The stork brought us in

 The Family Planning Association of the UK has earned the ire of British Indian parents with its latest information booklet Let’s Grow with Nisha and Joe. The Daily News and Analysis reports that the sexual health charity, in a bid to represent Britain’s growing multicultural population, decided to replace the usually white female character in it’s information pamphlet aimed at kids with a desi (brown-skinned and braided-haired) girl, Nisha. And desi moms are not amused.

 

Nisha, who is only a diagram, appears naked in the pamphlet and has to have nether regions neatly labelled by those who read the pamphlet. Oh horror! We Indians want nothing to have to do with such besharmi, do we? It’s only the shameless goras who go about speaking of doing you-know-what, isn’t it? “Why have they used an Indian girl in the pamphlet? Are they saying something about the lack of sex education among Indians or their prudishness about such things?” one indignant desi mom is quoted as demanding. Well, yes and yes.

 

Vatsyayana’s country didn’t get to be a billion-strong because India has a surfeit of storks. We do love our rolls in the hay, it would be fair to note. But, you see, we’d rather not talk of it. So what if YouTube is full of five-second clips of more-imagined-than-seen glimpses of cleavage revealed by film stars? So what if the alleyways of our countless towns and cities are crammed with quacks dispensing everything from snake oil to ginseng to clueless youngsters about to embark on or mortally rueing their first carnal encounters? So what if our children are confused by the clash between our ascetic interpretations of desi culture and the hyper-sexualised media world they live in?

 

We shall pretend the stork brought us all in. We shall be desi.