Don’t worry, it’s normal: Going deep with India’s leading sexologist

MUMBAI — “I am a 20-year-old unmarried girl. I have a strange problem.” Thus begins a question Mahinder Watsa, India’s favorite sex columnist, received recently. But as the 92-year-old sexologist has concluded after fielding hundreds of similar queries daily for more than 50 years, the problem is, in fact, rarely strange. “Whenever I see a handsome man, I feel like having sex with him. Does this happen with every girl?” the writer elaborates. Watsa repeats what he has told many others since he began penning his column on sexual health for a women’s magazine in the 1960s: “It’s normal.”

For anyone else, it might be tiring to wake up every day to an inbox full of these questions. Men ask about the consequences of masturbation (“Will it make my penis shrink?” “Is it wrong to fantasize only about Hollywood stars while doing it?”); women want to know how to have sex while protecting their hymen; and just-married couples are uncertain “which way to put it.” Fully half of the queries he gets are about masturbation. “I think I will have a burnout one of these days,” Watsa says from his sea-facing apartment in a posh neighborhood of the city.

In a country where the three-letter word is veritably taboo, Watsa has become an unlikely expert — at an unlikelier age — at counseling his readers on all things sex, in a tone that shifts from wicked friend to kindly uncle.

This summer, his words made the leap from column to book. “It’s Normal,” Watsa’s guide to sex and sexuality for average Indians, was released in the domestic market in June. The title is a nod to the Indian tendency to equate sexual desire with abnormality, a belief that he has spent a lifetime dispelling. In the book, Watsa explains human sexual anatomy, defines complex notions such as love, partnership and consent, and takes on popular myths surrounding homosexuality and bondage. 

The book came out as policy-makers first began making efforts to impose stricter state controls on matters of sexual freedom. In recent months, the government has sought to regulate activities such as watching porn, engaging in homosexual sex and buying vibrators online. Even in Mumbai, the most liberal of India’s cities, police officers have made headlines by patrolling public and private spaces for any sign of unauthorized pleasure.

On Aug. 8, officers raided hotel rooms on the outskirts of the city. They interrogated hotel receptionists to find out if couples had registered under different last names, i.e., if pairs of guests were unmarried. Then offending guests were hauled downstairs, their families called and the couples, many of them college students, charged with indecent behavior in public. In interviews with the press, some of the young people involved spoke of wanting to end their lives.

“Obnoxious, ignorant behavior,” Watsa says of the police action. “They have no idea of how much harm it does to young people.... They also raid pubs to harass people who are drinking. So what if they are? It makes people do things in secret.” 

Watsa is a sprightly man, his tall frame clothed in a buttoned-up shirt and high-waisted trousers. On a recent Tuesday morning he was bent over his desk surrounded by files and notebooks in the room where he has worked for decades. He may complain of weak hearing and poor memory, but he is alert to every little sound or movement. From time to time, he reminds his young assistant to check on the status of events and appointments. “It can get crazy sometimes,” says Trishla Jain, who helps him with his work. “His phone number is listed on Just Dial [a popular listings service], and people call through the day with urgent problems,” she says.

Many of these phone calls are from young people desperate for advice: about the right way to use a condom or the best time to pop an emergency contraceptive pill. Watsa tries not to be judgmental. “So long as it doesn’t harm the general society, it’s up to people to live their sexual lives as they wish,” he says. “Someone tells me he masturbates 10 times a day. I can’t tell him what he’s doing is wrong. But I’ll make him wonder if this should be the only thing he should do for sexual pleasure.”

It wasn’t until after Watsa began writing about sexual health for men’s and women’s magazines that he grew concerned about the general lack of knowledge about sex in India. “In 1976, I became involved with the Family Planning Association of India and started to work on a sex education program,” remembers Watsa. It also marked the beginning of his long and complicated negotiations with government policy-makers: Though sex education is banned in most states, two or three decades ago, the education department of the central government invited Watsa and a few of his colleagues to prepare a sex ed curriculum. A couple of years later, when the module was ready, “the ministry, they said no, nothing doing. They feel when you are teaching sex education you are teaching boys and girls how to do intercourse.”

The trick for dealing with skittish audiences, he has found, is to speak the right language. “Even if we introduce sex education, how do I bring up alternate sexuality or masturbation, which is banned in many religions?” When he used to speak at Roman Catholic schools, Watsa says, he would tell the administrators that he would not discuss banned topics, but would keep a box in the back of the room where students could drop notes with their questions. “And unsurprisingly,” he adds, “most of the questions from the students were about these very things, so I would explain these to them in private. That way the nuns would also feel they weren’t committing a sin by allowing this discussion in the class.”

Dealing with detractors is much less easy for the famous doctor, even though he makes sure to engage with them all. His weekly column in Mumbai Mirror is one of the newspaper’s most read; it is also among its most controversial. Occasionally, the editor gets called down to local police stations to deal with complaints from agitated readers. “We have an FIR [First Information Report] against us from five years ago claiming that children are affected by this column,” says Watsa. (An FIR is a document prepared by the police in response to allegations of a crime.) Watsa says he is to blame for another, older FIR. “Some idiot wrote that ‘I have come to my mother-in-law’s house in England for a visit and I have started having sex with her. What do you think?’ I thought of responding in the English manner, so I wrote back, ‘Make hay while the sun shines.’” The woman was offended and filed a complaint with the police. Tongue in cheek, Watsa protests, “All I had meant was sunshine doesn’t last very long in England.”

Then there are those custodians of chastity who convey their outrage in letters and emails. One fervent critic compared Watsa’s columns to pornography, writing, “By answering questions about sex, you have only given rise to more questions and have helped create a culture of the mind around sex.”

Watsa clearly derives amusement from his correspondence, however thorny. More difficult for him to explain is the gratitude of strangers. He searches for words, his right hand kneading his creased forehead, to describe an email he recently received from a reader. An 18-year-old woman who started reading his column two years ago describes it as a “hot topic of discussion in schools and colleges” and a “lifesaver for many.” “I am still thinking how could it matter to anyone so much,” says Watsa.

He’s far too self-deprecating to see himself as a voice of clarity cutting through the moral paranoia around sex in the country today; all he knows, Watsa says, is what he has to do. He takes all his responsibilities seriously — whether it’s encouraging a 70-year-old man to unlock the female orgasm, reminding a woman curious about threesomes to make sure “newcomers are infection-free” or cautioning a “happily married man of masochist nature” that before he decides to “make love” to his pet goat, he must ask her “whether she would like it.”