Comment

Boxing Day, as you know, has nothing to do with the pugilistic sport; traditionally, it was the day when people exchanged boxes of edibles and presents. Which meant that Santa Claus got us presents on the 25th, while our friends got us some more on the 26th .

Sadly, Christmas has come and gone, and today on Boxing Day, we find our stocking empty. Especially empty if your list contained, as mine did, one simple wish. That our country treat its adults as adults.

Amongst other things, that means saving us from future Operation Majnus, police chief Rajiv Ranjan’s brainwave of cleansing Meerut’s gardens of young couples. He is now trying to save his own skin by suspending the two policewomen who slapped and thrashed young girls in the park, but whose idea was it? And what was his idea? To arrest young couples just because they were together. So sure was he of his idea’s brilliance that he even asked TV channels to cover the event!

But why single out Rajiv Ranjan? He is only one of several authority figures in the country who have decided that Indians are not adults. Mumbai’s Ranjan is Pratibha Naithani, referred to in news reports as a lecturer in St. Xavier’s College. Her latest claim to fame is to have filed a Public Interest Litigation against the screening of adult movies on television. (Hey, I am part of the public too and I don’t remember Ms Naithani asking me if her PIL was in my interest).

In response, the Bombay High Court has not only banned all ‘A’ films from our TV screens, but U/A films too. Which means that the latest Harry Potter cannot be screened on television. And all along we thought that the Potter series was for children! Tossed out also are films like Maqbool, Monsoon Wedding and even the innocuous Parineeta. The oddity of the ruling is that children accompanied by adults can see “U/A” movies in cinema theatres but even adults cannot see the same films at home.

But why single out Naithani? In Pushkar, the pilgrimage place in Rajasthan, where wet and clinging saris are on the ghats and not just in the movies, an Israeli couple whose Hindu-style wedding ended in a spontaneous kiss, so offended the priest that he got them arrested and fined.

But why single out the priest? Think of the Police Commissioner of Chennai whose sense of morality was so outraged by photographs of young couples kissing while dancing in a local discotheque, that he shut down the discotheque and arrested its managers.

But why single out the Police Commissioner? There are a whole lot of Protectors of Public Morality out there, the ones who, for example, threw chappals, eggs, tomatoes and abuse at Khushboo, current actress and erstwhile temple deity, for saying that young people shouldn’t have unprotected sex. (Unmarried Indians have sex? God forbid!).

But why single out the moral brigade of Chennai?

Maharashtra’s home minister R R Patil has closed down dance bars in the name of morality, the film censors still ban many movies which have “too much” sex or nudity and Playboy is still on the proscribed list. Even D H Lawrence’s classic, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not allowed into India for years when it was on the required reading list of all international Eng Lit courses.

But why single out any of them? All of them belong to a group of people who would be most happy in a dictatorship, as long as it’s they who were doing the dictating.

They see before them an India that is changing into a more open society, and one that is moving away from the earlier hypocrisy of a repressed society. Their ostrich mentality tells them that if it can’t be seen, it doesn’t exist, and damn natural instincts, damn biological urgings, damn raging hormones. (If only they’d look at the outrages committed by some Catholic priests in the United Sates, or the peccadilloes of some of our “holy men”, their acts no doubt a result of enforced celibacy).

Being an adult means having the ability and the option of making your own choices, as long as none of the choices are criminal. The range of legitimate choices is large, and includes choosing when and whom to marry, whom to bed and how, which movie to see and where, which book to read and when. These are all part of a democratic system where everyone has freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of action. Inshort, it comes from being a free adult. And a free adult is what the Ranjans and Naithanis of the world do not want us to be.