Five Hours in Amsterdam

By Sangeeth Sebastian

There is a power blackout in Amsterdam, “major” by local standards, I am told,
 as I deboard at the Amsterdam Central Railway Station. Coming from Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, I am not entirely surprised, I have seen worse. 

Outside, the weather is hot and humid. I get a feeling that I am back in India already. To be hit by a sense of déjà vu is the last thing you want when you are out to explore a new city and that too in a limited time. My return ticket from the station is at 6 p.m. I check my watch. I have around five hours to know the city.

                               

      

1. 30 p.m.

Erotic Outage

I am in the Red Light District. The place is just 10 minutes walk from the station. That’s one good thing about Amsterdam. Being a small city, most of the touristy places- the arched bridges, the watery passageways, crooked canal houses- are all within your walking range.

The district located in the south is the oldest part of Amsterdam, built around 1385. The place confirms everything you have heard and read aboutAmsterdam. The canals and alleys in the district are fringed on either side with peep shows, live sex theatres, sex souvenir shops, prostitution windows and legal marijuana cafes.

It’s a hedonist’s dream. Groups of men, women and couples, constantly move along the canals and in and out of the alleys.

I wander aimlessly soaking in the visual spectacle before narrowing down on a double storied building overlooking the canal called the Red Light Secrets. It is a museum that claims to give a historical overview of the district “through the eyes of a prostitute.” The entry ticket is 9 Euros (around Rs 665). I step in to pay. It is then that I realise the gravity of the outage that has hit Amsterdam.

Amy, the genial owner of the place, politely declines to issue the ticket saying there is no power to run the film, which is a part of the Museum’s tour for visitors.
“I already lost 40 customers today,” she says wearily. I ask her how bad the electricity problem in Amsterdam is. “In the last two to three years blackouts have become quite frequent,” she says.

How frequent?  She pauses for a while and says, about two to three times a year. You call that frequent? I wonder to myself.

I stroll down the street and reach near a sex souvenir shop located in one of the alleys. The owner of the shop, Mustafa, a second generation Pakistani is standing outside. “It’s dark inside you won’t be able to see anything properly,” he shouts as I am about to enter. “Usually, they (the authorities) tell us in advance about the outage, but today it was unexpected,” says Mustafa expressing his helplessness. Nearby, even the window prostitutes, operating from their stuffy one room enclosure that has space just enough to squeeze in a bed and a side table, are struggling to attract clients due to blackout. Some are even willing to offer discounts. The desperation is understandable, given the fact that a prostitute has to pay 150 Euros (Rs 11,000) a day (yes you heard it right) as rent for her enclosure. The blackout has temporarily brought the sex-business in the district to a standstill.

3.30 p.m.

Hunger Pangs

All the walking has made me hungry. There are so many different speciality restaurants and street food corners to choose from in the district. I am clueless where to go. Google recommends ‘The Old Sailor.’ The pub is located right in the middle of the district, overlooking the canal. It is decorated with a lot of stuff used in a ship. It has also received some rave reviews on TripAdvisor. I settle for an Argentinean steak house instead. It didn’t take me long to realise that I made a mistake. The house speciality, a mixed grill platter, an assortment of various meats, is bland and rubbery. It also takes a long time to arrive.

4.15 p.m.

Back to the Museum

The neon lights have finally flickered back to life along the canal in the Red Light District. The sight of the red lights reflecting on the canal looks best when it is dark, informs my travel guide book. I make a beeline for Amy’s Red Light Secrets. The tour begins with a short film that offers a behind the scene peek into the functioning of the district through the tales of people who live and work there. Around 25,000 people, including 900 prostitutes, most of them from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, work in an area spread across half a square mile.

Though legalised and taxable like any other profession since 2000, prostitution it emerges is still a source of conflict in Amsterdam, with authorities trying to reduce the number of window prostitutes in the name of curbing crime every now and then. The occasional crackdowns, however, has done little to dampen the enthusiasm of their clients who in their excitement for a quickie often leaves behind personal belongings such wallets, sunglasses, cell phones and even false teeth never to claim them back. All these are now a part of the ‘Lost and Found’ category of Amy’s Museum.

5 p.m.

Enter the Gandhi

On the way back to the station, I discover Gandhi, an Indian restaurant. The name it seems is a just a ploy to cash in on the recall value of a global figure. There is nothing Gandhian about the menu. The restaurant specialises in non-vegeterian tandoori and curry dishes. It also serves vegetarian dishes. The restaurant is patronised mostly by foreigners and visiting Indians who miss North Indian food. I meet the restaurant owner Rajinder Singh who hails from Jalandhar in Punjab. His is a kind of rags-to-riches story.  A commerce graduate, Singh claims to have started out as cleaner at a restaurant in Amsterdam after arriving on a six months tourist visa in 1987. Though he has relatives in Jalandhar, he rarely visits them these days. I ask him if he miss India. “Initially yes, but not anymore,” he says, adding “this is the closest place to heaven on earth.”

IF YOU GO

Hire a bicycle and act like a local. It is perhaps the best way to explore Amsterdam, provided you have time. Nearly 70 per cent of all the journeys in the city are made by bike.

A note of caution: clicking pictures is prohibited in certain parts of the Red Light District, especially inside the alleys, where prostitution happens. So if you are in doubt, please ask or else your camera might end up in the canal.

The article was originally published in India Today Group’s Mail Today newspaper on August 30

Why porn blockers must read Kamasutra

By Sangeeth Sebastian

How would Vatsayana have reacted to modern India’s porn blockers? In all probability with a sagely smirk on his face that says: grow up.

Well…this is an educated guess. But I have every reason to believe so, given the ancient Indian ascetic’s track record for tolerance. While composing Kamasurtra’s section on “unusual sex acts,” a chapter that details almost all conceivable forms of modern-day pornographic acts, Vatsayana dismisses it as worthless, but neverthless includes it saying that there are all sorts of people in this world with different characters and inclinations.

Mining such surprisingly progressive views from a third century book, often regarded as a matter of national shame rather than pride, is one of the focus areas of American academic Wendy Doniger’s new book, The Mare’s Trap: Nature and Culture in the Kamasutra.

In envisioning a world of total sexual and social freedom and making it accessible to all those who have money, irrespective of caste or class, Vatsayana was more of a rebel in the league of the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, than his morally uptight and patriarchal ancestors Manu and Kautilya, the authors of Dharmashastra and Arthashastra, respectively.

In fact through Kamasutra, Vatsayana’s attempt is to rescue erotic pleasure from its sole biological purpose of reproduction as decreed by Manu, the mythological Indian Adam, who behaves more like a Pope when it comes to sex.

Vatsayana’s advocacy of women’s pleasure and freedom, suggesting those who are sexually unhappy in a relationship to walk out, would have appalled Manu who wanted a “virtuous wife” to constantly serve her husband like a god.

Perhaps, had it not been for Richard Burton’s flawed 19th century translation of Kamasutra, which according to Doniger, remains popular and precious in Europe and America like Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, Vatsayana could have been lucky enough to be named after a female anatomy. Because Vatsayana, Doniger insists, knew about G-Spot, the female pleasure point named after the 20th century German gynaecologist Ernst Graefenberg, and blames Burton’s faulty translation for keeping it a secret from the Western world. A V-Spot would have been a befitting tribute to a man who believed that women have a far higher libido than men.

Vatsayana’s interest in women, however, goes beyond erogenous zones. In fact, he takes female promiscuity for granted and asks men to be alert to find out if women are attracted to them by scanning for flirt signals and paying close attention to involuntary gestures and facial expressions and if that doesn’t work, by resorting to cunning psychological approaches like a pickup artist (Neil Strauss take note) to seduce those who are immune to seduction. He also lists a number of pick-up points such as temples, weddings and, rather strangely, in the vicinity of a house on fire, to hook-up women.

If the India portrayed in Kamasutra was real, then when did it get so conservative? Doniger rejects as “jaded” V.S. Naipul’s view that Mughal invasion ravaged and destroyed this liberal world. She is right. Though it may seem hard to believe now, Islam, unlike Christianity, is not an anti-sex religion. In fact Islam’s traditional attitude towards sex, elevating it to the sacred, may even appear similar to the ancient Indian philosophy.

 “The exercise of sexuality was a prayer, a gift of oneself…To rediscover the meaning of sexuality is to rediscover the meaning of God,” writes Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, a Tunisan sociologist best known for his 1975 work Sexuality in Islam. Doniger also advises not to excessively blame the Victorian Britishers for the current prudery as it ignores the conservative anti-erotic stream that was always powerful in Hindu society. But here, she is only partially right. Even while acknowledging this old tension between the erotic and anti-erotic strains within Hinduism, never has it taken the form of one path telling the other path that it has no right to exist, like the way it did recently, when the government decided to ban porn.

The blame for this modern scorn for sexuality among both Hindus and Muslims, to a great extent, lies with the Christian colonial powers. Ironically, by resorting to extreme measures in the name of corrupting Western influences we are actually aping our colonial masters more than our tolerant ancestors.

A shorter version of this review was originally published in India Today Group’s Mail Today newspaper dated August 9