The Future of Leching

THE FUTURE OF LECHING

Ajit Chaudhuri – May 2020

These are hard times, the world is going to change blah, blah, blah, and we are all concerned about the COVID-battered economy, the creaking public health system, the government’s encroachment into our lives, our uncertain livelihoods and likely-to-rapidly-dwindle savings, whether Liverpool will be appointed EPL champs, and the future of things such as education, travel, fine dining, work spaces, et al (I could go on and on). This note is about something much more serious – the survival of the lecher in a future of universal full-face respirators and contour-disguising PPE kits.

Leching – defined for the purpose of this note as ‘the act of hanging around in public places looking at girls’ – is the world’s second oldest time-pass for single men. It cuts across culture, class, religion, and region, and was indulged in by Mesopotamians, ancient Greeks and your Dad. It has many names – ‘checking out the babes’, ‘sampling the eye candy’, et al (my generation would remember the scene in the film ‘On Golden Pond’ that introduced us to the term ‘cruising chicks’[1]). And while mostly undertaken in market places (GK-1’s M block market was the gold standard for Delhi-wallahs in the early 1980s), at beaches, swimming pools and marriages, the serious lecher could convert any occasion into an opportunity; funerals, teerth yatras (pilgrimages), parents-teachers day at one’s children’s school, village self-help group meetings, academic conferences, and congregations to celebrate women’s day.

The term has a negative connotation, and the act itself faces opposition from parents (who hate time wastage), feminists (who hate men) and religious fundamentalists (who hate fun). It faces competition from the Internet (with the widespread availability of free porn and ‘hook-up’ sites) and women’s sports on TV – 40 years back the participants mostly looked like prison guards in drag, now they look like (and many are) models, including chess players and shot putters. And yet, it thrives – reminding one of Md. Iqbal’s lines ‘kuch baath hai; ki hasthi mit-thi nahin hamari; sadiyon rahan hai dushman, daurein zamaa hamara’ (there’s something about us; our footprints don’t die out; our enemies have been around forever; and yet we flourish).

But the COVID outbreak is an enemy like no other! How does one lech when the objects of one’s attentions are in facemasks? And if one does so, how can one avoid the cardinal sin of wasting time and effort on homely girls?

The latter statement requires explanation! Why should lechers be choosy – I mean, here are a bunch of idle good-for-nothing losers, what do they have to be picky about? This requires some understanding of leching’s logic of operation. Any act that crosses the threshold of merely hanging around and looking, such as approaching the girl, making conversation, taking her out, getting to first base, etc., is a function of something called ‘aukaad’ – a combination of factors that include the subject’s looks, courage, ambition, wealth, and prospects in life. Setting ambitions within the boundaries of one’s aukaad is rational strategy. The critical constraints in leching, conversely, are time and presence – for the lecher, the beauties are just as available and accessible as the others and, if one has 30 minutes, for example, to hang around, it would be a cardinal sin to expend them exercising one’s eyes on the latter.

And therefore, for leching to survive COVID, lechers will need to imbibe new skills to separate the lech-able from the others. Mere visual signals will be insufficient, and one will have to learn to recognize alternative cues. Luckily, a body of knowledge on this matter already exists, and I am qualified to expound on it based on observations from evenings mis-spent in the bazaars of small towns while criss-crossing Afghanistan and the years lived in the ghunghat-ridden areas of western Rajasthan.

This body of knowledge has two underpinning ontological assumptions about basic human behaviour. The first is that a beautiful woman will find ways of informing you (yes, even you) that she is beautiful, no matter what the circumstances. In the small towns of northern Afghanistan, it was in the way she swished her burkha as she passed you, the fleeting glimpse she afforded of her high heeled shoes, or the whiff of perfume that hung tantalizingly in the air after she went by. And the transmission of a message – ‘I am stunningly beautiful, and you are damn lucky to be in my vicinity’ via demeanour, aura, and other non-verbal and non-visual means.

The second is that beautiful women expect to be recognized when they meet someone they know, no matter what the circumstances. I was forming women’s groups in refugee villages in western Rajasthan in the early 1990s – this was a particularly conservative community that did not let non-resident men into the village (even visiting sons-in-laws had to stay outside in a designated hut that was called an ‘uttaara’), and the women had to have veils on in the presence of any man. In time, me and my team were allowed into these villages and to hold women’s meetings without the women needing to be veiled up (the first line at such meetings, after hi-hello, was to tell the men hanging around to get lost so that we could talk in peace).

‘How the hell did you expect me to recognize you?’ I asked one of them when I was at the receiving end of a firing for having behaved formally when I had met her earlier at a local market, ‘you had your ghunghat on full.’ I was duly informed that she didn’t give a shit, that friends should know each other when they meet, and that I would have to figure it out. And, as time passed, I did! And I discovered that beauty is visible in obvious parameters such as height, figure and carriage, and also in non-obvious ones such as hands (and the way she wears her bangles), ears (and the way her veil sits on them), and feet (the shape and cut, and also the second toe sticking out more than the big toe is an indicator that she is ‘bossy’).

And therein lies the future of leching – in recognizing cues that are not centred around fairness of face. For it to continue to be a worthy pastime, some re-calibration of skills and abilities on the part of the lecher may be required (and the element of speculation may even enhance its appeal). This brings me to the question that you would no doubt have on your minds – can the homelies use these cues to divert or misguide the lecher? Certainly! But, so what? For if she has you thinking ‘Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars’ (to quote Christopher Marlowe), then no matter, to you she is Helen of Troy.

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[1] If you haven’t seen this Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepburn and a smoking hot Jane Fonda classic, you have missed something in life. The scene being referred to is seeable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eQBa4JQzDI&list=PLRscOIr5vFO1phloMb-JU9Vyp2uiX7CC7&index=172