Recently, a five year old was raped and almost murdered in Delhi. Just few days later we read reports of a 13 year old being gang raped in Mumbai. So what? Such things happen. It’s part of life. It’s some peoples’ destiny to be raped, abused and killed. It’s their karma. They have attracted it for themselves. How does it matter even if they were juvenile? It’s all fate. We won’t stand up for any of these. Sometimes when we get angry, we will blame the government. We will blame the police. After all they are the institutions of supermen (and women). They are supposed to take care of us.
But, no. We can’t let sex and sexuality education be part of Indian curriculum. Are you mad? Who needs coaching on responsible sexual behaviour? Did we not learn it on our own? So will our children. No we don’t need to talk about our own body, how to deal with peer pressure and how to cope up with if something like a rape happens. We don’t need to teach our children all that. They will learn on their own. Classrooms are holy places. We can’t pollute it with stuff as dirty as sex education. We will teach them English; that’s such an important language. But we won’t teach them how to communicate about things that may be closest to their lives. No, we won’t let a scientific enquiry into sexuality happen. Homosexuals are sick. Transgenders are errors. Sexuality is more about morality than science. We will rather teach them Newton’s third or fourth or fifth law (fuck! Were there so many??). Kamasutra is not our history; let’s just talk about Gandhi and Nehru and the likes as if they were asexual beings. We believe in an education of irrelevance. Things that would matter to our lives will not find any space in our schools or homes. May be we will need another life altogether for them. Now what’s the big deal if some of them get molested and abused in the process? These things happen anyway. In fact some children may really enjoy. Harish Iyer, a very dear friend and an activist creating awareness around Child Sexual Abuse, shared a moment. When he came out with his story of abuse, many commented – oh he too must be enjoying. He sarcastically replied, “yes! At seven years of age, I really enjoyed being raped by an old man, time and again, bleeding in there.” Ah! May be that was Harish’s karma. But for instance, if the child was sexually violated in that age, and it was done in a nicer way, that was not-painful, did the child deserve to go through it at that age? Did the child’s natural sexual growth deserve to be hampered by an intrusion of sexual abuse? Who cares?
No, no! We still won’t let sex be discussed. We never spoke about it. We will never speak about it. Oh my! It’s such a bad word. Even in the country with exhilarating population. No this population is not rising due to our mad fixation with sex. It’s rising because our lord Sun and Vishnu and Sai baba and Allah and Jesus and who knows who else keep giving vardaans. This country is full of Karna and Ganesha. These people were born not out of the vagina but of random shit that our mythical ancestors did.
We will not talk about it even if we know that almost 52% of Indian children have a sexual abuse history. And this is only of reported cases. Since we anyways don’t talk, many cases go unreported. But how does it matter? We all get over it, don’t we? It’s so Indian to forgive and forget? After all we are the big-hearted Indians, aren’t we? Yes, we all get over it. Only to resurface as a society where a five year old is pushed in with bottles in her vagina. A country where, despite creating much furore over the Delhi bus rape case, there is still a sharp increase in the number of reported cases of rape and abuse.
Well, talking about sex will only make us want it more. It’s because we have suppressed our sexuality in a collective fashion, we are still not that bad. We love our children and we don’t want to embarrass ourselves by talking about it. Hmmmmm… okay. There’s something more to it. Actually… we don’t really know how to talk about it, let alone how to do it. So what’s the point of talking about something that we don’t know well? It may mislead and misguide our children, you see. And who has the time for learning all these things? There are more important things in life. Sex? Oh we all learn about it anyways.
We will ignore it and suppress it. We will hide and contain. Until our own child rides that bus in Delhi or goes to that Santracruz home party in Mumbai. And maybe even after that, we will still remain quiet. It’s okay if we lose our child. We won’t lose our ‘honour’. After all they say, “izzat banane me barso lag jaate hain. Lekin girane ke liye sirf ek second kafi hai.” But, children? oh we can produce more, anyways. They don’t take years, just few minutes of sex.
Image: http://blog.plazafamilia.com/should-sex-education-be-taught-in-middle-school/
