INDIANS ACROSS THE WORLD celebrated their independence day with dampened fervour over the past week, to salvage nationalist pride out of the economics of infection and pathology of recession. While all this was happening, two incidents caught my attention.
First, was a talk show on CNN-IBN discussing whether independent India is open to homosexuality, aired during the Independence Day week. The ‘experts’ invited to speak were responding to a CNN-IBN and Hindustan Times survey in which almost 70 per cent of the respondents felt that homosexuality should be illegal. The ‘liberals’ were represented by the likes of Shyam Benegal, Mukul Keshavan and Gautam Bhan. The ‘conservative’ was a young religious leader (whose name I cannot remember) and sitting on the fence was Jaya Jaitley.
