By escalating a trivial issue, a Thiruvananthapuram school has foregrounded India’s discomfort with the public display of affection, and demonstrated that institutions are as eager to sanction it as Valentine’s Day vigilantes. A class XII student has been severely penalised for hugging a girl and uploading the images on social media. The girl and her family were not uncomfortable about it but the school was, and suspended the boy, though both parties had apologised. When the boy’s family moved the state child rights body for his reinstatement, the school read it as a transgression and invoked higher institutions. In a public display of disaffection, it secured a stay from the high court, which was happy to agree that its reputation had been compromised.
While the boy has decided to approach the courts, too, to secure his right to education, his right to privacy already stands irreversibly violated. The school and the court have exposed themselves as inadequate and misguided guardians of childhood. Indian society has lately developed a peevishly moralistic streak, but the school has plumbed a new low by insisting, in effect, that repression is now part of the curriculum. Sex education is a component of the skills that schools are expected to impart, which empower children to negotiate the world on the journey to adulthood. Its importance has grown in recent times, since the early onset of puberty, long before marriageable age, has become commonplace.
Guided by a taboo-ridden value system, both these institutions have assumed seriously compromising positions. When baffled by such perplexities, it is customary to marvel at the paradox of a prudish country which has produced the world’s best-known sex manual. But this is an ignorant comparison. The Kama Sutra is not just a racy crash course in applied anatomy. It is a manual on social and conjugal relations, for preparing young people to take on the duties of adulthood, the most significant being the pursuit of happiness. That is precisely what our schools and institutions seem no longer equipped to provide.
