With apologies to James Hadley Chase, this is no country for old men, especially those with a fondness for the Groucho Marx method. Mature readers will recollect Groucho's saucy quip on the elixir of youth: "A man is as old as the woman he feels…" All those uncles who had booked tickets in advance for the upcoming New Year's Eve bash at White Orchid are furious over the government's denial of permission to Sunny Leone to perform at the venue.
One's sympathy goes out to the organizers who maintained a brave front saying, "We haven't received any official communication from the police. We'll wait for it before calling off the event. We don't know why there is so much fuss about Ms Leone performing here for a family show." In a country with such an abysmal track record of family planning, good luck with that is all one can say.
"We have denied permission fearing law and order problems in the wake of protests by pro-Kannada outfits and also keeping in view the directions of the Karnataka High Court in a molestation case reported on MG Road last New Year's Eve," said Home Minister R Ramalinga Reddy. Oh dear. The authorities have conveniently cited the precedent of Kerala where fans reportedly went berserk during Sunny's recent live show last August. The Mallus handled the nudes at the Kochi Biennale with aplomb but when it came to Sunny-control, they lost the plot and got very jolly. Simbly too jolly, so perhaps the cops are entitled to be worried about the sons of the soil in namma ooru.
Apparently some "longwage chauvinists", in particular a group called the KRV (don't ask) were up in arms against the "titillating show", claiming Sunny's performance here will be an assault on Kannada culture and tradition and will corrupt young minds. "We don't want her to come spoil our youth," the protesters said, while setting posters ablaze at Manyata Tech Park. There is little to be gained by pointing out that it is only the greybeard element who is craving a sunbath, when the Vedike is insistent that our youth must be provided with Sunny-control. Ms Leone must be an arsonist's dream come true: rumour has it that the posters were so hot that they spontaneously combusted, precluding the need to set them alight. A fringe element threatened to commit "mass suicide' if permission was granted for Sunny Nights to be held; it is highly regrettable that Darwinian methods of species selection are being interfered with.
All this confected outrage at the 'impressionable youth" of our country being exposed to "evil influence" is both tiresome and hypocritical. Today Sunny, tomorrow Netflix…who can foretell where wickedness and devilry may rear their ugly heads the day after? The solution lies in Kolkata, since what Bengal thinks today, the rest of India will think tomorrow. Take for example the generous phone allowance given to MLA's that lead to a controversy that rocked the West Bengal assembly some years ago. Apparently a CPM Minister had progressed from drooling over "feelthy pictures" to talking dirty on a Russian phone sex line at considerable cost to the state exchequer with the trifling sum of 11 lacs (that's 1.1 million in case you're drowsy or hungover) spent on subsidizing his habit.
Much fuel was added to the fire by his ingenious claim that his staff had used his official phone which drove his detractors to fury. As the enraged opposition pointed out in a lively debate at Writers Bungalow, "Orre baba, pizzical (physical) sex we can understand, but whyphor he is spending sho mach on this pone sex, haanh? Then he ish blaming his staffs for it, instead of taking phull responsibility on himselp, shameless phellow." If one may be permitted an outrageous pun, it was the minister's rod and not his staff that was the culprit, in a manner of speaking. With dance bars back in action and a zillion pornographical options available online, getting one's knickers in a twist about Sunny speaks volumes about our criminal lack of a sense of priorities.
