Savita Bhabi

I was just running through some random internet pages a while back when I found this article on the Indiatimes site. It is an excerpt from a blog post of Mr. Pritish Nandy, a renowned poet, journalist, politician, television personality, film producer and a member of Rajya Sabha. It essentially deals with the ban of a website in India by the I & B ministry of India. The website is savitabhabi.com, probably the only revolutionary female focused Indian website attracting over 60 million fans every month till existence. Mr. Nandy seriously goes up against the order from the Indian government which came in June, 2009 (I am just guessing).

“By banning her site, the I&B Ministry has demonstrated (yet again) how men want to control women all the time. What is Savita Bhabhi's greatest appeal? That she is a typical Bharatiya nari who is brave enough to demonstrate that when it comes to sex she's no pushover. I have known many women like her who pretend to succumb to the sexual politics that men incessantly play around them and yet manage to get their way by cleverly manipulating the XXL male ego. So even as they play coy, subjugated, they are actually free women who live their lives on their own terms. I admire such women and worship on their altar.” Says Mr. Nandy.

If we discuss Maslow’s need hierarchy, ‘Sex’ actually is a basic need. But (obviously) the need & contentment level vary from individual to individual. But talking about a country like India, is not it an utter shame to have such a site showing an Indian lady expressing her sexual desires? I mean I have nothing against expressing your sexual desires but sexual desires are definitely different than pure porn. Right? Well, I had come to know about the site about a year back when a friend of mine told me about it. Out of sheer curiosity, I had browsed the site same day. Believe me, I had not found a single thing that did not have a stuff to tag along a status of being a porn site.

Mr. Nandy feels the site is not a porn site as it does not have photographs of Filthy, vulgar, exploitative actual women. All it has is some comic book characters displaying harmless fun stuff. To be honest, yes. Yes, it does not have any photographs of real women. But is not it pornography when the same comic character removes the top half of her saree to show her ample breasts, drawn carefully to give it an Indian look with the extra big touch, & asking two underage boys to suck on them? (This was the only episode, I had seen that day. Trust me; I almost puked seeing that synthetic stuff.)

He feels the ‘mangalsutra’ & the ‘sindoor’ are there to show that even Indian women want to break free & this is harmless. I guess Mr Nandy “You are seriously mistaken. How can you even think it as harmless? Had the virus been allowed to spread furthermore, it would have created a disaster. Every single male would have started imagining each Indian lady as a sex starved whore.”

Final words, do not glorify this character in the name of Indian women's liberalization or the Indian women's sexual assertion. There still are obscenities quite unashamedly shown in the cartoons. So it has to be a porn site. The fans, who visited the site, never cared to see the liberated woman in her. All they imagined was a sexy Indian married lady acting as a dream girl in their fantasy world. Moreover it is humiliating the word ‘Bhabhi’. Bhabhi is considered next to a mother in Indian culture and if offensiveness is allowed then we would probably see a new site having a mother figure as the sex symbol. These are some feedbacks that I got.

My point is we can address the issues you have brought up by having ‘saree clad’ leading responsible ladies of our country, but have my words, such a site won’t even encourage half the hits what savitabhabi.com could manage. The reason is simple, it was not the liberalized Indian lady who attracted, it was porn.

Wake up! You guys are the representatives of the mass. Show some sense of responsibility.