Manmohan Singh says the country needs to shed its inhibitions on sex. DNA looks at how the prime minister’s opinion has been received by our people
When Manmohan Singh went on record saying that it was high time we as a nation started discussing the need for safe sex, there was probably no applause, but no one threw a tomato either.
Perhaps the fact that he was a man, and the prime minister at that, made everyone listen quietly to what, from a woman, especially if she were a celebrity or film star, would have caused a national uproar.
But Singh must have known he was stepping onto thin ice when he made the statement. More power to him.
He must have also realised that someone has to break the silence. To stop a country gagged by its own mistaken sense of high morality from tipping over the brink and finding itself in the same abyss as South Africa and the sub-Saharan countries.
Before the self-appointed guardians of morality start raising their banners, maybe it would be worth their while to stop and think.
Are we really as immoral or as moral as we think? Is Indian culture really going to the dogs, if we discuss sex, or teach sex education in schools? Or has it already gone down the drain, as our statistics relating to rape and HIV/Aids show?
India is a young nation. The base of the huge population this land mass supports is just entering man or womanhood. There is enough on television and screen to fire their passions and their libidos. I am not talking of the fact that kissing has come into the ‘permitted’ section in films and advertisements; I am talking of the remix videos and TV shows that are meant only to titillate the imagination.
Sex sells. Everywhere. On the net, in magazines, on the small screen and the 35mm, and you can stop the bar girls from dancing, but not the young man (or woman) from getting their quota, one way or the other.
Growing disposable incomes in the 20s age group and new value systems are making it easier for liaisons to be made and broken, even before one enters into holy matrimony, and of course, even after one has entered the ‘sacred’ state.
In such a scenario, does it not make sense to take the blinkers away from one’s eyes, and see India as it is … just a little shocking in its young people’s speakeasy attitudes to sex?
I remember a Catholic friend of mine, when advised at a pre-marriage counselling session (such a wonderful practice, I wish all communities would adopt it), telling the counsellor who advised that she should let God decide how many children she should have as family planning was against the Catholic diktat, that she would serve God and her family better if she could have control over her health and her life.
The power of choice is a heady power. It is not one that can easily be given up. Centuries of revolutions across the world have proved that.
And giving the power of choice in matters of sex will actually help keep a nation in check.
The young must be told that unsafe sex can kill, that AIDS is a very real menace sitting, masked by silence.
It was a silence that killed an entire continent. We can learn from that lesson before it is too late.
Manmohan Singh has lit the beacon, let us light our torches from it and illuminate the way to a future safe from HIV/AIDS, at least.
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