Still Evolving?[Part1][Part2][Part3][Part4]. If you don't want to spend 60 mins, here's the gist of it.


So yes, we are evolving. We are becoming fatter and shorter and who knows, maybe one day we'll sprout extra brains and extra hands to handle the information load and multitasking, but I don't know if this is good, I don't know if we are going in the right direction. The test-tube baby and the technology to "design" your baby seems scary.

P.S: And I'd like to see some study that charts the evolution of dogs over the past few 100 years or so. The most domesticated animal, dogs, sure understand human emotions, they can navigate through the human maze of cities fearlessly, but why have they not picked up our language skills? Why is there no dog who can speak human language? Or walk on only two feet like its masters?

Sunday Reading #4

From a finance illiterate's view, this is a wonderful article about the people who ran Goldman Sachs. Almost reads like a story.

Steve Friedman’s decision to quit as chairman of Goldman Sachs, in 1994, during one of its darkest hours, stunned and angered his partners. And despite Friedman’s maneuverings, it created a leadership crisis as the mismatched team of Jon Corzine (future New Jersey governor) and Henry Paulson (future Treasury secretary) took the helm. In an adaptation from his book on Goldman, William D. Cohan reveals how secret merger discussions put the expansive trader and the hardheaded banker on a collision course, setting the stage for the firm it would soon become.

About the Jan Lokpal bill, Of the few, by the few & At the Risk of Heresy: Why I am not Celebrating with Anna Hazare. Both good articles.


Next on my bookshelf, Why Loiter?

"Even in a city like Bombay, the so-called 'friendly' city, women have to strategise how to access public space. What will they wear; how long will they stay out till; who are they going out with; will they need to carry a shawl or a jacket if travelling by train, these are all methods of strategising," explains Sameera Khan.


Khan believes that one of the reasons women are given conditional access is the notion of 'virtue'.
"A woman has to establish 'respectability', [since] only if you're a 'good' girl are you worthy of 'protection'," she says. And 'good' girls don't loiter.
If they could, why do they still carry pepper sprays, safety pins and knuckle dusters in their bags, ask the authors.
"Women are having to constantly censure themselves, and are always in preparation of an 'attack'. Men don't carry that burden," says Khan.

Want to get something done? Help with work, a date or just wish to communicate better perhaps? Touch.

To get around in the world, we mainly rely on our eyes and ears. Touch is a sense that's often forgotten.
But touch is also vital in the way we understand and experience the world. Even the lightest touch on the upper arm can influence the way we think.

How language heals.

All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.”

And last, Amartya Sen on Rabindranath Tagore. 

Love Me...

"One thing we do know for certain is that the body is the place where each of us lives, and the place where each of us will die: our body will always, in the end, betray us."

Beauty is a $160 billion-a-year global industry. The worldwide pursuit of body improvement has become a new religion.

We live in a society that celebrates and iconises youth, where the old, the aesthetically average and the fat seem to have been erased from the pages of our glossy magazines, advertising posters and television screens.

The promise of bodily improvement is fuelled by advertising campaigns and a commercially-driven Western media, reflecting an increasingly narrow palette of beauty. The modern Caucasian beauty ideal has been packaged and exported globally, and just as surgical operations to 'Westernise' oriental eyes have become increasingly popular, so the beauty standard has become increasingly prescriptive. In Africa the use of skin-lightening and hair-straightening products is widespread. In South America women have operations that bring them eerily close to the Barbie doll ideal, and blonde-haired models grace the covers of most magazines. Anorexia is on the increase in Japan, and in China, beauty pageants, once banned as 'spiritual pollution', are now held across the country.


'Westernising' the human body has become a new form of globalisation, with 'Beauty' becoming a homogenous brand. The more rigorously our vision is trained to appreciate the artificial, the more industries benefit. The current standard of beauty feeds the fashion, cosmetics, diet, medical and entertainment industries, with the homogenisation of appearance becoming part of an increasingly globalised consumer culture.

But who creates this culture? However much we may confidently point the finger at certain industries, we can't deny our own tacit, albeit culturally conditioned, involvement. Like it or not, we are judged, and judge, by appearance. Perhaps we are obsessed with the way our own bodies look because we know how instinctively judgemental we are of the bodies that we look at.

A recent scientific study reported that we make decisions about the attractiveness of people we meet in the space of 150 milliseconds. This superficial appraisal has profound implications. Those we consider most beautiful not only find sexual partners more readily but studies also show they get better jobs and more lenient treatment in court.


We have created a world in which there are enormous social, psychological and economic rewards and penalties attached to the way we look. Can any of us honestly say, 'I don't want to be attractive'? Don't we all want to be loved? But have we been brainwashed into believing that in order to be loved we need smaller noses, bigger breasts, tighter skin, longer legs, flatter stomachs and to appear ever youthful? Where does it end?

The body has, in a sense, become just another consumer purchase. Everyone can, in the spirit of our age, go shopping for bodily transformation. Banks now offer loans for plastic surgery. American families with annual incomes under $25,000 account for 30 per cent of all cosmetic surgery patients. Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education.

As our role models become ever younger and more idealised, we are so afraid of aging that the quest for youthful preservation generates an almost pathological obsession with our bodies. As we align our sense of self-worth with self-image, the psychological and emotional consequences are tortuous. The one thing we do know for certain is that our body will always, in the end, betray us.

Check out the website: LoveMe.

What are we doing? 

Justice, Now On The Menu...

Who would have thought that something as irrelevant as food can affect a judge's ability to dole out paroles?

Turns out that the odds that prisoners will be successfully paroled start off fairly high at around 65% and quickly plummet to nothing over a few hours. After the judges have returned from their breaks, the odds abruptly climb back up to 65%, before resuming their downward slide. A prisoner’s fate could hinge upon the point in the day when their case is heard.[Source]

There’s an old trope that says justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast”. It was coined by Jerome Frank, himself a judge, and it’s a powerful symbol of the legal realism movement. This school of thought holds that the law, being a human concoction, is subject to the same foibles, biases and imperfections that affect everything humans do. We’d love to believe that a judge’s rulings are solely based on rational decisions and written laws. In reality, they can be influenced by irrelevant things like their moods and, as Frank suggested, their breakfasts.

So much for intelligence!

Goats & Dogs...

1,600 Chinese workers embrace Islam in Saudi

Wondering why?

Here's the story: When a multi million railway contract to build a 450km rail road linking the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah via Jeddah and Rabigh was won by the China Railway Construction Corp, they were told they could not bring Chinese workers to build the railway, cause according to the Holy book of Kuran, non-muslims are not allowed to enter the holy city of Mecca.

"The majority of scholars – including Muhammad ibn al-Hasan among the Hanafis – are of the view that it is not permissible for kuffaar to enter the sanctuary of Makkah at all, The view of the Hanafis is that that is permissible if there is a treaty or they have permission.[link]"

So what did the Chinese do?

1,600 of them workers converted to Islam.

I don't know which is a scarier community. But I am scared. Terrified.   

Blame It All On Oxytocin...

Love is indeed a many-splendored thing, but sometimes we all need to tie ourselves to the mast.

Whoa!!! Wait a minute, so according to this article, it is possible to fall in love with anyone with a help of a little squirt of Oxytocin? And it's also, therefore, possible to move on and not mope over a failed relationship, with the help of a drug that reverses the Oxytocin effect?

I am on the fence about the use of such a drug, ofcourse, cause it's not natural. Though, looks like, it won't be too far in the future when use of such drugs would be commonplace. What about all that romance and poetry then? Useless?

Link to the research quoted in the article above.

Also, interesting idea by Larry Young on why men love boobs. From Freudian, evolutionary, reproductive to now bonding eh? :)

Looks like, foreplay is the word :)