Whatever happened to Savita Bhabhi?
Sushmita Bose -
Sunday, August 02, 2009 9:44 PM
I am proud to say that we ‘outed' Savita Bhabhi -- from her portal on to the Sunday newspaper.
More than a year ago, when I was working for Hindustan Times, one of my team members -- who used to cover crime, intelligence and terror networks -- walked into my cabin looking a tad sheepish. "Er," he fumbled with a notebook (not the laptop version, just the paper one), "I have a story idea."
He told me about Savita Bhabhi - the fact that it was the first desi online graphic novel, in episodic AND multi-lingual format. It was already a huge hit and was drawing a record number of hits. He had the contacts of the people behind the site and promised to hammer out a feature in time for our Sunday paper.
"Please do me a favour," he suddenly said as he was about to get up from his chair across my table. "Don't give me a byline for this. I mean, my regular contacts and sources would be horrified if they came across a story on Savita Bhabhi, India's first porn toon star, by me."
"Nothing doing," I said firmly. "Let the world know that you are versatile." Red-faced, he skulked out.
The rest of the team wanted to know more about the hot bhabhi. Like me, nobody even knew that Savita Bhabhi existed in a virtual form. We logged on to the site, and there were collective (and appreciative) oohs and aahs and a few horrified "Omigod, what have we here?" all around. Personally, I thought it was bit too graphic and bordered dangerously on the obscene -- but then, the numbers said it all: like the countless surveys reinforce every now and then, Savita Bhabhi too was a thumping endorsement that sex was top of the mind. It definitely deserved to be a story.
We had originally planned it for the Sunday paper page one anchor, but the gentleman heading the desk that Saturday night looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses. "An anchor on a porn graphic novel by a chap who covers terror? Do you have any idea what you are asking me to do? Boss, this is a family newspaper... I agree it's a, ahem, very interesting story but, please, can we carry it inside?"
That's what we did. And it became the most read story in the edition and the ‘star reporter' was inundated with mails, mostly from readers who wanted more details about the website (apparently, many people were spelling the name of the website wrong!).
A few weeks ago, someone informed me that the government of India has issued closing down orders to the site. Then, a few days ago, I read a piece in The Huffington Post that said the land that gave the world the Kamasutra suddenly feels Savita Bhabhi is persona non grata because she was too hot to handle. And the site has now been closed down.
Reports elsewhere mention the site got over 60 million visitors a month; of this, more than 70 per cent traffic came from India. If the Internet market had been bigger in India, I am sure the figures would have been much more inflated. What this proves is that whatever people are saying, a hell of a lot of Indians had been flocking to the site - totally refuting the fact that we consider this an assault on our ‘culture'.
Personally, Savita Bhabhi is not my cup of tea, so it's very simple: I wouldn't visit the site. I have the option not to. But why dictate what others can or cannot watch or see or experience in a free country? Besides, isn't porn freely available on the Internet in any case? Isn't that one reason why we loudly proclaim that we are more ‘liberal' than countries like China and in the Middle East, where online porn is categorically banned?
By blocking Savita Bhabhi, we have just proved that we, as a nation, are such imbeciles that we do not know where to draw the line. Our individual actions and decisions have to be controlled and regulated by people who govern us. So what next? Polygraph tests for everyone to determine whether or not one is indulging in sexual fantasies?
Pritish Nandy wrote a piece for The Times of India and I thought he went really overboard with his ooh-sex-with-the-bra-salesman-is-such-a-cool-thing bit. He got hit by a barrage of comments; most of them were full of condemnation at his ‘perverse' thoughts, and there was righteous anger at his calling women in a sari ‘sexy'.
But that's not the point.
My point is: Savita Bhabhi has been shown the door because it "misrepresents" Indian culture. If we actually start believing that savitabhabhi.com can deal a body blow to our culture, we don't even have the right to say we have a strong culture.
Surely, our culture can withstand Savita Bhabhi's sexual romps: so why couldn't we extend our hospitality to her?