16 hours Ago By Mid-day
When one of mid-day’s editors messaged me seeking my humble opinion about Allahbadia, I had no clue who he was. Before replying to her, I hurriedly checked out Google and YouTube, and heard the scandalous thing he had said. It took some searching, I admit, because the media that covered Ranveer Allahbadia’s subsequent grilling for hours by the Crime Branch, including Joint Commissioner Ankur Jain, did not dare repeat the offensive words.
I finally heard them on Arnab Goswami’s show—where else?—in which he had that clip playing in a juicy loop. You could be offended over and over and over again till you maxed out.I found Allahbadia’s sentence—it was only a sentence—rather puerile and scatterbrained.
“Would you rather spend your life watching your parents have sex or join in and end it forever?” Here’s what went through my head: Nearly half the population of this country lives in dwellings where privacy is a luxury. For children in shanties and slums, the sounds of parental sex are not a mystery. Nothing is secret, including squabbles, violence, alcoholism, abuse and yes, sex.
As for the foul language with which we brutalise our mothers and sisters, it is impossible not to hear it wherever you go in Mumbai—from the kirana shop owner, the vada pav seller, your boss, your lover, your dhobi, your accountant, maybe even your priest. We are a species born with a potty mouth.Most times, it is fun and funny.
But sometimes, it is driven by malice and cruel intention, and the same words come poison-tipped. And children hear those cuss words too, whether they are loving or toxic.Let’s talk about BombaiClick the QR code above to join my WhatsApp group to share your Bombai stories for my book—and perhaps answer some of my Bombai questions.
Last week, I explored Bombai’s dying red light district, where sex is not a secret at all. I was taken around by the community workers of Prerna, an NGO that works with children of sex workers. We visited the erstwhile ‘cages’, where five or six women live, sleep and service their clients on narrow cots separated by curtains, and I asked the natural question: Where is her child? The child is sometimes under the bed, first too young to understand why it is creaking, and later painfully aware that this is the sound of what her mother has endured to keep her alive.
Or him alive. Or them alive.These children don’t joke about parents or sex.
They would have been puzzled by Allahbadia’s joke and the great indignation it produced. One of those children might ask her mother why, in a country that respects parents so much, no one is looking out for her. They would wonder why everyone is so offended by sex, when it is the reason why they are here, and the reason why they have families, and why they sometimes secretly watch porn.
There was a time when we embraced all of this, even immortalised it. Sex was not a secret, and human bodies were viewed with respect. Let me take you to Mohenjo Daro Dancing Girl for a moment.
Just about two years ago, the Prime Minister inaugurated the International Museum Expo in Delhi by unveiling the mascot’s statue. The Ministry of Culture introduced it in carefully couched language as a “stylised, contemporary, life-sized” version of an ancient bronze statue. If you should visit the Indus Valley Civilization of the National Museum, you’d see the original, exhibit #HR-5721/195.
It shows an un-self-consciously naked adolescent girl cast in bronze, one hand on her hip, clad in a few bracelets and a necklace with three leaf-like pendants. Nothing is hidden; she is clearly, openly female and proud of it. The figurine is only 10.
5 cm tall. The first travesty came with how she was labelled: the Mohenjo Daro Dancing Girl. Though not a thing about her suggests that she is dancing, even to an Indian archaeologist, a naked girl could only be an immoral bar dancer.
If you’re wondering why a governmental body picked a naked prepubescent child as a mascot, the answer is that they didn’t. They objected to too many things about it. It needed deep rectifications, structurally and morally.
The unveiled mascot was giant, larger than life; it loomed. Her brazen nakedness had been dealt with: the mascot was clothed, something tribal. As Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who wrote about this in The Wire, put it, she wore “a hideous assortment of clothes designed to evoke a fake, ersatz folksiness; the kind that so called ‘tribal dancers’ are made to wear, shivering, despite the bitter cold of the morning of Republic Day”.
Her skinny arms are covered by a brick-coloured blouse which, perversely, makes it impossible to ignore her breasts now. Your eyes are also drawn to her navel, singled out in the narrow skin exposed between blouse and sarong.Someone high-up in the ministry objected to the dark hue of her skin, so the mascot was dipped in a skin-lightening lotion or perhaps bleach or whitewash.
The once bronze mascot has skin the colour of pink tooth powder. #HR-5721/195 tells us who we are: a nation of liars who tell ourselves our parents never had sex and that we are not all completely, gloriously naked under our clothes.You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.
comSend your feedback to [email protected] views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
