Ram Gopal Varma Blog #106. “Rifle”

That was what we used to call her. Rifle was a name someone gave her at College and it stuck. She was the most sexiest woman I have ever seen in my life. When I was studying in Siddhartha Engineering College Vijayawada, there used to be lot of construction activity going on there and she was one of the construction labourers. Me and many of my classmates used to watch her through our classroom window while a boring soil mechanics lecture droned on. It didn’t make a difference to us that her thighs were caked with cement dust and her hair was uncombed, she used to walk bare feet with her chest thrust out and used to look straight in our eye. She had more sex in her little finger than most women in their whole bodies. To us she was just sex personified. Our imagination of how she would look naked under her clothes drove us insane. Agreed that our ages were such that even a telephone pole wrapped in a saree would look sexual, but there really was something truly amazingly electrifyingly sexual about Rifle. It’s not that there were no other women on the campus. There were plenty both in the engineering and the medical college but Rifle was Rifle.

I always felt there is a fundamental difference between beauty and sexuality. Beauty pleases your senses whereas sexuality controls your senses, or even more correctly makes your senses go berserk. Your rational thinking gets lost and the animal instinct takes over. Rifle used to draw out the animal in all of us. She in her non-caring demeanour and in the way she used to clothe and behave epitomized the word ‘sex’. We all used to sit in the nights with textbooks on our laps and have endless discussions on the shapes and sizes of Rifles various attributes. It took us the tremendous strength of our combined will of all our upbringing, education, social programming, morality, religious strictures and fear of law which just about managed to control us from pouncing upon her.

If ever in my life I respected God, it was for creating Rifle.

Now why was she so sexual compared to the crystal clean girls who used to come in swanky dresses, their lips red with lipstick? I think it’s because no man wants to taste lipstick when he kisses a girl.

I strongly feel that sexuality works more when it is ultra real rather than when it is enhanced by cosmetics. Aesthetics kind of undermine the rawness of sex. For example I think the difference between an erotic film and a porn film is the backlight. If it’s back-lit it’s erotic and if it’s front-lit it’s porn. In both cases the content is the same.

All said and done, for me Rifle was the ultimate epitome of what God really intended a woman to be like, before the cosmetic industry, the costume designers, the make-up people and the jewelry merchants came in and started backlighting that wonderful species called women.

P.S: 
Incidentally Rifle never knew that she used to be referred as ‘RIFLE’.
She was completely unaware of the volcanic emotions she aroused in the hearts and loins of a thousand guys on the Campus.
She never knew how many floodgates of jealousy she opened when she married a guy who used to run a Paan-Shop opposite our college gate.
Some day I will surely make a film based on the concept of “The woman as a sexual being” and I want to call it “RIFLE” as a tribute to her.