LIFE AND LOVE IN THE NEW BANGALORE
Tales of the ambitious youth in India’s outsourcing hub.
Recently, Nidhi Raichand, 33, and the other editors at health care Web
site mDhil decided to find out how young India really feels about
liberal sexual behavior.
To the Web site’s English-speaking, upper-class, Internet-savvy
audience, they posed the question, “Would you marry a non-virgin?”
The answers were sharply divided, but not the way that you may think.
When the editors took a video camera out onto the streets of Bangalore
and asked the question, both men and women in their 20s and 30s said
they would prefer marrying a non-virgin. Some even said they would shun
a virgin.
On the Internet, under the quiet cloak of anonymity, a different set of
answers poured in. One man said he would prefer a virgin because “she
would be faithful even after marriage.” Another said he would not marry
a non-virgin because knowing that his partner had slept with somebody
else would gnaw him constantly.
“No never,” wrote another. “That’s y our Indian culture differs from
the Western. It is not even imaginable for us,” to marry a non-virgin,
he said.
When it comes to Bangalore – and actually much of big city India – many
things have changed dramatically in the past decade. Casual sexual
relationships are no longer taboo among teenagers and 20-somethings,
for example. Bangalore’s hard-working office culture throws young men
and women together, often unmoored from their parents and family for
the first time, and away from the parental gaze they are behaving like
young Westerners.
“The winds of change are blowing across India,” said Prasad Bidapa, a
fashion and image consultant who grooms and “launches’’ dozens of
teenage ramp models every year. “Many young Indians are open to sexual
experimentation, without any guilt attached.”
To her generation, sex was only with someone you loved, the Web site
editor Ms. Raichand added. She says the gap is widening between her and
those 10 years younger. “Today, many in their 20s treat sex as a
recreational activity,” she said.
Even public displays of affection at malls, movie multiplexes, cafes
and other hangouts of the young have recently become normal. (Hugging
and holding hands are acceptable; kissing is still frowned upon.)
But, as the virgin poll illustrates, while actions may be one thing,
traditional Indian values are deeply rooted in these young people. Most
Indian parents still drill into their kids that virginity is a mark of
character, and that sex before marriage is taboo. So now, they’re a
divided generation.
“So many of us are caught in the middle,” said Arjun, 29, a
Bangalore-based lawyer who did not want his last name published. “We
may be Western on the outside but we are Indian at the core.”
Even if the men and women who responded to the poll were aware that
there is no real way of knowing, overwhelmingly they yearned for a
“Maybe Virgin.’’ “I would like to marry a virgin but I won’t ever ask…”
one man said.
Families seem to be in on the make-believe. When sexually experienced
women from well-to-do homes want to come across as innocent, they come
to gynaecologists like the Bangalore-based Dr. Kamini Rao, for hymen
reconstruction surgery. “Women from conservative families whose
marriage is arranged ask for hymenoplasty just before their wedding
day,” she said. Dr. Rao said she carries out a couple of such
procedures every month.
The angst of the Maybe Virgin generation is evocatively illustrated by
the response of one 27-year old virgin who said he was desperately
trying to fit into the happening, cool group around him by posing as
sexually experienced. “By telling the truth, I fear being found out as
a person with a small town-mentality, an imposter and a loser…”
The Hollywood movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” about a nerdy character
played by Steve Carrell who has never done the deed, was a hit with
Western audiences. But if it were re-made with a middle-aged Indian
hero, some in the audience here might not find it quite so amusing.
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