‘This is India and that is truly unfortunate’

If I had a dollar for every instance of breast-beating by irate senior citizens expressing anguish at our 'impressionable youth" being exposed to evil Western influences, I'd give it to Vijay Mallya or his legal team. Clearly the righteous, make that the self-righteous, protest way too much. Broadly speaking Gen Y is fairly sophisticated and if their morals and character are cause for concern, this anxiety is misplaced. As a baby boomer and card-carrying member of the flower child generation, I can truthfully admit that we were the truly deprived, as opposed to depraved, generation. As a wise man observed, "Books wash away from the soul the dust of everyday life" and a bookshelf is a reflection of one's character; more so by the quality of pornography on display. Going by the prevailing wave of sanctimony displayed by our greybeards, it does appear as if we are setting the bar way too high. My earliest memory of "pondies", as we referred to the genre in our youthful innocence, is the lurid publication Rasavanthi which was sold on the footpath of Moore Market in Madras.

This was way before Google Chrome, so browsing back then meant a bunch of horny schoolboys leafing avidly through the blurry images of its pink pages until the shopkeeper, a wily Gujju, stapled the magazine. A glimpse of the fleshy delights therein was available only to those who could brass up the princely sum of Rs.5 for a copy - no browsers please, we're Indian, was his unspoken motto. This crafty ploy did nothing to deter the more prurient element from getting a taste of the forbidden fruit. Necessity is the mother of invention and some of us were desperate enough to perfect the art of squeeze reading. Patelbhai then took to swishing a little cane on the knuckles of buccaneers taking the free sample route.

The magazine's agony aunt column was a particular favourite since it contained gems like, "My husband's sputnik is very short. Please advice (sic)." Honey and ghee was the treatment prescribed for successfully orbiting the interstellar galaxy by the sexpert, who gloried in the title of Dr Sanghamitra. The main feature customarily dealt with the travails of a hirsute lad, Cousin Gobind (having hairy chest) who habitually lay in a hammock on the banks of an unnamed river (hopefully not the Cooum) reading the Bible. 

Striking a piously censorious tone, the narrative focused on Gobind's lust, "Even though he was reading holy books, he was thinking unholy thoughts between his eyes and thighs…" Despite his ecclesiastical literary tastes, Gobind was an incestuous pervert who lusted after his cousin Gomathi, a temptress to rival Sunny Leone. Since Gray's Anatomy was available only to senior medical students, an entire bunch of us came of age, courtesy Rasavanthi, with no small amount of confusion on the subject of the female anatomy. 

The author didn't restrict himself to anatomical errors, oh no, sir. His saga was peppered with mood-setting descriptions of the climatic conditions: "sun was shining in the sky, birds were singing sweetly but they did not know the dark deed that was to be perpetrated that day." Yeah, I know, perpetrated is OTT.

Eventually, cousin Gomathi completes her ablutions or laundry - the author doesn't specify - and succumbs in the manner of a Weinstein victim to Gobind's manly charms. After this early literary diet, Playboy came as a breath of fresh air and we were part of a select minority who could truthfully claim that we read it only for the articles. 

Today with cable television, phone sex chat lines and the cornucopia of pornography available on the internet, getting one's knickers in a twist about Sunny Leone or having a Censor Board decide what is morally acceptable is really quite silly. We rarely get worked up over modern day horrors like lynching, cops and robbers in cahoots or manual scavenging, all of which is callously explained away as "TII": This is India and that is truly unfortunate. More porn, less horn is my bumper sticker for 2018.