Comment

In a utopia, everything is organised according to a rational scheme of things. Timetables, syllabi, parades and other congregational formations, including classrooms, are key elements in its ideal set-up.

Nothing should be done informally. Governments are erected on the premise of a utopia — everything should be in order. Ministers and bureaucrats in modern democracies are always trying to impose order on a chaotic society.

So, it is not surprising that the Indian government has thought of introducing sex education as part of the syllabus, which in turn is part of the larger scheme of the national programme for the development of adolescents. We know why utopia is a nightmare. It is the regime of control-freaks.

When governments steps in to deal with such intimate and beautiful aspects of life such as sex, they want to impose the utopian qualities of ruthless efficiency and deadly comprehensiveness.

Every aspect of the issue is given due attention. It is both boring and frightening when governments enter with such idealistic intensity to clear the air and set up systems, and fit it all into a carefully debated and well-formulated syllabus for that emotionally-charged physical experience called sex. It is the pedant’s ultimate revenge.

We have this rather grotesque spectacle of ministers who shout loudly into TV cameras and microphones that they want to ‘demystify sex’, and who say that a scientific approach is needed in the matter.

These overbearing ministers are usually and routinely brainwashed by low-lying, soft-spoken mandarins, who have this extraordinary capacity to reduce matters of life and death into facts and figures.

So, here is a government jumping up and down in ghoulish glee at the prospect of directing sex behaviour through schools. All this in the name of modernity and scientific temper!

The people who shout the loudest about scientific temper are the very ones who know the least about science and what it is all about.

This indiscriminate faith in what is scientific can be traced back to the 19th century enthusiasts, who did not do any science themselves. Among them are to be counted Thomas Huxley, nicknamed “Darwin’s bull-dog”, and Marx and Engels, the communists.

In India, the tribe of naïve idolators of science has been led by Jawaharlal Nehru. The present-day Indian media is part of this tribe of science acolytes, who sing hosannas for science with no clue about the complex mysteries of the subject.

They would not even know that a good scientist never arrives at his discovery through the rational method, but through that irrational thing called ‘the hunch’.

Most people of the ‘scientific temper’ mob seem to believe that once they throw in the word ‘science’, they can silence all objections. And those critics who still persist are to be laughed out of court as being unscientific.

Fortunately, the majority of the people are quite sane, and can differentiate between the uses and value of science, and where it fits into the complex pattern of life.

They know where to draw the line. There are millions of people who have managed sex in their lives with admirable dexterity and happiness with no help from pedagogues.

Sex is not just a chart of erogenous zones. It is deeply linked with that mystery called life. And yes, it is also about that old-fashioned thing called values. This is one subject that politicians, bureaucrats and teachers cannot handle. It is much too complicated. They must confine themselves to doing simpler, mechanical things.

Those obdurate scientific-tempered folk who persist in teaching sex in a classroom through a syllabus need to be shown real scientific evidence.

They must learn that there is sex before sex education. Even if we narrow our focus just to the human species, for nearly 20,000 years, humans have managed sex wonderfully well.

They created the rites of passage to mark the awakening of sex, which have taken protean forms of gestures, festivals, music and song. The perennial expression of the song of life is that of the girl and boy dancing in the rain, so enchantingly emblematised by the song-dance-in-the-rain sequence of Hindi cinema.

At the end of the song, the boy and girl get married. A new cycle begins. It is simple and beautiful. So, keep the scientific idiots — in the medical sense of the term — out of this.

Email: r_parsa@dnaindia.net