Sex in Srinagar

I hooked up with this bunch of journalism students – both men and women – and decided to talk dirty with them. Sex, not very surprisingly, is taboo around here. Not that people don’t have sex, but it’s almost always after marriage. What they don’t do is talk about it. Though things are changing according to my pals. And the reason for that: cable television, the Internet and mobile phones.

Now get this. Cable TV got here in the late 90s. One of the guys said that there was a time when his mom would switch channels when an ad about AIDS would come on. Wait, it gets better. It seems he would switch channels as well. It used to be too bloody embarrasing. Anyway, no one’s changing channels any longer.

So there I was surrounded by this bunch of young men and women, a couple of years younger to me at the max, and they were talking about sex, but they weren’t looking at each other. We soon switched to a safer topic: love.

Here’s a quote I used in a story that I filed earlier today, “Love is always undercover here. The giant Chinar trees have a use after all…” Everyone of them kept talking about how love happened in the shade, out of sight, away from prying eyes … the cellphone has been around in Srinagar for over a year now. And it has helped change a lot of things. Before the cellphone, rendezvous were arranged over email. In fact, the cyber cafe is actually a place people go on a date. The problem with that is that if one person doesn’t check their email in time, the other just might get stood up. With cellphones, and more particularly SMS, things have changed. Dates are a whole lot more instant now, even if they are completely surreptitious. Oh, and you don’t go out on a date all that easily either.

Try this on for size: marriage is a given if you actually start seeing a girl. There is none of the “we’ll see” shit. And this in a state where arranged marriages are the norm. The workaround to that seems to be converting a love match into an arranged marriage.

Originally published on ] t h i n k [ (tootb.blogspot.com); recovered from the Wayback Machine.