A couple of months back, I was privy to a private conversation between two bright young women in their early twenties. (Not a regular occurrence, I assure you.) So there I was, waiting for the participants of a shoot to get ready, and my focus diverted—and interest piqued—by the snatches of conversation I could hear. Work intervened, and I all but forgot about it. Suddenly, in the last leg of the shoot, one of the women volunteered information; such was the extent of their glee at the subject of discussion.
The boy was scared. Freaking out. He didn’t know what to do, and was going insane trying to figure out. This shoot was where these ladies met first, and were struck by a weird sense of having known each other. Indeed, so it came to pass, because their paths had crossed. Not paths, bodily fluids. The boy had been doing both of them. And somehow, thought they knew. No, he didn’t want them to. But they knew now. And loved the feeling of knowing. They laughed and they found friendship. The boy fell apart, because they let him know that they knew. It was a thing of the past for the girls. For the boy, it was present.
I realised immediately that something had changed. Amazingly, in my lifetime, I was witnessing a sexual revolution. From my mother, who led a moral life and never questioned norms. To my generation, who questioned but carry a weight of guilt and self-doubt. To a new, youthful sense of unbridled passion. And the women had achieved this. They questioned and they claimed.
I do believe that, as a country, we are going through a process of examination. Long-awaited. Also, fraught with the usual reaction to an unwanted question: violence.
The film that made me a filmmaker, Love in India, was a study of the idea of love and sex, and the relationship between the two. This was the beginning of my questioning. I was lucky to have been born in Bengal, bang in the centre of the Bhakti movement zone. It took me a while to get there, but when I did, it opened up to me like a hibiscus at dawn.
