If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.

Because if you pick it up, it dies

and it ceases to be what you love.

So, if you love a flower, let it be.

Love is not about possession.

Love is about appreciation. – Osho

Big yansh! Showy yansh!! Taking a passive walk around a community, where young gentlemen and ladies usually congregate or patrol in an active hour; to and fro classrooms, libraries, laboratories, dormitories and or houses, one (average guy, pastor or the other) is bound to behold beautiful, scintillating, romance-stimulating (you-know-what-I-mean? more of it!) figures (Big yansh! Showy yansh!!) that tend to be attractive anywhere your face turns (and it turns often enough). Believe me, irrespective of who you are or how religious you are, your eyes are beings of their own, they must see. One wonders why people don’t flee (no accusation of being literal here, please) at such sights, in spite of the warning in the scriptures of one of the modern religions.

Tell me you’ve never had such a sight before and you go, “hmmm”, “wow” or something of such even if silently or subconsciously. This writer has had such experiences, incredibly especially the sights of ladies pretending to be what they are probably not (I don’t claim any superior knowledge here) by covering their heads with black scarves or coloured ones. Big yansh! Showy yansh!!

This is where we are. (Almost) All ladies now strap dresses to their bodies, especially the essential parts (one wonders why but you don’t have to think too hard), the BB, buttocks and breasts; especially the buttocks. There was a time some ladies would yap, in public and in private, yap and yap ladies who glide in skimpy skirts and body-hugging tops. I’m afraid that’s in the past now. These ladies too have joined the fray. They too now appear in skimpy dresses or at the least, body-hugging skirts and tops. Go, ask the streets.

Young, old, slim, fat, religious, irreligious, naturally-beautiful, naturally-ugly, boisterous and gentle (or annoyingly quiet) ladies, (almost) all o’ them have joined the fray and it has become difficult to distinguish between the categories.

Big yansh! Showy yansh!! Why has this become a culture? Why have our ladies reduced themselves to objects that need to be picked up? Is it for public acceptance? Is it just to feel in vogue? Or something picked up on the social media, television pop culture, life magazines or the red carpet?

This writer wishes to acquaint readers with a paragraph he intended to begin this piece with. Would have thrown it away but at the last minute, chose to place it rightly here. It follows.

“There are so many attractions that have become the in-things across the globe. And in a bid not to be shamefully left behind, everyone seems to be joining the new trends. These new trends are encouraged and established by younger folks, who suddenly realise their ‘eyes have opened’ and need not be dictated to anymore like kids. “I’m of age now. If I continue to act like a kid, everyone disregards me. For people to respect me, I must be up to the game. What’s the new trend? in fashion (now almost-nude)? in school (malpractices)? in music (ask KSA, Osadebe, Daddy Showkey, Father U-turn, Remedies, Styl Plus, Tu Face, 9ice, MI, Kaycee, Olamide and the rest of the reigning members of the Nigerian, and or global, music bloc)? I must be tops on the list in all of these areas. O ma ta lenu jor.” If you know what I mean. If not, apologies. Go to bed. These dictate the trend, personal and collective disposition to stimuli.” End of quote.

Around the globe and even in Nigeria, ladies go to any length (like guys would to increase their pecker length) to enhance the bulge of their buttocks. To do this, surgery and stuffed-pants come in handy at great costs to the beneficiary. Big yansh! Showy yansh!! The question again, why go this length? Public acceptance? Ignorance? Just keeping up with the Joneses? To please the male counterparts, who themselves (ourselves) are a bunch of folks who really don’t know what else we want order than beautiful, curvy but hidden things under those clingy dresses? To get picked up like a beautiful flower, only to wither shortly after? Considering that life in today’s world has become a stiff competition, is it that the ladies force themselves into tiny dresses in order to attract ‘merited’ and ‘unmerited’ favours from unsuspecting men, who are made to drool by such spine-cracking appearances? Big yansh! Showy yansh!

In conclusion, Prof. Ade Ajayi, former Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos (once rechristened Moshood Abiola University, MAU, lol ) once asked and I rephrase, “When little children give birth to little babies, what would the little babies be thought by these little children who have become little mothers?”

For the sake of this article, I ask “When little children continue to act like little children even after becoming mothers, what would they teach their little children?”