Savita Bhabhi, the queen of “Indian porn toons” (www.kirtu.com)
For me 2010 is an arbitrary number for a planet that is about 4.5 billion years old in a universe that is about 14 billion years old. So is 2011 and every other number that precedes and succeeds it. A section of the human race just pulled it out of its collective arse and said, “Here, follow this.” And we all do. That’s as far as it goes. It means nothing and has no special sanctity attached to it. Also, it has no significance other than what we choose to give it. As long as you remember this I am fine with using any arbitrary number. You can call 2011 7850 if you please and I will accept it.
With that bile out of my way, here is what I actually wanted to write about. Occasionally, I do look at the kinds of searches that bring people from around the world to this blog. Yesterday I spent about half an hour looking at the various statistics about this blog and established something I had sensed all along. In 2010 the search that brought the highest number of visitors from across the world to my blog is (pretend you hear the drumroll)… Savita Bhabhi and her bra/boobs. (The number is high within the low number that visits the blog.)
Savita Bhabhi, as some of you of the scholastic bent of mind would know, is supposed to be the most popular fictional porn “toon” character of Indian origin on the Internet. I have written only one post about Savita Bhabhi in the context of how the Indian state of Goa was unhappy at the fact that the creators of the porn fiction comic had based one of their issues in Goa. ‘Savita Bhabhi is tormenting Goa’s moral police’ was the headline of the post on September 21, 2010. The post was in response to an IANS story that quoted Goa’s tourism chief Nikhil Desai saying that those who visit such sites are “perverts.”
"People who visit these sites are perverts. There will be perverts in this world. I think people who really want to go on a clean holiday will not go by the impression of Goa created on these websites," Desai has been quoted as saying by Mayabhushan Nagvenkar of the IANS. I particularly like the emphasis ‘There will be perverts in the world.’ Indeed, there will be Mr. Desai, there will be.
Of all the search combinations that I read in my data the funniest was “bhabhi in bra.” I think it came from someone in Delhi, which somehow seems appropriate. So there is actually someone in Delhi who sits in front of his/her computer, cracks the knuckles and punches in “bhabhi in bra” in Google search. Those of us who know the cultural significance of bhabhi (specifically meaning a brother’s wife and broadly, any good friend’s wife) know that while at the loftier level she is seen as a mother figure, at the baser level she is also seen as a person who can, if she chooses to, introduce one to forbidden pleasures. More about that some other time.
What this data has showed me is that no matter what I write, from our anthropocentric delusions of grandeur to full behavioral modernity and from Schrodinger’s cat to President Obama’s India visit, ultimately what most concentrates my readers’ minds is the profound question – Is Savita Bhabhi is wearing a bra? Brilliant.