Porn Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Video clips are mere breach of privacy. If there is any taboo that must shake the nation’s consciousness awake, it’s the violence on the marginalised.

- Natasha Badhwar

PERHAPS I should start with a thank you. I usually don’t watch viral videos. After spending some of my best years being an enthusiastic cog in the wheel of the news television industry, I feel like I have seen it all. I need to see no more. Sometimes I click on baby animal videos, but I will confess that I switch tabs before they are over.

This week, however, I watched a “sex scandal” video featuring the 24-year-old Hardik Patel, a dynamic leader of the Patidar community in Gujarat. I liked it so much I showed it to my 12-year-old daughter after I had seen it once.

The action is set in what seems to be a hotel room. A man and a woman enter the frame. She sits down with her back to the camera. I note his pink shorts. She is wearing a blue top. She makes a phone call to her mother and speaks in a reassuring tone. He walks around the bed figuring out the light switches. She shows him something on her phone. Other people are mentioned. He listens. She talks. He is quiet. There is a kind of peace between them. A comfortable rapport. After a while, the main light is switched off, the dim nightlight remains on, and both the man and woman lie down on the bed. The camera’s aperture can no longer capture details and the video ends there.

By the time it ended, I forgot that the video was supposed to be scandalous. It’s like the opening scene from a realistically shot film. It would be a director’s dream to have actors so comfortable in their skin. I remind myself that this is real life, for God’s sake. This is an everyday, commonplace interaction between two consenting adults.

This is what a world at peace looks like if you break it down to its atoms and molecules.