Good entertainment is the best contraceptive

���Thou shalt gratify, not edify��� is the maxim we entertainers live by. It has always been this way. Small wonder the village dancing girl always threatened to take away the pontificating priest���s audience.
Unsurprising then, that in this age of instant gratification, the only way to wean oneself off something is to replace it. Mother Nature has always lured us mortals into a honey trap of happy copulation by ensuring the act is the zenith of pleasurable experience.All this in order that man self-perpetuates. In India, the Shivaling ��� a symbol of the male organ mating with the female ��� is enshrined in the inner sanctum of the temple. It is a reinforcement of the place given to pleasure in our culture.
For millions of Indians, leading drab, colourless and frustrating lives, sex is the only form of instant gratification available. For them and for all of us, sex is a painkiller, an emotional and physical pethadrine. So it was, until another contender came on the scene.
There has been a dramatic transformation in the way Indians think, engage with the world and seek gratification from roughly the middle of the 20th century. One of the major catalysts of this change has been television, which has gone from a curiosity owned by a privileged few, to the country���s most dominant force for communication and entertainment, reaching millions of homes. Almost every other home in India now has access to TV. Other than the hours we work and sleep, TV viewing is the single most prevalent activity in our lives.
Television is almost impossible to avoid. It bombards and overwhelms. Streams of images from distant lands, shaped by the world���s best image-makers, pour into our homes. And the simple Indian man suddenly goes from being a big frog in a small pond to a small fish in a vast ocean of images, where he is endlessly entertained.
On the outskirts of Naxal-infested Chhattisgarh, I remember seeing a group of men and women gaping at a television powered by a noisy generator. They were watching Star World in dumbstruck awe!
The audiovisual drug has proved to be efficient as a birth control method in our billion-plus-and-still-counting nation. Recently, when there was a cable strike and Mumbai was starved of its daily dose of television viewing, a social activist remarked that ���this entertainment blackout is going to cost the nation a lot. In our homes people will be busy making babies to amuse themselves without their TV entertainment!���
There are many who say this is too simplistic a solution to a very complex issue. What India needs is a three-pronged attack to deal with this problem. Provide riveting entertainment, which can work as a deterrent or at least delay manufacturing babies; use television as a tool to sensitize and inform people about birth control methods in an engaging, entertaining way, and focus on all-inclusive economic growth so that people participate in nation-building and find self-actualization. This, because giving birth to oneself is the highest form of self-gratification.
Last but not least, motivate Indian women through the characters in our daily soaps. Brazil found a huge drop in its population in the ���70s and ���80s. It���s been attributed to the rise in viewership of soaps, where unlike India so far, the female characters were more interested in carving out a place for themselves than being mere breeding machines. Indian soaps still glorify the suffering housewife. Imagine the revolution if women on Indian television became architects of their own destiny and captains of their own fate. Wouldn���t that be something!
Mahesh Bhatt is a filmmaker known for tackling social and sexual themes