India Uncut

The majority of condoms manufactured in India are used not to make love but to make saris. AP reports:

Only a quarter of condoms made in India are used for sex, most of the others are used to make saris, toys and bathroom slippers, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

The condoms are valuable to manufacturers because of the lubricant on them. Sari weavers place the condoms on their thread spools and the lubricant on the prophylactics is rubbed off on the thread, making it move faster through their sewing machines, the newspaper quoted an Indian industry official as saying.

This was actually reported by the BBC a year ago, in a story by Nivedita Pathak that also listed some other uses condoms are put to. For example, they are used by villagers to carry water in fields ("my water carrier is bigger than yours"), for waterproofing ceilings, and they are sometimes "placed over the ends of guns to protect them in desert sandstorms". Yes, real guns. Not euphemisms.

The Economist says:

AIDS is no respecter of morals: it affects babies as they are born, children as they are orphaned, nurses as they are accidentally pricked by a dirty needle, patients of any kind as they receive a transfusion of contaminated blood. Indeed, it affects the entire society in which its victims live and die.

It also affects the faithful wife of the unfaithful husband. That is why the ABC slogan so beloved by the Bush administration—Abstinence, Be faithful and Condoms—is, in practice, a slap in the face to many people. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief commits at least a third of its promised $15 billion to “abstinence until marriage” as the main way of stopping the spread of AIDS. It also urges that the use of condoms be confined to people who engage in “risky behaviour”—prostitutes or couples with one member who is HIV-positive. Many groups are reported to be ending or reducing their condom-promotion schemes to qualify for American money.

That might not matter if condoms did not matter, but they do.

Oh yes they do. Millions might already have died because of Pope John Paul II's opposition to the use of condoms, and the catholic church isn't alone in thinking in this manner. Denial of AIDS is widespread in official circles in India because of misguided nationalism, and there's probably a moral angle to it there as well, given the sanctimony that pervades our politics. But the disease inflicts more than just prostitutes and gay people, and it affects all of us. And there could be nothing more immoral than turning a blind eye to it.

How odd that on the day I blog about an Indian gent with a 16-inch thingie, news should emerge that Indian gents. on the whole, are not like that at all.

On the contrary, they have small dicks.

BBC reports:

A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men.

The study found that more than half of the men measured had penises that were shorter than international standards for condoms.

The Times of India quotes a researcher as saying:

As per international standards, most condoms are 150 mm to 180 mm in length and 44 to 56 mm in width. But data collected in Mumbai till 2001 showed that 60% of the participants measured 126 to 156 mm in length and 30% between 100 and 125 mm.

Here, this will help you do the math. Most of us, needless to say, won't need to go here.

(Link via separate emails from Gautam John, P, Ashutosh, Happy-Go-Lucky, Quizman, Patrix, Anand, Naveen and Shane. Calm down, boys!

LPSG link via Gautam, to whom I boasted, "My organ is so massive that when I ride a woman's cycle, someone can sit in front." Lies, I assure you.

And ah, here's a previous post that mentions thingie length.)

Update: Gautam points me to discussions on this subject at Digg and Reddit.

Update 2: This may not be related, but ToI reports: "Raj Thackeray is in a mood for ball dance."

Update 3: Heh. (Again, via email from Gautam.)

"Students use condoms to cheat at exams," a news story on Sify.com reveals. It says: "Invigilators at Jai Narain Degree College were baffled to find eight condoms hidden inside the underpants of a boy taking BA-II examination in Jai Narain Degree College. Inside the condoms, chits with short answers, tips and formulae were neatly packed."

This is, it seems, quite a common phenomenon. And there's more. The story reveals: "At Eram College, a girl was found hiding her chits in what the invigilators called 'an unmentionable place'. When the chits were recovered, she swallowed them."

Eeks.

"Daddy, daddy, I don't want strawberry icecream."

"Ok, beta, then what do you want?"

"Strawberry condom."

No doubt it is because they fear conversations like this erupting across the country that "[a]uthorities want to stop the daytime airing of a television advertisement promoting flavoured condoms saying it is obscene and in bad taste." The flavours include strawberry, chocolate and banana. Hmm.

Arjun Narayan, who mailed me the link, points me to what certainly must rank as the line of the day:

A senior DKT official said the flavoured condoms were not meant to promote oral sex, but to encourage couples who do not like the smell of latex.

That's a stunning, stunning insight. I just hope I don't think of it the next time I engage in carnal activity, or I might just start vibrating with laughter and, um, spill the strawberry icecream.

In a feature in Wired titled "Battle of the New Atheism," Gary Wolf writes about "the challenge posed by the New Atheists":

We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil.

I'm not sure if that accurately describes the positions of the 'New Atheists' Wolf refers to -- Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett -- but it's certainly one that I don't hold. I'm an atheist for the simple reason that I have never seen any evidence to prove that God exists, just as I've never seen any reason to believe in the FSM or flying fairies or moons made of cheese. But if there is something I hold sacred, it's individual freedom. And that freedom includes the right to believe in whatever you want, as long as you don't impinge upon the freedom of others with your beliefs.

Thus, I see no reason to object if you believe in Jesus or Allah or Krishna or Mogambo, as long as your beliefs don't have, to use jargon, negative externalities. Indeed, it is the negative externalities I would object to, not religious belief per se. So while I'd condemn the Vatican's opposition to condoms and birth control, and the oppression of women carried out under the name of Islam, or the rubbish the Hindutva brigade regularly rolls out, I would certainly not demand that people stop believing in Christianity or Islam or Hinduism. Any atheist taking a "for-atheism-or-against-atheism" stance risks driving moderates away.

Wolf quotes Glen Slade, an atheist, offering a counterpoint to this. Slade says:

Moderates give a power base to extremists. A lot of Catholics use condoms, a lot of Catholics are divorced, and a lot don't have a particular opinion about whether you are homosexual. But when the Pope stands up and says, 'This is what Catholics believe,' he still gets credit for speaking for more than a billion people.

That's a valid point, of course, and that phenomenon extends across religions. But I'd still hold that attacking the externalities while respecting people's rights to believe in whatever religion they want is the practical way to go.

Dawkins and Dennett are two of my favourite modern thinkers, by the way, and I heartily recommend all their books. The two on the subject of God and atheism that Wolf's article refers to are Dawkins's The God Delusion and Dennett's Breaking the Spell. And though I've linked to it before, let me again recommend that you read this excellent interview of Douglas Adams, in which Adams explains why he is "a radical atheist."

(Wired link via email from reader Aki Kumar.)

Update: Rishi Iyengar points me to this excellent essay by Dawkins from a few years ago: Snake Oil and Holy Water.

... than barbers?

You can't quite walk away when they start talking to you about it, after all. The stand-out sentence in the report linked to above:

Eleven thousand packets of condoms have been distributed by the 85 barbers in the past six months in Lajpat Nagar alone.

It's a relief that no one's yet protested the distribution of condoms on moral grounds.

(Link via email from Sanjeev Naik, who has a detailed post on fighting AIDS, with many links, here.)

CNN-IBN reports that the Indian soldiers who are part of the UN's peacekeeping troops in Lebanon have been ordered to " abstain from sex during the course of their stay." A gentleman named Colonel Aditya Madan has been quoted as saying:

Condoms are a secondary part. That need comes into picture in case an army person indulges in sex. But I'm so confident that there's no need for any precaution because the boys are going to abstain from sex anyways.

I wonder what Colonel Madan's confidence stems from. Perhaps there are special nanocomputers inserted into the organs of these Indian soldiers. And every time the organ in question approaches another kind of, um, organ, they get an electric shock. I can imagine an apologetic soldier telling his Lebanese paramour:

I'm sorry dear, you're electric. But, er, so am I.

I'm a huge fan of keeping the peace.

(Link via email from Sanjeev.)

Well, it's amusing all right, but why on earth would the Financial Express link this one-sentence story from the front page of their website? (Screengrab here, headline's at the bottom, in bold.) Is it really so newsworthy that a company named Cupid Ltd is supplying condoms to the "Indian ministry of health and family welfare?"

On the other hand, I must confess that I didn't click on any of the other headlines on that page. I hope that doesn't mark a worrying trend.

(Link via email from MadMan.)

Well, not to the contraceptives, but to the word itself. The thought police is out in force.

"[O]ne room at a Navi Mumbai lodge, one girl and three condoms."

I hope Mr Patil is happy now.

Condoms from China are doing really well in Gujarat. Why so? Well, because it's garba time! (Link via email from Arzan Sam Wadia.)

It's not all naughty business, though. True love also blooms.

Condoms.

Assam Rifles takes a stand against one of the Indian Army's biggest enemies: AIDS.

Previous posts on the subject: 1 and 2.

JA Prufrock (as opposed to JA Prufrock; someone get these guys together to party) informs us that the The Catholic Bishop's Conference of India is upset at the Hindustan Times. Why so? Because, according to this agencyfaqs! report, HT has "borrowed a quotation: 'Let there be light' from the Old Testament of the Bible." They are also pissed off at a recent television commercial for Rin, which shows Amitabh Bachchan in a cassock.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people continue to die of AIDS in Africa because of the Catholic Church's opposition to using condoms. But that, I presume, is the will of God.

PTI reports:

A man has moved the Allahabad High Court challenging his wife's right to abortion on the grounds of being physically unfit to deliver a baby.

He argued that his consent should be taken before any move by her in this regard.

[...]

He said the concept of fatherhood was similar to the concept of motherhood and the consent of the father must be made mandatory.

"The moment a woman conceives, the right of the father begins," said the petitioner, adding it would amount to violation of Article 21 (Right to Life and Liberty) of the Constitution if the wife went ahead with abortion.

I am disgusted by this argument. If a woman wants to have an abortion, no one has a right to stop her. This illustrates what I'd written about here and here: too many Indian men still think of women as property. I wouldn't be surprised if they started getting them insured. Rape insurance, anyone?

Update: Two quotable responses have hit my inbox in response to this post. First, Ashish Hanwadikar writes:

Granted that womb belongs to the woman. But what about the unborn child? Or even that is a property of the woman and she can decide to dispose of her property as she see fit?

Could you care to explain how can one person come to have absolute property rights over another person?

This takes us into the knotty area of definitions: is a foetus a person? If so – and that question is at the heart of the debate over abortion – then the debate over whether a husband has a right to stop his wife from having an abortion is moot, because an abortion itself would be morally wrong. If not, then Ashish's question is wrong.

Indraneel Kanaglekar raises the question:

[L]et's say she decides not to abort, and the "father" wants her to, is he liable for supporting the kid? If yes, why?

Whether the father is liable for supporting the child is dependent on a lot of other external factors, but his wanting to abort the kid, in my mind, would not remove any responsibility off his shoulders, because he fathered the child in the first place.

Sigh, what a mess. Just use condoms, ok?

The Telegraph reports:

On January 29, the crime branch [in Ahmedabad] received an anonymous letter from a devotee who said a CD showing four sadhus engaging in sex with women was being sold. The police identified the quartet and one of them was caught with three touts who had arranged for women to be taken to the sadhus.

The gentleman arrested is "[a] sadhu of the famous Junagadh Swaminarayan temple" named Bhaktiswarup, and "all of them [the sadhus] belong to the original Swaminarayan sect of Vadtal set up some 200 years ago." PTI quotes DG Vanzara, the police officer in charge of the case, as saying: "Several books containing nude photographs of women, a copy of Vatsayana's Kamasutra, condoms, contraceptive pills and sleazy literature were also recovered during the raid at Bhaktiswarup's residence at Junagadh."

The moral police in India, of course, is being kept busy, with another MMS scandal erupting in Vadodara, where a girl training to be a teacher allegedly "used her camera phone to capture images of her hostelmate taking a bath, then sent the 10-second clip to her boyfriend through MMS. The boy forwarded the MMS to some more friends."

Our young are losing their innocence, our moral guardians would complain. But at least they aren't losing their Lexus.