No Sex, Please; You Are Indians!

By Vijay Prabhu

"Indians are spiritual, and it's un-Indian to have sex (tantric sex and sex with gurus excepted)." A ban on Indians having sex might help India contain its exploding population. On the other hand, India is the land of the Kama Sutra. This book of passionate satirical essays examine India's conflicted, love-hate relationship with sex and beauty queens.  The book consists of new essays as well as essays selected from the author's controversial 1997 book, “Beauty Queens, Children, and the Death of Sex,” which was censored and prevented from reaching most Indian readers. The essays suggest that the West’s policy has changed from “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” to a pro-Suitable Boy “The only good Indian male is a sexless Indian male.”.

The essays combine humor, tongue-in-cheek statement, politically incorrect commentary, and serious examination of sexual issues and of modern Indians' often tortured and confused attitudes towards sex.

The pen name "Vijay Prabhu" is used only because it is a name of the protagonist of his first novel. It is used a matter of convenience, and has no other significance whatsoever.

Around 52 pages (16,000 words).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Invisible Man Press
• Release date: Apr 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781501433177

Book preview

About this Book

Originally published by HarperCollins India in 1997, Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex, from which most of these essays (barring the satirical Preface and two short additional essays) are selected, had a controversial reception in the media (some praise, some heavy criticism) and did not reach most of its potential Indian readers, possibly due to its having violated certain taboos or offended certain powerful persons. The rights were returned to the author around three years later, and the book has been unavailable to the public in the last twelve years. By presenting four important essays that comprise the essence of that book (sexual repression, the death of sex), the author hopes to renew interest in the book and present what he considers to be an important as well as a humorous take on Indian sexuality, hypocrisy, and confusion, as well as a book that he considers to be an important milestone in his literary journey, without which a proper assessment of his work would be incomplete.

Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex is now available as an e-book (author name: Richard Crasta), but No Sex, Please: You Are Indians! continues to be made available in e-book form because it contains an original satirical Preface relating to contemporary events (2014), and yet another essay, both of which perfectly fit the title, while excluding essays that do not belong within the theme.

Table of Contents

About this Book

Preface: Stop Having Sex, and Start Atoning

An Afternoon With Miss Universe

Children and the Death of Sex

More Sex Please, We’re Indian

An Interview with Khushwant Singh

No Sex Please: You Are Indians!

The Fifth Commandment of Impressing the Whites

Do Indians Fuck?

Preface (Continued)

Other Books by the Author

Preface: Stop Having Sex and Start Atoning

In 1997, around the date of the fiftieth anniversary of India’s official independence from Britain, HarperCollins India published Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex, a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and humor, and a daring book for any married man to write and publish. This was more than 3.5 years after I had published The Revised Kama Sutra, which was also a daring book for any married man to write, but one that, thanks to its being entirely fictional, had a wide and enthusiastic critical and popular response and was described, by the standards of Indian publishing at the time, as a bestseller.

I am not sure exactly what the problem was with Beauty Queens, but most likely it had to do with its irreverence towards certain living persons who were considered sacred cows, being very powerful in India at the time; the book never received proper distribution and display, and I finally agreed to buy back the remaining copies and to take back the rights (the books ended up being either stolen or pulped, for I did not have the means to distribute, sell, store, and safeguard them, and the Indian distribution system is controlled by an unethical mafia). I still believe that some behind the scenes censorship took place and that pressure was exerted on the publisher by powerful outside forces to quietly suffocate the book with inadequate distribution and display.

However, as this book had been for me a passionate exercise in freedom of expression, which, at the time, I felt that Indians had less of (and, though I was living in America, I was still holding on to my Indian passport, despite being long eligible for U.S. citizenship — which is why the consciousness in these essays is very Indian), I have all along felt that its denial to the Indian public for more than twelve years was a loss to the cause of free expression, and I have decided to publish a few of the essays in it as an e-book.

And now that the e-book of Beauty Queen, Children and the Death of Sex has been published, why continue this book?

Because it contains ideas that are not in the original; and because its very title is an act of satire and a direct and defiant rejoinder to a certain double standard about Indians — one that still reigns in the world media and in publishing. If you purchase this book, please do so for its preface and its original essays, as well as to support an independent writer who writes as I do (and there are very few, Kancha Ilaiah and a handful of others excepted, who dare to write all the things that I have written; I am the result of many forces and influences, many accidental, and you can’t easily duplicate me).

In order to be true to the politically incorrect, untamed writer I was then (I have probably changed — matured, as they say — a bit since then), and to honor the truth instead of constantly retreating for the sake of political correctness, I have retained the language of the original in the essays from the original