Hippocrate changing?

When it comes to "sex", it is widely accepted that we Indians are big hippocrates. It is such a taboo subject that even a mention of the word like "condom" needed guys to cough out all the courage they had! My contemporaries would sure remember the awkward yet comic scene from then "famous" movie "Anubhav", where the bloake played by Shekhar Suman makes a fool of himself in the chemist shop, wanting to buy condom!

On one hand, for long, we kept mantaining a moral high ground by being obssessed by virginity before marriage. On the other the incidence of incest, if all reported, would make make us appear like a "sex-obssessed" race. If you keep your ears to the ground, you would hear all those murmurs of how most women at some time or other have been "felt" or "fondled" by a close relative.

Sex was dark. To be "done" at night. "Done" and not to be talked about. If at all "sex" was discussed, it was discussed either as a boastful experience of guys or as a complete derogatory description of the women involved. A typical reflection of a Patriarchal society, which is so biased against fair sex.

Well, we all know that. Why am I raising it then. Here is the reason why -

I recently started watching "Theatre" . Over the years, I had only watched one play that too was years ago at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai. It is great that now one can watch "theatre" even at Gurgaon! To many of us who haven't seen much of plays and such stuff, "theatre" evokes images of "old-fashioned", "melodrama", "fading art in times of technology", "a poor cousin of cinema" etc. But it seems it has caught up in big way! At least I was ignorant about the contemporary face of Theatre till I saw two plays (of a 35 year old "Ruchika Theatre Group" )- CHAAL & PEOPLE LIKE US.

Apart from other things, the bold mention of sex related issues was an eye opener. There was even mention of terms like "breasts", "oral-sex", "tits on legs" while describing the sexual harassment and incest. Imagine that the audience were all family members and that it did't appear scandalous!

Add to this the movie "President is Coming" where while the security gurad tries to do a security check on Maya (Konkana Sen Sharma, she cool-ly and confidently warns - "please don't touch my breasts".

I think we are changing. We are now able to face these things better than how our parents or their parents did. We are at least opening up to discuss the issue related to sex which was such a big taboo.

Have you seen/heard the recent ads of generic term "condom"? If you have, you would understand what I mean. And you would also understand the significance of the ring tone "condom-condom-condom".

Hopefully, this new-found openness would help women to come out and report their sufferings and would make men perhaps more sensitive towards women. And hopefully we all may be able to use this to make sex-education more relevant to the younger generation and not just an awkward dialogue or mere lecturing.

Good Day!