There was this article on new year’s day that i read while i was at the hospital. If dad had seen it his heart would have probably hit 500.

It was about a retired professor called John Itty, from somewhere in the backwaters of Kerala, who made a police complaint about a man and a woman cohabiting outside marriage. He called it prostitution. The police laughed and threw out complaint.

“Prof Itty, a visiting fellow of the Centre for Socio-Economic and Environmental Studies, Kochi, and formerly of the Kerala Institute of Local Development(KILA), had observed in his complaint that man and woman not bound by marriage staying together in a room is being interpreted as prostitution and the police used to arrest such people and charge cases under the Immoral Traffic Act.”

Now, none of this would have made news if the man hadn’t been Rahul Gandhi and the woman hadnt’ been his long term girl friend.

The police in Kerala labelled Itty a publicity seeker and threw out the complaint. After all in today’s India if you arrest men and women for having sex outside marriage, half the country would probably have to be converted into a jail.

Trouble with men like Prof. Itty and Mr.Togadia is that their version of India and Indian culture/morality is soemthing that is out of the colonial past. Out of Queen Victoria’s own repressed view of how society should behave. The only difference is that one is a repressed Christian, the other a repressed Hindu.

For them there is only sin in the world. None of its beauty, none of its wonderousness. Wonder what is the best course of action. To ignore them and hope that they would go away, or to take them apart. Intellectually, socially, theologically destroy their arguments. one by one. make people laugh at their arguments rather than go strident and shrill in response to such idiocy.