Unparalleled stupidity: the Amul Macho Ad

What exactly do they take us for? The Information and Broadcasting Ministry at the Centre headed by none other than the old warhorse Priyaranjan Dasmunshi has banned the Amul- macho underwear Ad. Are we all children then? What exactly is offensive there? There are no explicit sex scenes, no paedophilia, no advocacy of designer drugs and no attempt to disturb the religious sentiments of Hindus and Muslims.

But the Ad itself is a stupendous fit of imagination. I can certainly bet my bottom rupee that it is well beyond the limited I.Q of a Doordarshan voyeur. Dasmunshi should restrict himself to what he loves doing best: to be available at the beck and call of the Dynasty of New Delhi.

As I was saying, the Ad is a gem of imagination. A village belle from the much-maligned Hindi belt of our country ventures to the local pond to wash clothes. Other women in the scene describe her as a newly married bride who had her nuptials the previous night. As she descends the steps to reach the water, we feel poetry in motion. Her gait evokes a lascivious desire in a man’s heart; it is tantalizingly seductive. It recalls the walk of Sakharam Binder’s promiscuous wife in Vijay Tendulkar’s play of the same name and that of Shabana Azmi’s in Mandi.

More provocations are to follow. She takes the underwear of her husband’s in her two hands and stretches it as if demonstrating his erect penis ready for intercourse. The onlookers are aghast. She repeats the procedure twice.

Now she sits down and washes the underwear by scrubbing it with soap. Her movement is slow, gentle and rhythmic. We get a profile and can see that her buttocks are rising up and coming down. It mimics the movement of the male during coitus. I really do not understand why a lady journalist described it as a woman having an orgasm. During a successful intercourse a woman’s thighs goes out and comes in, out and in.

Later on the movements become rapid strokes, as man discharges his semen at the height of ecstasy. The women on the stairs, who are watching this scene and are obviously menopausal, are envying the bride her success at last night’s performance.

Indeed brilliant! And our killjoy minister has the gall to wipe this Ad from the network! Is the minister too menopausal? Here indeed is the idealizing of womanhood. The lady in question is fantasizing an erotic commerce with her husband. She has had the experience the night before and to her it had been simply divine.

But the twist is elsewhere. It is a rare glimpse of a woman fantasizing about the sexual pleasure of a man during intercourse. Men are known to fantasise about the woman of their dreams when having sex but the fantasy of a woman is closely guarded, as if women do not have sexual desires.

When will the blockhead of a Minister will ever understand?