Two of my opinion pieces in Outlook
“Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.” — Communist Manifesto
Our bourgeois, not content with seducing each other’s wives, not to speak of bragging about these and other conquests through social media, also take the greatest pleasure in satisfying their collective voyeurism. This is where the modern sex survey steps in, with a magic potion in each of its multiple arms. As a potent cure for curiosity, it unabashedly tabulates everything: appetites and aphrodisiacs, flings and fake orgasms, incest and infidelities, pornography and partner-swapping, therapies and techniques, turn-ons and turn-offs, sexual positions and satisfaction, virginity and virility. The text is racy, the figures are voluptuous, and the accompanying photographs are, for the lack of a better word, helpful. This way, the elite urban consumer learns about the latest aspirational standards in love-making. He is transported to a realm where men are the only ones who can fantasise about fantasy, and women are mostly subdued into passivity, defined on sexual terms and packaged as commodities on the sex market.
Such a survey targeting the elite is only the tip of the frigid iceberg called capitalism. Since it revolves around demand creation and making even the worthless count, sex is simplified and quantified in order to aid sales. In these surveys, every salacious experience is laid threadbare. Power here flows from potency.
You also think that India’s biggest problem is a boatload of terrorists from Pakistan. You have not heard of Khairlanji or Gadchiroli or Koodankulam; they are multi-syllable names of places that have never managed to sneak into your sublime conversations. Ultra-ambitious, you only enter lands that require your passport, your visa and your commercialised skill-sets. You are India’s shining, swaggering export. You have sold your soul for a song. You have sold your song for a sophisticated accent. You have sold your sophisticated accent for a sanitised silence.
Most of the time, you do not even speak your mother tongue. You only learn the languages that pay: C++, Java, Python, English. In spite of your mastery over two-and-a-half languages, you choose to remain voiceless. Abjuring violence in the way of old souls, you renounce every aggressive drive to assert yourself.
Maybe you earnestly believe in the development panacea. Maybe you are bamboozled by its seductive, saleable divinity. You don’t realise that government-style development is a devil that walks backwards, drinks blood, feeds on corpses and fattens on millions of tonnes of bauxite and iron. It goes by multiple aliases: Essar, Vedanta, Posco. Like its cross-cousin democracy, development is widely believed to be a rumour to keep rural masses in a hysteric state.
And perhaps, like your home minister, you take pride in being a patriot, unaware of the atrocities of your army in Kashmir and the Northeast and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and far-flung African countries. You are blase about how your tax money ends up being used for mindless militarisation projects. Since “our republic cannot bear the stain of killing her own children” (as the Supreme Court observed in the fake encounter case of Maoist spokesperson Azad), the state has efficiently come up with an arrangement of convenience in which the children pay for each other’s bullets. The republic remains stainless and squeaky clean. You end up with blood on your hands. Perhaps you sponsored the bullets that killed seven Dalits in a police firing at Paramakudi last month.
