India's Growing Obsession with Porn Culture


Bangalore:  Three Karnataka ministers were caught on television on 7 February, pouring over a cell phone watching a woman in a petticoat gyrating wildly. The ministers lost their jobs for watching pornography in the sacred boundaries of the Legislative Assembly. The incident is a high-profile example of a classic reality: porn is pervasive through the Internet across India, easily and freely accessible, and not just available to wary politicians but to children and adults in millions of ordinary homes, writes Damayanti Datta from India Today.

The times have changed in India too. Sunny Leone, 30, the most famous international porn star with Indian roots appeared on Indian television, on the reality show Big Boss 5 and has now launched a ‘clothes-on’ Bollywood career.

The organized $12 billion (60, 000 crore) American adult entertainment industry, to which Sunny belongs, has bred explicit images beyond the limits of imagination and they are free. Fuelled by the Internet and facilitated by high-speed data service, pornography, born in dozens of studio lofts around the world, has managed to enter teenagers' mobile phones with the force of a dangerous flood. It threatens to squeeze conventional notions of morality, raises tension in bedrooms, tempts children into a world they do not understand, and initiates a culture that threatens the ethnicity of family life.