My Expanded Profile

Av·a·tar (v-tär)

1. The incarnation of a Hindu deity, especially Vishnu, in human or animal form.

2. An embodiment, as of a quality or concept; an archetype: the very avatar of cunning.

3. A temporary manifestation or aspect of a continuing entity: occultism in its present avatar.

Shru·ti·yan (shroo-tea-on; n., Hindi): in music, the notes sung or played in-between the scripted notes during performance; the expressive trills and flourishes that characterize an artist's skill and school of training.

A·na·tra (on-ah-t_rah; adj., Hindi): secondary; alternate; the other.

Thus my name, thus my persona, thus my avatar. I've found a woman in this world, so like me yet so unlike; a facsimile of my analog, yet the perfect embodiment of my hidden desires. She is my Ego, my Id, my Psyche--and her two sisters. I have become her, and at times, she has become me.

For the avatar of discerning taste, and a predilection to the unique, I offer my services in this alternate world as a companion of the class of courtesans all but forgotten in our time: no mere pincushion for temporary release, I am a woman of charm and intellect, skilled in the 64 arts ascribed by the original text of the Kama Sutra (and many more besides). A consort of unparalleled beauty, and singular in my place in Second Life--I'll feign no false modesty here.

Don't be daunted by my Ivy-League education; rather, succumb to the charm of an erotic novel written specifically for you on the spur of the moment. My personal tastes are esoteric and varied: musically I gravitate toward jazz and Bollywood, in design toward the sublime of Bauhaus and the temples of Kajuraho, in literature I prefer magical realism tempered with a penchant for technical and academic journals. Sensually I prefer the slow burn, the ever-heightening thrill of anticipation; sexually I've found precious little in the way of limitation. But don't feel confined by these categories; rather, be challenged to present me with a topic of which I have no more than a passing knowledge.

If you're chosen to be my paramour, you can expect the journey to far succeed only rhetorical discourse; you will come to know a world of sensuality only hinted at in mere images of erotic design, a world unbound from the fetters of representation, a world unleashed in your own mind. I believe in the power of words as keys; they are the magic incantations that can give life to limitless images and sensations. Language alone can release us into our interior landscape, the only boundless frontier. But be advised that to engage me requires charm, delicacy, and perception. I conduct myself in accordance with the Hindu tenets of proper Dharma, Artha and Kama; namely that one should attend to righteous and profitable living before attending to the business of pleasure. My services are appropriately valued, and again be forewarned--very addictive.

I am also the founder of the Kama Sutra Institute, a learning center for the intelligent pursuit of pleasure in Second Life. You can find out about events and more, as well as my Indian ethnic fashion line, here on the official blog.

My First Time

"Oh, dear, I'm no interpreter of maladies. Yes, Jhumpa Lahiri is in fact a family friend; though I'm not particularly fond of her writing."

File under statements rarely made in Second Life, or Analog Life for that matter.

As an Indian girl in Second Life I bridge several peculiar minorities; those of time zone, linguistics, education, sexual orientation and profession, as well as translator of social mores. It is a peculiar niche to carve, yet one which I have inhabited in the Analog my whole life, and which provides both comfort and conundrum with expected regularity.

I was told about Second Life by my former girlfriend, and one day innocently downloaded the viewer at my office to investigate this world which I had no previous notion of. Quite unhappy with the clay figure I saw, I spent my first hours learning how to adjust my appearance and skin tone to more closely resemble my self, my conception of my "self". I found the nose to be the most difficult; I am both cursed and blessed with a traditionally ethnic proboscis of decidedly Persian origin...read "large and rather unwieldy". After attaining some small comfort with my new character, I wandered away from the newbie island in search of this human interaction that my previous paramour assured me was to be found. Little did I know.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I was to find. As a woman in avatar and fact I was propositioned with varying degrees of propriety (or lack thereof) before I had even escaped the confines of the welcome center. My initial reaction was of self-defense: what kind of world was this, where I am yet another product to be consumed by the masses? And where did she get that wonderful outfit, while I am here in a hideously concocted ensemble of pink and blue? After some less predatory conversations, I discovered shopping.

My learning curve has always been rather shallowly inclined; I take to new information intuitively and synthetically. Thus I was found by my first in-world paramour (though I didn't know it then) at an asian-themed store scouting for freebies. K.A. approached me with refreshing tact: "Hello Shrutiyan; I see that you're new here...would you like a little help looking around?" She was beautiful, clad in a provocatively skin-tight red outfit, and continued to speak in a way that indicated both sensitivity and intelligence, always the surest way to infiltrate my defenses. We shopped and talked for hours, her instructing me on the basics of interaction in this place (I hadn't yet discovered how to read a profile), of the many things this world had to offer in the way of creation, communion, and of course consumption. All the while K.A. had been complimenting me; my beauty, my uniqueness in a world of amazonian white women (I'm on the shorter side of a darker ethnicity), and my charming naivete. After outfitting me in an acceptable frog-collared asian silk shirt and some low-rise black pants, both far exceeding my Analog attire sexiness by several magnitudes yet emphatically tame for this world, she took me home to her "apartment in the sky" (I did not yet understand skyboxes, or even the beginning of the newly expanded physical boundaries here). She had hinted several times about the (dare I say it?) rampant sexuality that pervaded the aether in SL; I related how I had already fended off several hackneyed advances from equally inexperienced avatars. Soon we began to confide in each other, something I would later learn to do with much greater discretion: who our Analog selves were, the persons behind the masks. Our flirtation became more concrete, tangible....

K.A.: "Click on the pink ball. It will ask you to animate your avatar; click 'Yes'." In retrospect, Dante Alighieri invariably associates with this moment: All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Here I was, making love to a woman in texted chat, sitting at my computer in an office in Mumbai, seeing my cartoon representation glide through a series of positions I was in turn familiar with and pleasantly surprised at, feeling things I had yearned for without recompense for far too long. How I wish I had known how to save that chat, but like the Analog, that moment is enshrined in the gossamer film of memory alone. And it was the moment my life had changed. No longer was I ensconced in a world of convention and limitation that did not agree with my own attunement, no longer subject to my terms being predicated by Theirs; I was in a place that I could inhabit entirely as an embodiment of my desires, my Id and Ego given form and free reign. K.A. was herself as shocked as I at my aptitude. "A girl of your talents could make a lot of money in this place. Many girls do it, but it's not for everyone. Go out and explore, learn, and find what you love. And always remember me." She then gave me my first money in Second Life; for the first time I felt what I like to call the "Romance of the Transaction". How could I forget?

Since that first meeting I stumbled, then ran, along the path of escorting, discovering the mechanics and the semantics, and discovering a part of myself only dreamed of vicariously until now. I learned to excel, and find my place in it. And I only look back in fond remembrance.

Seeking Pleasure in a Virtual World: Revisited

“Whatever our values, we carry them with us into this place, and they are tested against a new set of possibilities and constraints.”

At first glance, from very early on in our marathon 2+ hour discussion, it seems that we have established that we are indeed moral beings. Oddly enough, a topic that has been bouncing around my circle of friends and acquaintances in both worlds, to one degree or another, and unbidden across varying circumstances. Even the populist media seems regularly to ponder this most existential of questions, with noticeable recent headlines about the sentience of viruses alongside the incessant opining of how war is probably wrong. Here we are at a stage of human evolution which affords us perhaps the time and certainly the energy to find ever more clever apparatuses to conduct our ongoing experiment of self-awareness, and yet one can’t help but feel that there’s a ruling minority of folks out there that don’t read writing left so rudely on the wall(s).

“Perhaps pixels are not as intimate or sacred as flesh?”

This is perhaps the heart of the matter, if not the matter of the heart. We all however agree that the level of personal emotional investment in SL can vary wildly, and reflects proportionately what one takes away from the experience. And that hearts break just as easily in-world as out.

“And those are mainly the creators and the people that get deeper meaning here.”

The old computer maxim still holds true: garbage in=garbage out, good stuff in=good stuff out. Turing would be proud.

“How many of us have noticed our analog avatar taking on traits from our digital lives? I know I have.”

“And in RL, I sometimes think of how [my avatar] would react to a situation. Because we are two different people.”

Aside from the humor value of trying to right-click someone to check their profile while you’re at the drugstore buying cat food, it seems that one can’t help but identify and at least at some levels acknowledge a rather surprising degree of cognizance of the multifarious aspects of our consciousness, vis-à-vis (pun intended) our personality development in SL. Being a vague Freudian myself (please forward all hate mail to my junior Literary Forensics professor), I see this as akin to giving our id and superego a doughy little homunculus to conduct a passion play on stage as large as the entire planet. But I’ve always been a romantic that way.

“And really, I see escorting as a form of therapay [sic] for the masses.”

“Well the fact is, sex is part of what keeps me here; engaging in it or not, it is in the digital air.”

Ah, the transactional romance culture; as unlike as Edwardian and Victorian, in ways, yet as constant as time itself. The world’s oldest profession may have been trumped by scripting (though I doubt it; I don’t doubt the first script was created to be placed in a pose ball), but it remains firmly ensconced in the human condition. It is something that we need, and it is in our nature to seek it, even revel in it—by rights and good sense we should revel in it, for it is an integral aspect of our own divinity, this power of creation and connection. We are troubled gods, indeed, but constant seekers, and SL is a wonderful garden to sow.

“But I’ve sought out people who prefer reading an erotic novel written for them only, on the spur of the moment.”

“To keep it here, to play the sexual and the sensual out as the experiences of our avatars, to respect their ownership of that experience, is the crux of what drew me to this talk. The development of that as an art form.”

After we ponder the wonders of creation, the revolutions of the planets, we try to express that to our companions, and thus Art is born. From cave painting to pixels, it is the engagement of the sense that we all seek, of knowing that we indeed have a higher consciousness without and within, and that it watches us, most amused by our every exploit.

I would like to thank all those that attended; it was a grand feast of which only a few morsels are presented here for your reflection. It was a wonderfully paced exchange of ideas; the conversation flowed like the wine of Khayam. Please note that the editorial content is mine alone, thought the quotes are directly transcribed from the discussion, with my own amendments to punctuation and spelling in the interest of readability. Also I apologize for taking so long to post the review; computer problems prevented me from doing this sooner.

I encourage all readers to pursue your time in both worlds ever-mindful, for that is the basis of a life fulfilled.

Shrutiyan Anatra, 27 March 08

Satyagraha

As an Indian in SL, how could I not link to this:Joseph DeLappe's walking performance art.

The Ides of March event: Seeking Pleasure in a Virtual World

This is the inaugural round-table discussion for the Kama Sutra Institute. Our topic will be the pursuit of pleasure in SL--the many forms it takes, how it differs or aligns with 1st life, and to what ends it is taken.

Much of the press, both mainstream and in the blogosphere, regarding Second Life revolves around its economy (or un-economy, as some would have us believe) and pleasure-seeking (read: escorting). Fundamentalists take umbrage, those with an agenda manipulate, the Fortune 500 downplays, and...well, the fundamentalists again take umbrage. Yet every newbie signing in to Second Life for the first time will have their first sexual encounter (or at the very least be propositioned) within hours of being in-world. What happens in a virtual environment where most of the prevailing societal norms and constraints (and, indeed, those of the physical) no longer apply? While there are many outlets to seek pleasure in SL--from the very forward-thinking reality experimentation, beautifully-designed sims of fantasy and fancy, to interpretations of RL thrill-seeking (e.g., FPS games, roleplay, racecars and rollercoasters, et cetera)--the preponderance of escorting has raised many an eyebrow.
Yes, you can go newbie-fishing in the welcome areas, yes there are hundreds of sims where a roll in the hay (or sand, or clouds, or aether) will cost you nothing more than time. You can go to innumerable escort houses and nightclubs and titillate the night away (or your lunchbreak at work) for a nominal fee with any size shape or manner of public woman (or furry, or angel, or devil, or alien, or...). But there exists above the strata of the mundane a new, elite class of companion that seeks to enrich every moment spent in her company, who values an avatar that has taken care to present [it]self with distinction and knows that value for value is not lost on some, and who seeks pleasure in a manner at times innocent and pure and at times with the intoxication of a fallen saint.
How has this path been paved? And where does it lead?
That shall be ours to answer.
The round-table discussion format serves to exchange ideas among willing minds, expand the boundaries of the status quo, and in the best tradition of thinking people everywhere to elicit change in a tangible manner, one person at a time.
Several friends and SL luminaries will be invited to participate; seating for the general public is *strictly* limited to 15 and *must* be confirmed via IM to me directly; the parcel will be closed to those not on the guest list once the event starts.
Updates will be posted during the week.