Khushwant Singh on Women, Sex, Love and Lust

Book excerpt: An anthology of Khushwant Singh’s best writings on his favorite subjects, Women, Sex, Love and Lust is at once witty, informative, thought-provoking and flagrant. Definitely a book you can’t afford to miss! If you are looking for answers to eternal questions like which came first – love or lust, or debates pertaining to celibacy, chastity or arranged marriages, Khushwant Singh delivers his unique exposé. Whether he is analysing the fine dividing line between obscenity, pornography and erotica, describing sex from ‘Chaturbhani’ (200-350 B.C.) or his ideas of a composite Indian woman, Khushwant holds the reader’s attention effortlessly. But that isn’t all – years before terms such as ‘gender issues’ or ‘gender divide’ became popular, he was writing, thinking and sharing his views on them. His deliberations reveal an unexpected side to Khushwant . . . in these pages you’ll also find a rare glimpse of Khushwant the feminist. Women, Sex, Love and Lust abounds with Indian as well as foreign myths, legends, proverbs, and poems ranging from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman to Kalidas, Iqbal and Faiz. Almost each page offers you delectable quotes from Russell to Wodehouse along with special anecdotes which could only come from the inimitable Khushwant. Only he could share with you his intense experience of nudo-phobia suffered in Sweden, his acute observation of Indian whoremongers when abroad, scandals amongst the literati and glitterati – H. G. Wells as a compulsive fornicator or Georges Simenon hammering away at his typewriter (and his women) at the age of eighty are only a few revelations.