“I am 39 years old and I have been master master, umm, masterblasting,” stammers a middle aged man, peering curiously at a popular Mumbai tabloid’s ‘Talk to the sexpert’ column. What follows are a series of hilarious snippets of Indians of all ages reading, albeit, blushingly, bizarre sexual experiences from the newspaper.
“We’re not shooting the messenger here, but in a country of every 1000 teenage girls, if 76 get pregnant between the ages of 15 and 19, shouldn’t we at least come around to the idea of saying the word, ‘penis?,” says Rohan Talwalkar, producer of Reading the Sexpert.
With vociferous opposition to sex education in the country, a porn ban and recent outrageous moral policing, an Indian Voice and Schbang thought it had to be a lot more than just another funny video on YouTube.
“We set up a fake audition and made people come in and read these accounts and once we called cut and were done laughing, we told them what it was for,” says producer Hari Bala.
The inexplicable reality is that these accounts appear in a widely circulated Mumbai tabloid and ironically, these very lines would have been censored if they appeared in a film. “The video is part of a larger initiative,” says Harshil Karia, building block at Schbang. “We launched a corresponding website, which provides helpful information on how to talk to children about sex, which further leads to a secret group on Facebook that parents can be part of which allows for discussion.”
Are they worried about the reception of the film? “We had our reservations about how people would react when we were shooting, but when we saw our own cast encourage it, I knew we could release it online,” says Talwalkar.
After all, if having sex is not against our culture, why should speaking about it be?
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