Should we have theatres for porn films?

Who says the age of miracles is over. India which has always been a copulating country is finally also becoming an erotic one.
If Vijay Anand succeeds, we’ll soon have X-rated cinema halls all over India. It seems certain that if this audacious chairperson of the Censor Board succeeds in de-linking us from the archaic censor guidelines, pornography will no longer remain a backstreet activity in our sacred land.
I have always wondered how sex, the very seed of our birth, can be bad? Sex is a good part of life. But in India, people have a dual attitude to this subject.
It has a place in books and conversations but on screen, we pretend as if sex doesn’t exist.
It is sad that in this age of demystification, where the world is talking about human clones and test-tube babies, an average Indian craving for pornographic products is made to feel sinful.
I still remember how embarrassed a senior actor felt when I ran into him in an X-rated cinema hall in London where I went to watch The Last Tango in Paris.
Even today, he blushes when I remind him of that incident. I hope more and more people in India will soon be able to make and see sex movies without feeling as if they were an aberration.
Pornography, a pleasure technology for centuries, now seems to be on its way to getting its due place in this land of Kamasutra.
The male of the human species is aroused by the sight of a nude woman. Not just in the flesh but also in movies, photographs, drawings, postcards etc.
This thirst of his supports a multi-billion dollar pornographic industry worldwide. Did you know that General Motors Corp. is among the firms involved in selling sexually-explicit images?
It is reported that it sells more graphic sex films every year than Larry Flynt, the owner of Hustler empire.
It is also reported that media giant, Rupert Murdoch makes more money selling adult films through his satellite subsidiary than Playboy does with its magazine, cable and Internet businesses.
Even AT&T Corp. offers a hard-core sex channel called the Hot Network to subscribers of its broadband cable service. It also owns a company that sells sex videos to nearly a million hotel rooms.
A leading film distributor from Central India recently confessed to me that in these terrible times when no decent Hindi film is bringing in audiences to cinema halls, he was making ends meet by secretly screening X-rated foreign language films in his territory!
The production of C grade Bollywood films which has a very high dose of sex and violence remains unaffected despite economic recession.
These films have kept cinema halls afloat in these times of consumer apathy. Sex sells. Anything that titillates the libido will score big in the marketplace.
It’s high time the government realises this and makes money by streamlining this illegal transaction. Pornography existed before we were born.
Our ancestors dealt with it with maturity. It’s time we as a nation shed our repressive Victorian influences and begin afresh. Because if we don’t, we will have nothing to gain and everything to lose.