Just a Kiss?

Kiss Of Love protest in Kozikhode

So, the other day at 9 in the morning i found myself to be packed among 25 other completely random people who just like me couldn't find a seat for themselves. Pushing against the crowd and patiently absorbing the looks of disgust my fellow passengers were giving me i found myself a place beside a pole which i could lean against and stand for the next one hour. Making myself comfortable on my Newfoundland i pulled out my cellphone and started off with my daily bus routine which is plugging in my ear-pods and surfing the news.

So as soon as i opened the Times of India app, This picture of a couple engaged in a passionate lip-lock amid a crowd of angry protesters popped out. "This looks interesting" I said to myself. 'Kiss of love campaign reaches Hyderabad' read the caption. For those of you who aren't aware of this whole 'Kiss of Love' movement allow me to enlighten you. For those of you who do, well, you can skip the next 8 lines.

So, the 'Kiss Of Love'campaign started out in what is popularly known as ''God's own country" i.e Kerela when a Facebook page with the same name asked it's followers to participate in a protest against moral policing. Soon enough the page got more than 120,000 likes and with non-violent marches and protests happening in almost all major kerelan cities a new movement was born. Within a span of a few months the movement reached major metros in the country like Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and even Hyderabad. Students and youth across the country were participating actively to protest against the acts of moral policing the whole country had been witnessing for the past few
decades.

Kiss Of Love movement being promoted on a T.V show

Being born and having lived in India for well..almost 20 years now, I can say that the culture in my country is a very conservative one. Daughters aren't allowed to venture out of the safety of their homes after 7 pm, they cant go hang out with any of their boy-classmates or boys-who-are-friends, if a girl is spotted talking to a boy she incurs the wrath of her parents, her grandparents, her uncles, her aunts and everyone else who is one generation above her in the family tree. Girls are told not to talk or hang out with boys because such acts can 'defame' their household and the more she does things like these the more difficult it becomes for them to find her an eligible suitor and etc etc.

My belief is that this conservative ideology harbored by almost every Indian parent takes its roots from their desire to protect their daughters from the eyes of evil men, people who equate members of the fairer sex to a piece of meat. Now this is a feeling which almost everyone understands and can relate to. Hell no one would want their daughters or sisters or moms be exposed to the prying eyes of men whose hormones have taken over them.

And those who protest say that they want to end this fad of moral policing in India. I.e when a group of self-appointed dharmic-stalwarts take it upon themselves to ward of evil from the society in their own barbaric and twisted ways. Their most frequently used technique being beating the hell out of the boy before getting him married to his date. They say 'It is unallowable in our culture for a boy and girl who aren't married to be doing these sort of things!'

A right wing activist in a heated argument

Those people from the RSS and other saffron groups who are very active in moral policing have one unified opinion. "What will our children think?". When we are out with our kids, enjoying a lovely sunday evening stroll in the park and suddenly my son/daughter comes up to me and says 'Look mom! Those people are doing something there!' pointing towards a couple lost in their own world, what will i say to them?

Even though i'm a 19 year old kid who has watched practically every TV series from Breaking bad and Game of Thrones to House of Cards and Walking Dead, i agree with the right-wing people on this one. What message do such acts give to the kids? Now, some may argue that there's no point hiding these things from our kids as they will come to know about it someday and some might even say 'When children come across violence everyday what is wrong with a harmless kiss?'

Well, a kiss might not do anyone physical harm but when things like these occur in public, they make shameless acts appear common, They raise the bar for what can be considered as shameless or adult-rated. And this 'does' cause a lot of harm in the society. I remember back when I was a child and if any intimate love-scene or whatever came up on TV the channel would be switched immediatly now it's perfectly fine for the whole family to got to the theater and watch Katrina Kaif wearing almost nothing, dancing shamelessy to 'Chikni Chameli'. What was adult-rated yesterday is pg-15 today, what was pg-15 is now rated E for everyone. Every single year the standards for shamelessness have been coming down. Tommorow maybe they will have fully naked women in films meant for 12 year old kids.

'So what?' some might ask. 'Were all Humans, we all have desires!' they might say. Well that sir, is a topic for another blogpost some other day. What I mean to say is If two people love each other there's nothing wrong with it. But they need to set a few standards and restrict acts of intimacy to the privacy of their homes or whichever place they feel no-one will watch them.

This Kiss Of Love campaign has got one part right, the usage of violence against unarmed and innocent people is untolerable but when it becomes 'ok' for people to engage in liplocks freely will we not be living in a strange world?