My title is curious and kind of amazing. I'm saying this because I know it. And yes, I borrowed it from 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'. But enough already. I've chosen to start in a curious manner and give a curious title as a diversion (or trap). When you read the title, I had your curiosity but when you read the first line, I hoped that I would have your attention as well (I need to stop quoting epic movies). So what I wanted to talk about was sex. I'm not going to sermon you, I'm not going to bombard you with my opinions on the topic and I'm definitely not going to talk about things like 'how to improve your sexual performance' or '25 secrets she'll love in bed' or for that matter 'does size matter'. What I want is a conversation. Coming straight from the hearts and minds of a million bewildered youth of our country.Allow me to extend my fishing net over the pool of curious fish that you people are. Allow me to elaborate.
Now I'm a curious product of a curious Indian socio-economic class. Educated folks like you know that class as the 'middle class'. We are not the Ambanis and the Tatas, nor are we the people they show in WHO ads, living below poverty line and having protruding ribs that remind me of a Salvador Dali painting in some way. We are a people with defined dreams- embedded within which are some scattered engineers and doctors. We are the synonyms of ambitions and progress and hard work and IITs and IIMs and scores of success stories- conventional and unconventional. But we are also the dark reminiscent of a certain hampered mentality (majority, if not all-rebels like me and you are everywhere). When it comes to certain things, we are intolerant and orthodoxly opinionated. Sex, I believe, tops the list of such things followed by things like career ambitions (parents), honor among relatives (I still haven't figured out if its pseudo or genuine), marriages (and a million other things related to them) and fascination with studying abroad. These, among earning a six figure annual salary. The last one is a string that binds all of the above-mentioned fascinations. The 'COMMON FACTOR'
Now, now… I see I've drifted a wee bit off-topic. Duh. Maybe another of the many insignificant fascinations of my middle class bred mind. Then again, a little drifting is not bad. How else am I supposed to engage my fishes in an otherwise boring discourse? So back to where I left. Sex. It might be just me or a number of people who might have noticed that we Indians are probably living one the most intricately fabricated hypocrisies of our times- being the second most populous country in the world (which means a lot of sex.LOT), being famous for rape(again,sex.FORCED) probably more than we are for the Taj Mahal and having extremely offensive, orthodox and ridiculously stupid notions about sex. Not to forget that Vatsyayan wrote Kamasutra near 400 BC. Also, according to many Indian Philosophies, sex is among the four main 'purusharthas' (goals) that a man needs to achieve in order to lead a successful and satisfying and righteous life.
Why does this happen? There are many reasons- culture, a long history of how we have looked at women-the practices and division of power, the way new media portrays sex, lack of sexual education, complemented by an excess of sexual frustration ( the latter might be a result of the former), a general inability to regulate and process sexual desires due to the way our society carries its taboos and norms- taking a very closed approach to sex and not accepting that for most humans, despite the facade, sex remains one of the basic instincts.
Having discussed all this, we shall focus on the reasons in a more detailed manner in the next part of my article. Stay in the net.

Originally published at: [http://theindianeconomist.com/sex-and-loathing-in-india-part-i/]