The government shouldn't ban porn websites: Here's why

One thing Indian citizens can always count on their government for is for it to be a hunkering, inefficient mess. While this leads us to complain about things like potholes, terrorism and the IRCTC website, at other times the system ends up helping the citizen. In July this year, the Supreme Court directed the centre to block pornographic websites. It is now mid-November and not much has been done because I presume half our politicians are engaging in state-sponsored and subsidised porn watching on their free iPads (you could call it research. Or masturbation) while the others discover the existence of a computer. What I find fascinating are reports that describe the current Indian user’s pornographic preferences. According to one survey, over 90 lakh Indians watch porn on their smartphones every day. This makes me sad because a decade ago, watching porn was a community experience that brought people together. Groups of young boys were forced to sit awkwardly in a cabin inside a nondescript cyber café, just like families watching saas-bahu serials in the living room. Hours were spent logged into Yahoo chat rooms, trying to convince a man pretending to be a woman at the other end of the world to start up a webcam so that breasts would magically appear on the other end. Dial-up connections were braved and we waited for 15 minutes just to load a badly Photoshopped picture of Mamta Kulkarni’s head on a generic white woman’s body. [caption id=“attachment_1227019” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A man reading a pornographic comic online. AFP.[/caption] I can’t help but feel that my generation valued porn a lot more. My father’s generation had to make due with smuggled magazines, which passed various hands and whose crisp texture one was never supposed to question. My generation had stashes of CDs that had to be mixed in with regular VCDs like Dil Chahta Hai, in the hope your family would never feel like watching it. When Moser Baer started selling cheap blank CDs, it became an even bigger problem to differentiate the music collection from the porn stash because all the discs looked the same. Special codes had to be written with a permanent marker, so that only a select few would understand what was inside the discs. My personal favourites remain “Beethoven” and “Mozart” to make elders believed we were into classical music and thus on the right spiritual path. Regardless, porn was limited and the collections had to be nurtured in the same way that collectors do stamps. Over time, we built a relationship with it and throwing away a scratched CD was as traumatic as burying a dead puppy. Unlike the youth of today, who can stream pornography at will, we did not take it for granted. The pornography consumption exercise taught us negotiation skills, patience, espionage and helped us live up to the phrase “unity in diversity”. It’s sad that with the coming of the smartphone, even porn has become a selfish and individual experience. Another statistic I found telling was that Indian users spend five minutes watching porn on their smartphones every day. While I for one don’t see the point of watching something for longer than I last personally, I can see why people would want to shift. Unlike computers, smartphones prevent accidental damage to equipment such as keyboards. Smartphones also come loaded with a camera, which Indian users love using to harass people without permission. If that fails, one can also crank up the volume on the phone’s radio and play it in public. One look at the Android Play Store and you will notice that the trending apps are “Blue Film Videos”, “Taaza Sexy Kahaaniya” and “Sunny Leone Videos”. Clearly, the smartphone is also being used as a tool to freely learn about something that is traditionally kept under wraps. With greater smartphones, this penetration can only go deeper (pun unintended, of course). The rapidly growing telecom infrastructure that we love boasting about at Davos might just be fuelled by our desire for porn. My hope is that our government and judiciary will realise the value of pornography and also that we as a society will hold on to porn’s ability to promote social cohesion among all hormonal Indians as it negotiates its shift from an analogue to a more digital environment. I for one cannot wait to watch some on Google Glass.