Celebrity Column: Gentlemen’s club, writes Ayushmann Khurrana

I have studied in an all-boys school and an all-boys college, and I don’t have a sister, just a younger brother. Thank God, I didn’t study mechanical engineering or else, I would’ve become a bastion of an all-male domain. But I have a karmic connection with this male domain. No wonder, I get those scripts, which are loudly and subtly phallic. Solid or flaccid, that doesn’t matter.

I have a WhatsApp group, which is named St John’s Boys. And 50 of us create quite a ruckus. The batch of 99. This group binds us together. We share jokes and forwards, which we clearly couldn’t have shared if there were any women in the group. From funny porn clips to all the dirty things, this group is the place where we behave like terribly shameless teens. I’m sure most men have these all-boys groups where they vent out all their anger, frustrations and most importantly, discard the facade of being non-sexist. It’s like a solace room. Where you generalise women, curse their driving skills, love them, hate them, but clearly don’t ignore them. It’s our revered gentlemen’s club, but it’s mostly about women.

While the boys were sharing certain videos, I raised a question asking, how can guys get turned on by fake boobs? That’s plain weird. We belong to the Baywatch generation where Pamela Anderson was the flag-bearer of the silicon revolution. And we guys didn’t mind it. The reason being, we were just a bunch of curious teens in the ’90s.

But now, after growing up, we should go beyond boobs and butts. Isn’t it about intelligence, wisdom, talent, and personality, etc? Sigh. This sentence would’ve got heavily rogered in my WhatsApp group. Over there, I can’t make these holier-than-thou statements. In fact, you are not allowed to be spiritual and saintly. You have to be a raging bull in that group. It’s either politics or sex. That’s what boys talk about. My wife once saw the conversations and was baffled that we guys haven’t changed a bit. Some of my batch mates had a crush on her when we used to attend Physics tuitions together. She has always said that boys from my alma mater were too desperate. I tried to convince her that it’s only on paper — as in, only on the WhatsApp group. It’s just for the sake of nostalgia. We are the real gentlemen in the real world. Our group comprises top doctors, civil servants, politicians, artistes, alumni of IITs, IIMs, AIIMS, NLS, etc. But on this group, we are just a bunch of mad teenagers. And that’s refreshing. You can only be like that in front of your school friends.

Having said that, it’s ridiculous to be in same-sex institutions. These are the places where we are prepared for the real world, without the other gender. Huh! What an irony! The school next door was an all-girls one called, the Sacred Heart Convent and there also was a certain Carmel Convent School that was three km away, which every boy/Johnian fancied. We used to go berserk whenever their school bus used to stop right next to ours at the housing board traffic in Chandigarh. Such were the symptoms of being in an all-boys school that our sole motive was to find a girlfriend and have a lot of sex after passing out from the school. Clearly, this is not normal. And this is not the best agenda/aspiration to have as a 17-year-old. So, the best inference that can be drawn from this column is: Never put your kids in a same-gender institute. It’s catastrophic.

Trivia! I still feel shy speaking to my co-star for the first time. Yes. A legit confident Bollywood performer. I’m 33 and a father of two.