Sex and the city: Part I

Chennai, it seems, has suddenly become the most preferred destination for journalists from all over the country. In the last one year or so, this has become a very sex-y city indeed. Add to it a liberal a la carte' of filmy glamour and there is pretty much nothing else you will need. Your soaring circulation figures will tell the rest of the story. Little surprise then that tabloid journalism has well and truly arrived in the city.
First came the Sankaracharya story--a more perfect potboiler one could not have asked for--with its
cornucopia of religion, sex, films, murder and revenge. A journalist friend who had come down from New Delhi could not stop rubbing his hands in glee: ``This should keep us going for at least six more months.
Till now, the south (India) has been having too good a press while Mumbai and New Delhi earned the reputation of naughty metros. Time you got your due!''
Not that we did not have this do-you-know-who-did-it-and-how-with-whom style of reporting earlier. A magazine like Kumudham, for example, combined patches of serious reporting with kiss-`n-tell stuff. However, with the arrival of the eveninger Tamil Murasu on the scene, even that fig-leaf has been whisked away.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that in two out of the three instances of moral policing that have rocked the city in the past few months, the daily has played an agenda-setting role. In the Kushboo case, it initially lost the initiative to India Today and Thina Thanthi but made sure it caught up resoundingly.
In the Park case, it virtually taunted the police into raiding the hotel with its `What are you going to do now, Mr.Commissioner?" poser. So it was that Kushboo ended up skewered on the crosswires of an unholy, even cannibalesque, media feeding frenzy.
Be that as it may, is Chennai `having its due', as my journalist friend put it? In a city which is home to the world's most hang-it-all-out film industry, is sex-talk suddenly getting more open ( with all this talk of pre-marital sex/virginity/AIDS control/safe sex, if you block out the context, you could easily believe yourself to be in Bangkok and not in thayir sadham/filter kapi-loving Madras-going-on-Chennai)?
And what about this incestuous link between the `new morality' (which, the NDTV informs us, is what has taken over Chennai) and that insidious western import, keyhole journalism?
Even as I write this, Tamil Murasu has outdone itself this evening: in its latest caught-on-camera act, it has a woman journalist posing as a customer to nab a male prostitute (``I like rubbing bodies'', he says in a video clipping aired on Sun TV). The stated motto: to show that male prostitution is alive and well in Chennai. What you saw on the screen: the prominently displayed video-grab of the website offering male prostitutes (in case you did not want to miss the name).
What we read: women are asking for it these days (remember the ``Is this gender equality?'' poser which accompanied the daily's photograph of a lip-locked couple at the Park Hotel?). Tag to this the Anna University Vice Chancellor's quip that ``inappropriately'' dressed women are a threat to campus peace and
the vexatious petitions in various legal fora against Kushboo (one even said the petitioner had lost his mental peace because of her and that she was a threat to law and order) and what you see is not a city that is newly discovering its under-the-bedcovers identity but a schizophrenic metropolis torn between its wanting-to-go-global avant gardeism and a tortured socio-political legacy which preaches the one-man-one-woman ad-wobble foisted by polygamous male political leaders.
And so, more sex please, we're Tamils....