“The place where you love no one — Is death
The place where you regret nothing — Is death
The time when those who remembered you are dead — Is soon
When the sun emits no light there’ll be an eternally Dark moon”
From Dhoka Cola, - by Bachchoo
A week ago I heard from a friend that he had been approached by acquaintances in India to download a random compendium of pornographic videos from the Internet and send these by email to them. My friend, I hasten to add, declined, and explained that the porn-watchers and addicts of India faced a ban on their viewing of choice as the Indian courts had ordered the Internet sites carrying pornographic material to remove it.
Obviously, such a ban wouldn’t work if private emails could carry the material anyway. Now the blanket porn-cut has been modified to the banning of “child porn” — of which more later. To the pornwallas of India the threat of a complete ban must have been akin to householders facing a permanent electric power cut. As Indian citizens know, power cuts are not permanent and even after hours, the lights come on again and the air conditioners and refrigerators begin to work.
The blanket ban was, after some dissent about freedom of access to information, however lurid or in bad taste, or involved with the exploitation of adults, lifted.
The ban now extends, quite rightly, to “child porn”. The term itself needs to be modified to “severe child abuse” because this “pornographic material” cannot be generated without such criminal abuse. Any attempt by private email or through other channels and media to access this child abuse material or to supply it ought to be met with the full force of the Indian law.
In my youth in India there was no TV, leave aside the later videos and the arriviste Internet. Yes, we had American films with kissing scenes in them but nothing more risqué. The lumpen clientele of the cinemas who sat in the five anna seats (yes, I did too!) would put their palms to their lips and make kissing sounds when these scenes came on screen. I remember an Italian film called Bitter Rice starring one Silvana Mangano.
It came with illiterate English subtitles. The attraction of the film was a prolonged dance in the rice fields by Silvana and other actresses showing parts of their breasts and raising their arms to reveal unshaven armpits. The cinema hall, the five and 10 anna seats mainly, would erupt in catcalls and some saucy commentary about “showcases” and “godowns”.
It was the closest one came to visual porn. At the time the source of porn was exclusively the printed word. In my all-boys’ school several novels with well-thumbed pages containing overt sexual descriptions had a wide circulation. The most disgraceful of these paperbacks, about which I have bad and frightening dreams to this day, circulated round the school was a book called House of Dolls. It was an account of a concentration camp in the Nazi holocaust.
The book was purportedly written by a woman ex-prisoner who described the degradation of Jewish women used as sex slaves by German soldiers. The book was passed around by some perverted adolescent not for its historical revelations, but as a source of pornography. Did I read it? Yes, I did.
One of the establishments from which this genre of literature emanated was a small shop at the end of Main Street called Punjab Book Exchange. It was a commercial lending library with learned and enlightening tomes. These remained firmly and perpetually in the window displays. Inside the shop the bookcases were filled with novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, “Western” novels soppy romantic trash and the sort of paperbacks which the proprietor would recommend to clients for their pornographic content.
At the rear of the shop was a rope curtain leading to a smaller back room. This was reserved for special, trusted clientele and contained brown-paper-wrapped, badly printed pamphlet-sized books with suggestive titles like “Confessions of a Russian Princess” and “The Nun’s Delight”.
This was hard-core stuff and the proprietor refused to let me or my friends browse through this collection or borrow the material saying it was “not for us”. I don’t believe it was any moral inhibition — he was just afraid of the likelihood of our parents or guardians coming across the books and alerting the police.
Society and the law should realise that the users of child-abuse porn are not citizens exercising their right to view what they like, they are complicit in the cruel and criminal enterprise which India has taken the first step to eliminate.
