Looking for Sandra in LSD

Who’s Sandra?

She’s on keychains, in films, her aura is in the air.

She’s carefree, caricature, and consolation all at once.

She’s a feeling.

Paromita Vohra’s search for the elusive Sandra from Bandra unspooled the myth and the mockery, little by little: secretary Sandra, religious Sandra, ‘loose’ Sandra, whose Sandra? She is audacious to some. Others are apprehensive about her. Sandra is not a singular person. She exists in all of us, in the ‘swish of our skirts’ as Vohra narrates. She’s a symbol, she’s multiple stories and little fact. She knows what pleasure is and lives vivaciously so we can live vicariously through her.

Sandra, then, inhabits the Love, Sex, and Data (affectionately and obviously known as LSD) conference organised by Agents of Ishq and The YP Foundation. In a way, LSD unlocks our Sandras.

I didn’t think that I would ever get the opportunity to write about something like the one-hour interview that Paromita Vohra herself was magnanimous enough to grant me with. I screwed up the Zoom link once, almost got interrupted in the middle by my dad (despite explicitly telling him that I had an important thing, I’m interviewing someone, jeez), and stumbled over my words at least five times. But she was generous with her words and her time. I was wondering what I could ask her, as one of the lead organizers for the LSD conference. I wrote down four questions and ended up asking seven. Her answers unfurled tightly-coiled topics of pleasure, segregation of perspectives and materials, and the expressions of the elusive self. Pleasure to Vohra was something that she grew up enveloped by; it was never discouraged or trivialised by her family, which delighted in late-night cinema and roadside sweet paan. But although Vohra’s family might have been liberal with their enjoyment of pleasure, the rest of India was not quite so. Vohra, cognisant of how society – state and family included – seemed to be clamping down on pleasure, deliberately melded love, sex, and desire into her work from 2007 onwards.

I was five years old in 2007 and my greatest pleasure at that time was probably annoying the hell out of my older sister and parents. But I might not have done that as much if I was preoccupied with watching Vohra’s films. To her, the films allowed her to explore her own self. “I wanted to make films about the things that I wanted to see, and what I liked.” This also included serious issues, but serious topics don’t necessarily mean a dry and stiff representation. A train of thought like this is probably what sparked off the making of Where’s Sandra, which traces the many versions and stories surrounding that local Bombay legend of pleasure, Sandra from Bandra. Fifteen years after Where’s Sandra released, Vohra had another bold project along with others – the conceptualisation of the Love, Sex, and Data conference. Vohra’s films are meant to leave you with an experience that you’ll carry even after you finish watching, which Where’s Sandra probably epitomises. In many ways, the Love, Sex, and Data conference was exactly like that – a time, a collection of moments, a box that bundles experience, that you can take with you wherever you go.

10:00am. 2:30pm. 12 – no, not 12:30pm, that’ll collide with the 12pm one. 5:30pm.

These aren’t the musings of a train operator trying to figure out railway timings. This was what was running through my head as I was trying to work out which events I could attend at the LSD conference without missing college classes or committing to too many panels.

Actually, there is no such thing as ‘too many panels’ for this conference. My only issue was that I didn’t have 30 hours in a day with which I could virtually dash through my classes and then sit through all the keynote speeches, panel discussions, conversations, workshops and the ever-delightful Pleasure Pockets that the Agents of Ishq and The YP Foundation had put together. LSD abounded in pleasure, without a question.

Going through the schedule itself was immensely enjoyable, which is more than I can say for train schedules that are printed in microscopic font. The LSD schedule was colour-coded, vibrant, and inviting. I almost couldn’t figure out which events to attend, but here’s where life naturally eliminated some options because of the timings or my lack of Hindi comprehension. The workshops were also out of the question because they had already been filled up, although I would have loved to attend at least one – if I had to pick, the Sex by Numbers: Data Journalism Can Make the Earth Move and Change the Story hosted by Rukmini S. As a journalism student, a workshop about how numbers drive stories seemed very valuable, but unfortunately it was full. I’ve heard this choice statement about statistics – they’re like bikinis, they show everything except what’s most important. Normally I would not have ever written a sentence like that, because one immediate reaction to it is: oh my gosh that’s misogynistic and sexually objectifying. But that was actually something that I found being brought up in various events at the conference – does something revealing and promiscuous became sexually empowering, or is it demeaning? A mention of this came up in the keynote address delivered on the first day, ‘Ishq and Censorship – Histories of Pleasure and Displeasure in Modern India’ by Charu Gupta. It also resurfaced in the penultimate event, a conversation between Paromita Vohra and Shubha Mudgal titled ‘Women, Music, and the Note of Desire – Art as Knowledge’. If I understood correctly, the general sentiment was that if someone is willingly, unabashedly expressing their desire and pleasure, embodied in the lyrics in the poems and ballads that Mudgal sang to us, then they are claiming their sexuality and openly telling the world that this is what they want. Constraining that by morality and decency and categorising the consensual and self-possessed pursuit of pleasure as perverse was the subject of Gupta’s talk. She described the chronology of India’s scandalised attitude towards anything remotely sexual, taking the audience through Victorian moral codes and the deepening sectarian nature of ‘decency’ between Hindus and Muslims, ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ castes. Touch became sterilised by ludicrous claims. Christian evangelism and Indian ‘nationalism’ sent the country into a moral panic about sensuality being ‘filthy’, aided by Hindi poets deriding sex and desire.

But modernity brought new forms of pleasure, and a new proliferation of sex pamphlets that catered to a Hindi audience. The rubber dildo made an appearance, and everyone swooned (except for the prudes). Speaking of dildos, there was a Pleasure Pocket presented by a sex toy company called the Sangya Project, which I wished I could have attended. I am certain it would have been racy and delightful. One version of Sandra may have approved.

The Pleasure Pockets are a new innovation of the LSD conference. The entire conference has no precedent in terms of theme and topics, but I haven’t seen a venture like this before where keynote speeches are followed by performances and ten minute presentations on a particular concept or item. It’s like stopping at different stations while you’re on the Kaniyakumari Not-Super-Fast Express and peering out the window to get some scrumptious snack or piping hot cup of coffee. Manak Matiyani, one of the moderators of the conference, summarised that the Pleasure Pockets were like rummaging in a pocket and finding something nice and surprising. You get small interventions of happiness in your day if you find a random marble that you can roll between your fingers satisfyingly, or a 5-rupee coin that buys you one (1) Kaccha Mango Bite. The same jolts of curious delight filled the Pleasure Pockets on sex-ed nationalism by Susie Jolly, Sapna Kedia’s highly informative My Girlfriend, Our Abortion talk which presented the findings of an International Center for Research on Women study on male involvement in abortion, or the unexpected connection between Shah Rukh Khan and economic security which was the subject of Desperately Seeking Shak Rukh Khan, an upcoming book by Shrayana Bhattacharya.

When you look at the title of the conference, all three of the topics might not sound familiar when they’re used in conjunction with each other. Love and sex, sure. Sex and data . . . maybe. Love and data? No chance. Love, sex and data? Unheard of. What ties them all together? Where does data fit into the other two notions of emotion and passion? To answer that, you just need to go to the LSD India YouTube channel and watch Louisa Allen speak about pleasure’s potential in sexuality education. She did research on high school students, using interviews and a questionnaire to ask them what they thought about sex education, sex itself, and pleasure. Allen described how pleasure was missing from most of the content in sex education, as well as the research done about it – it had apparently turned into a very narrow and parochial dimension which only focused on heteronormativity and the consequences of sex. Thus sex was converted from something fun into something risky. This doesn’t, of course, stop people from having sex – they do it without knowing much about it. This is something that Allen brought up in her speech – comprehensive sex education which includes pleasure can actually help people make more informed choices about their sexual activity, because they’ll know exactly what they like and what they don’t. They won’t feel judged or inadequate if they don’t feel pleasure. She also quoted results from her research – couples who had been together for a while but didn’t know how to bring pleasure to their partner during sex. So there you have it – all three fractions of the conference in one whole.

This talk was part of one of LSD’s five themes: Why Are We Scared of Pleasure?, The Body as Data, The Transformative Power of Pleasure, Love, Sex, What Data?, and Our Lives, Our Data, Our Interventions. Another lecture following the theme of bodies as data stood out to me – Nikita Sonavane’s Criminal Histories, which covered the criminalisation of tribes in India and its repercussions for how they were viewed by society and the justice system. That talk was gripping, because it combined politics, history, and law into a condensed 90-minute lesson on why Brahmanical patriarchy has serious implications for the prejudices and discrimination that run rampant in Indian society. Lives and livelihoods became jeopardised because the society surmised that certain communities like the Vimuktas were ‘habitual offenders’. Some tribes found their source of revenue, which was brewing alcohol, drying up because of legislation like the Excise Act. Booking people for brewing excess quantities leads to a vicious cycle of stigma and constant surveillance. Women’s bodies, in particular, were morphed into ‘loose’ bodies, and female sensuality became considered as depraved – a point that I recalled from Charu Gupta’s speech. Worse still, the culpability of infanticide fell onto them.

The Criminalisation of Tribes Act (CTA) was a colonial piece of legislation, so it’s easy to assume that it’s a thing of the past, that it doesn’t have repercussions on our judicial system’s functioning and our societal prejudices. Hearing talks like this was sobering, because it reminded me just how important it is for us to have data about our lives, and about others’ lives too, both past and present. We don’t live in a cocoon where our entire world is a tiny hamlet anymore. There’s data for everything – but we need to probe what we mean by data. When I think of data, my mind automatically goes to statistics and spreadsheets. An IAS officer probably thinks of the same, except maybe salaries as well. A meteorologist would think of diagrams and dampness in the air. A zoologist would think of animal behaviour. There are different conceptions of data, different gulfs and abysses. If data was a story, it’s Yellamma’s story as told by Shilpa Mudbi, which changes every 30 kilometres. It has plot holes (re: loopholes) which any sensible and uncharitable reader would pick out and wonder ‘where did the author run off to without resolving this’.

Vohra is right when she says, “pleasure is sensory”, but that’s one of its qualities. There’s a whole cornucopia of things that pleasure is. It’s also curiosity and discovery. We think that we have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, but do we really? Whose world? Who puts that knowledge there, how does it come to us, how do we contribute to it? Is it lacking? I remember an Internet Freedom Foundation talk with Ronald Deibert, who said that the ‘bad guys’ don’t care what your data is, even if it’s mundane. It doesn’t matter whether you have something to hide or not. Abuse of power is just abuse of power, plain and simple. So we should also be asking: who uses that data, and to what ends? These questions are probably why the LSD conference organizers probably called people like Biva Rajbhandari from Quilt.AI and Maya Indira Ganesh to talk about algorithms and big data. I fell in love with the soft-spoken Biva as she talked about how our usage of the internet is a reflection of our ‘stated and unstated behaviours’ – what we make obvious, like streaming a kpop song 10,000 times as an indication of devotion; and what is more subtle, like casually stalking someone’s profile because some people want to live Wattpad love stories from 2000 kilometres away (not me). The way we use the internet is significant, because so much of our information comes from there, whether it’s news, entertainment, or helplines. Rupsa Mallik from Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action (CREA) pointed out that “you can’t control the way the information is read”, distinguishing between the human component of helplines and the more impersonal nature of the internet. At face value, the internet is a resource, not a person. Sure, it’s made up of the contributions, musings, and meddling of people, but it isn’t as conversational as real life. Whenever I open up a new tab on Google, I’m looking for something specific, not necessarily something meandering. I want what I want, and the internet knows what I want too. It keeps giving me ads for mini katanas. This is why I shouldn’t have watched Kill Bill at age 5.

But the point of including conversations around online spaces and the data gleaned from it wasn’t to caution people against using them. In fact, that became the subject of another discussion: Digital Recipes for Pleasure Positive Spaces. Our digital spaces are colourful, but they’re not a coherent and orchestrated combination. There is no artistry to the internet. It is wide and gaping and weird. Some of that vastness is all-consuming. There is an odd tightrope to be walked between wanting to find acceptance and validation from people you’ve never met and creating an entire online persona that’s curated according to people’s assumptions about you.

A bit of that persona is reflected in the content that you create online. Vijeta Kumar, from The Open Dosa, says she’s “forgotten how to write without responses”, because most of her initial writing went into online spaces that were open to other eyes. But not all content is as ‘palatable’. Writing is usually one’s own, a mirror of one individual and what they think. Kumar is describing her own writing, which is less pointed information and more wandering expression. But there are bodies of work on the internet that are cumulative efforts, with a specific aim. Neysara’s TransgenderIndia (TI) website, or June Low’s Good Sex Ed are examples of those efforts. TI is aimed at empowering people of the trans community, giving them the resources they need, the answers they seek, and the support they deserve. Although TI’s website has been running for years, they only recently made a foray into Instagram, which Neysara was wary about. “Social media spaces aren’t always safe”, she explained. “Google can be informative, because you look up, am I trans; but it also fetishizes us and politicizes the community. At least on the website, you can take your time, you can search. But Instagram feeds you what it thinks you want to know.”

This is something that I keep lecturing my dad about, because he’s a middle-aged YouTube addict who knows that algorithms exist but isn’t self-aware enough to not take YouTube so seriously or to switch up his searches so that he doesn’t end up in an echo chamber. Still, he derives a lot of pleasure from it. He gets to see Gary Sobers matches and Eric Clapton jamming sessions which he wouldn’t have found on CDs or DVDs.

The entirety of the conference wasn’t just information, although there was a lot of that. At the end of the day I was burnt out, nearly unfocused, but immensely satisfied. To take in the medicalisation of bodies and also make sense of participatory approach in policymaking and realism in international relations was almost more than my two braincells could handle. There are seven pages of notes about LSD in my diary that stand testament to my desperate battle against the unravelling of my mind as I tried to figure out which lecture (college or conference) to mull over first. But in hindsight, the conference itself wasn’t an onslaught, it was just the multiple commitments that I was running to keep up with that were wearing on me a little. That’s why I’m grateful that the conference events are on their YouTube channel so I can revisit them. I can go check if my notes on the lectures and panel discussions are legitimate or if I blabbered; it’s always good to have verification for nonsense.

Fortunately, there were multiple tracks for entertainment in the conference as well. Aditi Mittal and her acquaintance Dr. Mrs. Savitri Lutchuke showed up and I actually giggled twice during her one-hour skit. The LSD organizers concocted another mischievous feature, After Hours, which was the leisurely end to the days of serious discussion. I listened to Neha Bhat speak about relationships and felt like I was back in high school, drinking milkshakes with my friends or sitting on the classroom floor and listening to them gossip and tell each other, ‘open your eyes and stop ignoring his actions’. After Hours was the perfect touch of informality and relaxation to help cap off the daily schedule.

What sincerely impressed me about the conference was what I’d like to call blending. The five themes are only reference points for the events – in reality, most of the talks combined a plurality of topics, including sexuality, caste, class, gender, nationalism, and the beloved word, intersectionality. If Neha Bhat was discussing caste barriers to relationships, Surabhi Yadav was talking about how rural women didn’t have enough leisure time to themselves, and how time as a resource is subject to different constraints no matter where or who you are. Everything circled back to pleasure – what is it? How do we seek it, how do we find it, how do we enjoy it? Who is entitled to pleasure? Who and what stops us from being soaked in pleasure all the time?

When I was a kid, I didn’t hear the word pleasure very often. I read it in books, and heard it in songs and movies, but I didn’t use it much myself. I used alternative words – happiness. Joy. Satisfaction. I only now realise that these words all come under the canopy of pleasure. When I got slightly older, I came to that age that all biology teachers dread – the period when they have to explain reproduction systems to a bunch of baffled but abashed thirteen-year-olds. My biology teacher told my friend to read out the chapter, waiting on tenterhooks for the bell to ring. When it did, she bolted out of the room giggling, leaving behind a class full of confused adolescents. Even then, our bodies were only mildly, nervously discussed. Our closest brush with sex education came through seniors, the internet, and that bizarre omnipresent ‘vulgarity’ that pervades every school. Pleasure was so far removed from the equation that it might well have belonged to a different mathematical paradigm. No one patiently and outspokenly discussed sex, but no one rambled for too long about their own interests either. We all tailored our hobbies to what was cool, or popular at the time. If the prevailing trend was Rubik’s cubes, then every kid either bought, tried their hand, or failed miserably at them (sometimes all three, in that order). The idea of enjoying things for enjoyment’s sake, and discussing that enjoyment and not being competitive or lascivious about it, was quite foreign to me.

I still don’t tell most people every single thing I like, because I’m afraid of being judged or put down. I’m sure most of my peers feel the same way and do the same thing. But I began the process of de-trivialising my own pleasure some time ago, and LSD gave me renewed confidence. It isn’t like I now go around with several fluorescent banners screaming about my interests. It’s that I’m more comfortable and accepting of them, to myself. We might never tell each other that actually, we do like this one cartoon, or that we like cosplay, or that we have the entire Marvel superhero figurine collection sitting on our shelves. We might not say anything that doesn’t fit with the image that we want to or have curated. That’s fine – there’s no obligation to sacrifice the sanctity of your pleasure to the world. But we can admit to ourselves the lovely and unassuming joy we get from the things we like. If the Sandras in Vohra’s documentary like their dresses, their church choir group, or their impromptu train concerts, they have no qualms about expressing it. You can see it in their body language and their smiles, leaping out at you. Vohra explains that “there is a mutuality in [her] films.” I found myself swaying when film Sandra swayed, laughing when Sandra D’Souza of Almeida Park scoffed at Sandra being a religious girl, and turning up the volume when Eunice de Souza read out her poem. I think I was almost as engrossed in the documentary as its makers. I got to partake in their pleasure too.

There’s apparently this tip to getting tattoos, which is to save a picture of the design and stare at it every day until you’re absolutely sure you want it on your body. It acclimatises you to the idea of the tattoo. Attending LSD was resembled that acclimatisation a little – I heard pleasure day in day out and by the end of it I said to myself, ‘my gosh where has this been all my life.’ LSD was talking about pleasure for the pure sake of talking about it. It had its sizeable portion of academic research, but the conference never detached itself from the idea of pleasure. When discussing data, sex, bodies, laws, and education – all topics that have been highly dissected and analysed – it never turned clinical and unfeeling. LSD didn’t hide from anything. I was astonished and gratified.

Vohra hoped that the conference would “unlock pleasurable triggers” which people could explore later, and I think it succeeded because exploration is at the heart of the LSD conference. It is part of what Agents of Ishq and The YP Foundation do, part of what Vohra holds dear, and part of what all the conference speakers (and probably attendees) engaged in. Pleasure is meant to help you open up your own closets and dig around to find what you’ve hidden away in them, or build new closets to help store the new and exciting fruits of original and creative thought. It is no surprise that the conference organizers wanted their audience to walk away with this notion of a “fizzy feeling of excitement”, as Vohra described it. To her, “pleasure is resilience, it is a relationship with the self. It’s self-belief.” Even in adversity, one can always claim pleasure for themselves, just as one can fashion their own expressions and vocabulary. Our personalities are ours to cultivate, mixed with all the fragments that we stole or appropriated from the people we meet. Our pleasure is ours to protect and own.

The mysterious Sandra encapsulates that sentiment, in a way. Where’s Sandra shows women who have been teased for the ‘Sandra from Bandra’ stereotype of being a ‘good-time girl’; women who get great pleasure from knitting in fast-moving trains and singing together; women who aren’t even from Bandra but seem to be laughing at themselves in a small, not unkind way about their unearned reputation. Sandra from Bandra is claimed cautiously, greedily, strangely, by many people. Her notion of pleasure is all-encompassing – at least that’s what the documentary portrays to me. When I saw the Sandras dancing to Hindi film songs with lipstick and a confident smoulder, I felt like claiming Sandra must be like drinking alcohol. It gives you a delicious thrill, but if you do too much of it, people are going to stare at you and point and make up stories about you. Society is vindictive at times, not letting someone enjoy their pleasure in peace and freedom. Vohra points out that “social structures either devalue subjective pleasure or they aggregate histories.” How many histories has Sandra lived through? How many Sandras really contributed to the myth, and how many didn’t but secretly wanted to? Sandra is mesmerising not just because she’s meant to be seductive and ‘immoral’. She’s so enthralling because she seems to embody the idea of knowing what she wants and going after it. Half that delicious thrill, half the fission that Vohra and the other organizers wanted LSD’s attendees to experience, is the recognition of not asking for permission to indulge in pleasure – in Vohra’s words, the “liberty of pleasure.”

If writing is what you find pleasure in, then you can go ahead and write as much and as boldly as you want. Like Vijeta Kumar said, you don’t have to ‘tick off a checklist’ to be a writer. Pleasure isn’t something definable by a solitary opinion or measure. Sometimes it is abstract, sometimes it is sensory, and sometimes it is communal. Sometimes pleasure is passed down, evidenced by Judy Amina telling us about how raunchy discussions about sex by older women in Kenyan communities are shared with the younger women. But so rarely do we openly and unashamedly talk about pleasure. We tend to hide any discussion of sexual pleasure behind giggles and innuendo. Sex itself is shamed and ostracised, except for advertising and cinema, which props itself up on ‘sensuality’. Bodies are sexualised, but sex is bad. Love is fine, but only within certain caste and class boundaries. Data is up to the government, and what they say goes for importance, collection, and documentation.

In a situation like this, the LSD conference becomes crucial. If for nothing else, the sheer novelty of the venture, but more importantly the blunt assertion of the gravity of its topics. Although it certainly is momentous, it would be rude and reductionist of me to boil the conference’s import down to just ‘it’s something that’s never been done before’. The three days of the LSD conference, between 7^th and 9^th October 2021, contained some of the most informative, enjoyable, and lasting talks and presentations that I have listened to. LSD was substantial. It was affirming. Most of all, it was enormously fun. I remember Paromita Vohra describing the conference as in the “top 10 best conferences that [she] ha[d] attended”. I haven’t attended that many, but if I had, I think I’d agree.

The conference organizers wanted to emulate their best conference experiences, and somehow, they succeeded even in a different domain. Logistically speaking, this conference must have been an utterly immense undertaking. It was originally slated to be held offline last year, but the pandemic threw a wrench into that gear. The online experience, already a familiar fixture in events and urban life, gained a boosted prominence. Some aspects of the conference were made easier because it was online – one could have international guests like Susie Jolly and Michael Liu as long as the time zones worked out. One could also have ISL interpretations, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, and Hindi translations happening simultaneously as the events proceeded. To fly in guests and accommodate all the translations in person would have swallowed up a great deal of expenses. And Vohra also points out that the online mode allowed people to partake in it even if they couldn’t have made it in person. Does that mean that all future plausible editions of the LSD conference would be held online? “I think we’ll have to see where the world is,” she says, “maybe there can be some hybrid model.”

To conceive of a conference like this means to concoct a veritable cauldron of imagination and ideas, and hope that there is a collective brilliance arising out of it. How did the LSD organizers choose who to invite? Vohra says that the community of people who work on pleasure was already fairly small, and that it was easy to find people through their work and recommendations. Anybody glancing through the LSD speakers’ list will undoubtedly see the multiplicity of academic, social, and cultural backgrounds that the speakers come from. Part of the reason that the panels were structured the way they were was to trace the connections between the specialisations of the different speakers. How did Surabhi Yadav’s notion of time as a resource correspond to Anne Philpott’s pleasure campaign? How do all the themes fit together; how do all the speakers find purchase in each other’s words? Vohra has the answer: “All the topics at the conference are on par with each other, because they are different ways of seeing the world. And it gives us pleasure to do that.” It turns us back to exploration, to forceful boundary-pushing and vigorous carpe diem-ing. Like Vohra says, “To discover something is to not know what you’re going to find.”

LSD wanted people to explore themselves and the world around them. It hoped that its attendees would have philosophical conversations, political conversations, pleasurable conversations. To think about life, in its pleasantries and misfortunes, and to build resilience out of the conviction to pleasure. To not segregate our experiences and opinions and ‘put things into silos’, as Vohra describes it; but instead to embrace a whole-hearted, full-bodied consuming of the world. To make connections, between things and each other. To enjoy things without shame or judgement, and to take that enjoyment seriously. “Pleasure is valuable to you”, Vohra says, “even if the world doesn’t think it is.” This is probably the single most axiomatic principle that LSD, Where’s Sandra, and Vohra’s own worldview revolves around.

The LSD conference gave everyone involved the fizzy, soda-bottle-shaken-too-hard feeling of curiosity and invigoration. It gave them information and entertainment, sawaal and sexting. It was that exhilarating train ride at 5 in the morning when the sun has just broken through blue paper skies. Love underpinned the entire conference, even if it wasn’t explicitly discussed. As much as Vohra thinks that June Low’s utility pouches shaped like a uterus are an act of love, I think that the LSD conference is a manifestation of love – “love as acceptance.” LSD gave people new horizons. Gleeful embraces. Intriguing connections. Security. Community. Data. Sex. Love. Pleasure is our prism and we are Isaac Newton on the cusp of discovery. Carpe the hell out of the diem.