Desires and Moral Policing

Indian carpets undulate like the Western Ghats, with all that's beneath them. The wheel turns; the same spokes arrive again and again. In Meerut, a chilly-bellied police woman ran amok with her palms in that hapless park, dusting the faces of teenagers before the camera. Why the cameraman did not focus on her badge, I cannot comprehend. In Mumbai, someone proposed the bimonthly toast of gomutr to a cleansing of Marine drive and Bandstand- why, so that the moral citizens of Maharashtra may gather in harmony every evening there to sing bhajans and feed each other zunkha-bhakar? Of course, men and women separate, all sterile, pebble-eyed, wood-brained puritans, like true Indian culture no? In Lucknow, a police officer declared that being gay is like committing murder. I will not be surprised if merry khaki bands of brothers romped in mohallas on government diesel, high on Old Monk, mellifluous of cow-belt abuse, rounding up young gay men to thrash.

Bloggers would of course have spewed venom; liberal celebs would have done their bit before the camera; academics would have held conferences on 'the restrictive dialectic of phallic fungibility and its connotation of otherness in an extant and shared cultural consciousness' ;-) Those who prefer action would have been out on the streets, wielding the chappal. Bata's saleoos surely meet their targets: as long as there are outraged moralists on the one side and their outraged victims on the other, slippers will be needed to garland posters and then diligently slap them all day. No matter which side of the fence you are on, Bata is there for your political needs.

But seriously. Moral policing with its notions of decency will create personal, secret indecencies. Since we're all human, we will all be aware of having been indecent all our lives, every day, in deed and thought, be our colour saffron or green, our beards long or cropped, our tongues Arabic or Tamil. Some of us will unlearn this unnecessary anxiety. Most will be bogged down by it all their lives.

There is the latent voice of desire and there is the manifest voice of suppression of desire. The act of moral policing is perhaps a disguising response to the primordial, basic instincts of the moral policer. One way to engage with a discomfort with sexuality (why macha why?) is to condemn it. Even if the moral policer is not gay himself, the disguised desire/act might be the watching of porn- many people do it but few non-liberals would admit it freely- or, simply, good old lust . (Bear with me; I've started reading Freud and now suspect dissembling distortions of latent wishes in every thing. So I'm open to correction.)

Love and let love I say. Learn from Scandinavia. Learn from our ancestor, the revered Vatsayana...