Candymen

Long before the advent of Internet or concupiscence (or knowing what the word meant), we had our shares of celebrity crushes. Ronn Moss as a delectable Ridge Forrester in The Bold and the Beautiful of the early 90s. There was Akshay Kumar, who in the pre-historic era of unshaven chests, sizzled his way through cheesy movies with Raveena Tandon & Shilpa Shetty. And Sachin Tendulkar, in the 1996 World Cup and thereafter, who I was so madly in love with, I had plastered my room, my bookshelf and my bed with his posters.

Delectable, sizzing, yummy, hot, sexy - they weren't words that we used to describe the men back then. In the post-school gossip sessions, the most common squeal would be "Ooh! He's sooo cuuuuute!" or "Isn't he adorrrrrrable?!" All crushes fitted conveniently into descriptions of cute or adorable or handsome. We fantasized about meeting them. We reserved pages in our autograph books for them. And had endless arguments with the girls over whose crush was cuter (or more handsome, or more adorable). When boys our age were discovering porn, we’d follow the lives of our crushes on Stardust/Sportstar/the Friday movie section in the newspaper.

We then evolved, as did our fantasies and our vocabularies. Some of us outgrew celebrity crushes and realized that guys nextdoor were not all that bad. They probably didn’t have the same kind of looks/money/aura as the celebs had, but at least they weren’t taken/gay/too much in demand. The rest of us never gave up on crushes (celebrity or otherwise)... and continue to have them now and then, in a fashion that isn’t really much more sophisticated than before. The crush terminology though, is delightfully different.

They can range from to sweet-toothed carnivorous...
“He’s so yummy, I’d like to lay him down on a plate, drizzle some chocolate sauce on him and eat him up with a spoon.”

... to pedophilic...
“My my... come to momma”

.... to feline...
“Rowwwrrr”

... and sometimes, plain horny.
“That bicep is screaming out to be felt up.”

Which brings me to why I blogged about celebrity crushes in the first place. Every girl I know (believe me, EVERY girl) has the hots for Abhishek Bachchan. I don’t feel it – not even a mild tepidness. Will someone tell me what it is about an arbit actor (who passes off brooding as acting) that makes him so desirable?

PS: Had I not outgrown celeb crushes, I might’ve wanted portion of John Abraham with chocolate sauce. He comes close to the original teenaged version of yum.