Innehållsförteckning för Monday, April 10, 2023 från India Today

Numbers and statistics may seem a coy method to access the subject of sexuality, but broad chunks of data can give us vital clues to how society is evolving. The 18th edition of the India Today Sex Survey, the first after a Covid-enforced hiatus of four years, offers us a lens into the state of post-pandemic India in its most intimate realm. The news is not all good. A kind of generalised dissatisfaction is the overwhelming sense one gets from the 3,032 respondents who filled up the questionnaire prepared by poll agency MDRA. Deeper patterns reinforce that conclusion. We are calling it ‘The Pleasure Gap’. If we treat this as a barometer of how happy and balanced we are at the core, it means our indices are in the red.…

They may exchange heated arguments as political adversaries but occasionally there is light-hearted banter too. As in the Maharashtra legislature recently when Maharashtra deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said that the state government was willing to take responsibility for the marriage of Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader Aaditya Thackeray, the bachelor boy retorted with a smile: “Is this a rajkiya dhamki (threat of a political nature)?” The exchange left the house in splits. Kaushik Deka with Jumana Shah, Amitabh Srivastava, Dhaval Kulkarni and Amarnath K. Menon…

INDIRA GANDHI Year: June 1975; Party: Congress Constituency: Lok Sabha MP from Rae Bareli, UP Reason: The Allahabad HC convicted the then PM of electoral malpractices and debarred her from holding any elected post for six years. The SC overturned her conviction on Nov. 7, 1975 LALU PRASAD Year: Sept. 2013 Party: RJD Constituency: Lok Sabha MP from Saran, Bihar Reason: Convicted in the fodder scam case, gets five-year jail term J. JAYALALITHAA Year: Sept. 2014 Party: AIADMK Constituency: MLA from R.K. Nagar, Tamil Nadu Reason: Gets four years in jail in a disproportionate assets case. Loses CM chair AZAM KHAN Year: Oct. 2022 Party: SP Constituency: MLA from Rampur Sadar, UP Reason: Sentenced to three years in jail in a 2019 hate speech case RASHEED MASOOD Year: Sept. 2013…

“Have you gone totally crazy?” “You will be behind bars in no time!” “It is not only a crime, but also against our culture” “You will be blacklisted…” THESE ARE SOME OF THE NIC-EST COMMENTS I HAD THE pleasure of receiving when people came to know we were about to launch India’s first adult store (a nicer way of saying ‘sex shop’), but that was 2012. It has been almost 10 years since we have been live. As of October 2022, we have delivered to over a million customers in India and welcome 4-5 million visitors to our website annually from various sections of society: celebrities, politicians, sportspeople, the rich and famous, middle class, and even people whom we know in our network… who quietly place orders praying hard that…

WATCHING PORN In India, viewing sexually explicit material in private spaces is not illegal. The Centre has, however, enforced bans on various porn websites from time to time. In 2015, the government banned 857 pornographic websites. Many of these are now operational again under new domain names. Last year as well, the government ordered internet companies to block 67 pornographic websites for violating the new IT rules issued in 2021. PORN AND AGE Section 293 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) makes it illegal to sell, distribute, exhibit or circulate obscene objects to anyone under the age of 20 years. PUBLISHING OR TRANSMITTING PORN Section 67 of the IT Act makes it illegal to publish or transmit obscene material or material containing sexually explicit acts or conduct in electronic form.…

A successful presidency of the G20, according to India’s G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant, is dependent on three factors: it has to be action-oriented and inclusive, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stated, with the political narrative of India’s development story being an important element; the priorities and issue notes India has spelt out, and the organisation of G20 events in a distinct manner—across all states. Kant was speak-ing at the roundtable discussion on India’s presidency of the G20, the progress made and how it can be made more effective, at the India Today Conclave 2023. The roundtable was attended by ambassadors of various nations, foreign policy experts and prominent economists and heads of organisations. IN-DIA TODAY organised it in collaboration with Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German foundation that works for global…

Supriya Sobti Gupta is not new to the Indian non-fiction landscape. The 38-year-old filmmaker has served as the producer on two documentaries streaming on Netflix: Bad Boy Billionaires: India (2020) and Mumbai Mafia: Police vs the Underworld (2023). She is also a former journalist, having worked with organisations like the BBC and Al Jazeera. For her directorial debut, she melded her vocation and profession in a way. Gupta trained her lens on the horrific match-fixing scandal of 2000 that shook Indian cricket to the core. The result is Caught Out: Crime. Corruption. Cricket, the recent addition to the slate of nonfiction titles on Netflix. Gupta says that she was propelled by a desire to shed light on a dark period. “I was interested because it is a retrospective story that…

India evokes strong emotions in those who fall into its warm embrace. Love it or loathe it, you can’t ignore it. Jean-Claude Perrier’s Like Barbarians in India revolves around four French writers—Pierre Loti, Henri Michaux, André Malraux and André Gide—who wrote (mostly) endearingly about India. Of them, only Gide never travelled here. While Pierre Loti (Captain Julien Viaud in real life) is unapologetically Orientalist (“The people we meet are all beautiful, calm, noble, with big velvet eyes—those Indian eyes with a mysterious black charm”) in his L’Inde: sans les Anglais (‘India without the English’), 1903, with Henri Michaux—half of whose Un barbare en Asie (‘A Barbarian in Asia’), 1933, is dedicated to India and has inspired this book’s title—we are slightly less wide-eyed, but only slightly (“When I saw India……

Much of the late S.K. Lambah’s half-century-long sojourn in diplomacy had to do with Pakistan. Even without the Pakistan interface, his would have been a most distinguished career, serving as he did as ambassador to Germany and Russia. Yet, it was diplomacy with Pakistan that will constitute his legacy. In this book, Lambah provides in part a historical recap of Pakistan’s evolution, an anecdotal journey of his own engagement with it, and finally a reflection on the value of diplomacy as an instrument in dealing with our most recalcitrant of neighbours. There is, in addition, a valuable chapter on post-9/11 Afghanistan, where Lambah played a major role both in ensuring that the Indian voice was heard and in bringing about a settlement on which the new architecture of governance was…

Raids or visits, the Gujarat government’s conducting them with surprise. State home minister Harsh Sanghavi recently led a surprise raid on all the state’s central and sub-jails. Personally supervising the operation from a control room through multiple CCTV cameras, the raid involving 1,700 cops resulted in the seizure of weapons, narcotics and cellphones. Earlier, CM Bhupendra Patel paid sur-prise visits to the villages in Mansa taluka near Gandhinagar, the slums of Vadodara, the Directorate of Pension & Provident Fund in Gandhinagar and the SP office in Ahmedabad Rural. Government officials are on high alert, not knowing when they’ll be taken by surprise.…

ONCE UPON A TIME, Amrita Pillai (name changed) would keep Friday nights for hooking up with her various digital chat buddies. This was five years ago when Pillai was 29 and still a mid-career professional in the investment banking sector. Now, at the age of 34, Mumbai-based Pillai has a lot more commitments that occupy all her time, including her once-favourite Friday night. She is responsible for two young interns, has double the work load, housing loans to repay, a longer commute to work ever since she shifted from the local train to driving her own car. Not to mention an ageing mother recovering from endometrial cancer. “Where is the time for pleasure?” she asks. “When there is time on hand, all I want to do is sleep and be…

IF WE WERE TO DESCRIBE THE SEXUAL ECON-OMY IN THE LANGUAGE OF ECONOMICS, then the results of the INDIA TODAY-MDRA nationwide sex survey suggest high desire, but not high demand. A majority of those surveyed, both men and women, reported needing more sex. But unlike some other kinds of satisfiable needs, sexual ones depend in part upon other people. And the results tell us that the respondents might be more comfortable opening up on the survey questionnaire than they are with their partners. The survey results show high sexual self-knowledge and sex desire, but they also point to a lag in the willingness to be sexually vulnerable with, and reliant upon, another person in a sexual partnership. The variables of vulnerability and dependency complicate the overall sex survey results. These…

IT’S TEMPTING TO THINK THAT IN THE ERA OF THE INTERNET, WHEN MOST PEOPLE ARE equipped with smartphones, dating apps and social media and can initiate dozens of new connections daily, sex has never been more accessible. Self-proclaimed custodians of a prudish ‘morality’ whine tirelessly that the internet is ‘corrupting’ today’s youth, as if because of technology, we’re all having more sex than ever before. But, are we really having more sex? Or is technology actually having the opposite effect? According to the latest INDIA TODAY sex survey results, over 57 per cent of the respondents indicated that they “need more sex” than they get. When asked if they were happy with their sex life this year, 19 per cent said, “Not at all.” In 2018, only 5.5 per cent…

Q. What was it about the role of polished politician Ranjan Varman in Lost that made you choose it? Do grey characters appeal to you? It was the script—such a taut, intricate thriller written by Shyamal Sengupta and Ritesh Shah. Just reading it kept me on the edge of my seat. I was surprised by the role. It was completely different from anything I’d been offered before… Sinister yet stylish villains are such fun for any actor to play! Q. After critical acclaim and popularity in your early films, why did you choose to go ‘boutique’? I use ‘Boutique Bollywood Actor’ as my bio for my social media accounts. I don’t know why it triggers people—it’s not meant to be taken seriously! I had been hearing the term ‘boutique’ used to…

Once it was pedigree, now it’s about educational degrees. Political rivals have always questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s post-graduate degree despite a mention in his election affidavit. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, an IIT gra-duate himself, is only the most recent to call him 12th-pass and even “illiterate”. Meanwhile, the BJP isn’t done with Rahul Gandhi. When sister Priyanka defended him after his Lok Sabha disqualification, saying the BJP called him Pappu even though he has degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya was quick to ask for proof of the former since Rahul’s affidavits don’t mention it. Priyanka is partially correct. Rahul was at Harvard briefly, but earned his BA degree at Rollins College, Florida. His affidavit also mentions an M.Phil. degree from Trinity College,…

Sign of things to come? TDP cadre has been feeling enthused after the party won four Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council seats and four MLAs of the ruling YSR Congress cross-voted. Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy may retain a firm grip on the party and government, but cracks are starting to appear. Many blame Sajjala Ramakrishna Reddy, the CM’s political advisor, for bringing the party to this pass and want him removed. A one-man show so far, Reddy will finally have to contend with dissent.…

On March 23, the Surat district court found Congress leader Rahul Gandhi guilty in a 2019 criminal defamation case under Sections 499 (defamation) and 500 (punishment for defamation) of the IPC and sentenced him to two years in jail, the highest penalty for a conviction under these charges. He was granted bail and the sentence suspended for 30 days to allow an appeal. The case followed a plaint by BJP MLA Purnesh Modi, who said Rahul’s remarks defamed the “Modi community” as a whole. Defamation is the act of injuring another person’s character, reputation or fame by publishing false or malicious statements. In India, defamation can be both a civil as well as a criminal offence. In civil defamation, the defamed can move court seeking damages in the form of…

The INDIA TODAY Sex Survey was conducted by Marketing and Development Research Associates (MDRA) between December 2022 and January 2023 in 19 cities across all zones of the country among 3,032 adults who were sexually active. The respondents have been selected randomly to prevent any bias from creeping into the samples. We have followed a multi-stage sampling process: at the first stage, any major factors that could cause sampling errors have been controlled through an appropriate selection process (among males, females, geographical distribution, sexuality, age, etc.). In the second stage, contact points with the respondents are a mix of colleges/universities, shopping malls/multiplexes, hostels/lodges, restaurants, etc. This is an adaptation of the queuing theory, where randomisation is built into the system. The confidence level is 95 per cent with an error…

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN DHRUV SHARMA (NAME CHANGED), A 19-YEAR-OLD STUDENT from Pune, would shudder at the thought of asking someone out. Engaging women or trying to develop sexual intimacy was a daunting task, one not made easy by his body image issues. But that’s all in the past now, thanks to technology and the internet, where, Sharma says, he is free of such physical hang-ups and can have consensual virtual sex. “It is empowering. I have four-five partners on various apps. We use video chats that are non-encrypted…. It has helped me feel better about my body and I can now even meet women offline without feeling ashamed of myself,” he says. Thousands of Indian youths like Sharma have in recent years embraced the idea of finding sexual…

Among Gen Z actors in Bollywood, few make as much noise as Sara Ali Khan. Her quirky shayaris, inspiring workout videos and picturesque travel diaries on Instagram, where she has 41.8 million followers (and growing), keep her in the headlines, sometimes more than her films. But one senses that the 27-year-old, five-films-old actor wants to turn the page and start a new chapter in her creative journey. No, she isn’t giving up on her penchant for rhyme schemes; she’s just looking to surprise audiences with her work. The whodunit, psychological thriller Gaslight, which releases on Disney + Hotstar on March 31, signals the dawn of a more adventurous Sara. Talking to her reaffirms the belief that she is a tad wiser, more introspective and cognisant of her mistakes. “I had…

Good Indian noir is an infrequent occurrence, especially in the written medium. Good Indian noir that also has insightful things to say about the systemic injustices of Indian society is rarer still. Tanuj Solanki’s new novel, Manjhi’s Mayhem (2022), featuring a rough-around-theedges Dalit hero (the promotional literature calls him an ‘anti-hero’, which isn’t really accurate) called Sewaram Manjhi, is a member of this small club. Manjhi works as a security guard at a Mumbai café frequented by the well-heeled. At the restaurant across the road, a beautiful hostess named Santosh runs into a spot of bother, only for the muscular Manjhi to thrash the problems out of sight. From that point begins the ‘mayhem’: Manjhi becomes embroiled in a heist initiated by Santosh and her sister, and there are crooked…