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Scoop-Wallah - Life on a Delhi Daily
Scoop-Wallah - Life on a Delhi Daily is being re-published as part of Summersdale Publisher’s classic travel series on 2nd February 2009 with a new forward by the author.
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Extract - Part 2
Sindoor and Sex Continued..
There was very little gratuitous ‘thingy’ when the article was printed. It came out under the headline ‘Safe is Sexy’ and seemed innocuous. Uncleji Harry did not get a mention. The facts, figures and comments were alarming but they were twinned with two big colour pictures of laughing crowds dancing in holiday-camp settings, the text’s impact lost amidst
what looked like good clean fun. I had not said anything but I had assumed that the picture desk would go for a contrast – an image of an HIV clinic or one of the AIDS awareness campaign posters that were on the hoardings, something to act as a visual jolt.
Even with this soft approach readers were disgusted by my insinuation that their dewy offspring could be dabbling with a disease associated with what one commentator described as ‘tarts, tramps, drug addicts and the sexually perverse’. The AIDS awareness bandwagon was rolling but it was not necessarily giving the right message.
The director of a sexual health helpline in Delhi had read the article. She was concerned and depressed that some of the advertisements that were ostensibly promoting AIDS awareness were actually adding to the confusion and she rang me.
‘You know there is one advertisement, just your typical kind of ad painted up on hoardings in the standard way. It shows two men leering at a woman in a skimpy skirt, smoking a cigarette. To your average man a girl in a short skirt with a cigarette means one thing, fast, flash, easy and Westernized. Some callers responding to that ad have told us that they are safe because they do not sleep with such types of women. But the fact is that “such” types of women are not available to “such” types of men and neither are “such” types of women the only ones who could give them the virus. One of our great problems is that apart from prostitutes and gays, who are beginning to realize the impact, every other sector of society seems to feel that it is immune because they are too poor to go to prostitutes, too clean to get infected or too rich to be touched by the virus. Every day we feel that we are at war, not against HIV and AIDS but against the prejudice and ignorance.’ She took a deep breath.
You know we had a case recently where a young woman was in a government hospital suffering from AIDS and they put a placard at the end of her bed saying “Bio-hazard”. You know the ward boys, the ayahs and the nurses were treating this woman as if she was an untouchable.
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