I was yanked out of my virus-induced misery by the deafening shrieks of TV news anchors who, between gasps for breath, hurled words like ‘despicable,’ ‘degenerates’ and ‘uncultured.’

The apparent culprit? A YouTuber/ influencer named Ranveer Allahbadia, who asked a question that sent India’s moral Police into cardiac arrest.

And what was this heinous question? Brace yourself…

This baby-faced 31-year-old, appearing on a show run by a 27-year-old — a show infamous for its crass humour and intellectual bankruptcy — posed the question: “Would you rather watch your parents have sex every day for the rest of your life, or would you join in once to stop it forever?”

Yes, it’s crude. Yes, it’s juvenile. Yes, it’s disgusting and disturbing. But on this show, where the humour barely rises above middle school toilet jokes, are we really expecting high levels of public discourse? I was not surprised at all.

But what truly baffled me though was the magnitude of the outrage.

News anchors combusted live on air, moral outrage shot through the roof and soon, politicians and even the Indian Parliament was rocked by the ‘perv’-Ranveer ‘scandal.’

FIRs were filed, committees were formed and suddenly, this became a national issue! All this because a 31-year-old asked a dumb and disturbing, even if it was hypothetical question, on a dumb show run by a 27-year-old?

Meanwhile, in the land of selective outrage, four days after the Ranveer saga, a Chhattisgarh High Court ruled that ‘Unnatural sex with wife without her consent is not an offence.’

But no shrieking TV anchors there, no emergency Parliamentary sessions. No outrage from feminist and human rights groups and ‘intellectuals.’

Apparently, juvenile humour is a far bigger threat to Indian culture than crimes against women.

It gets better. Politicians — yes, the same breed of people who were caught watching porn inside Legislative Assemblies — now want to prosecute these two man-child internet jesters in the name of public decency. Irony just died a slow, painful death.

This isn’t new. Our media, much like our politicians, have a spectacular talent for opportunistic outrage.

We all must remember that free speech ends when violence begins. Any sane person would rather be offended than be subjected to physical violence.

That said, today, we are outraged that two youngsters are a threat to our decency. But where was this outrage when Prime Ministers and Law Ministers made statements that were abusive and could have triggered violence?

Remember when Oxford-educated Salman Khurshid, the Union Law Minister during UPA rule, at his supporters meeting threatened Arvind Kejriwal in 2012 when the latter was going to protest in the Constituency of Khurshid’s wife?

“Let him come to Farrukhabad… but let him also return from Farrukhabad,” he said, with all the subtlety of a Bollywood villain.

If that wasn’t enough, he even added, “I was made the Law Minister and was asked to wield a pen… Now it is time to replace it with blood.”

Murderous threats from a sitting Union Law Minister? Meh! Didn’t outrage anyone but a crass joke on YouTube? NATIONAL CRISIS!

Another example, remember how Mamata Banerjee once used a colourful Bengali phrase “Pichhone ki kore bamboo deya jaaye.”

It means “trying to stick a bamboo up the ass of those who are trying to do something positive.”  She even added an enthusiastic hand gesture to go with it.

No calls for her to apologise and no calls for FIR and no high-decibel TV meltdowns about                                   public probity.

What a misguided sense of outrage from the media, the Government and the ‘learned’ public.

There is more danger to the people of India from the numerous YouTube channels and influencers, peddling dangerous medical concoctions, fake news and financial schemes but have we ever heard  targeted outrage and reportage about those? No.

So, let’s be real. This Ranveer issue isn’t about protecting Indian culture, public decency or the youth. It’s about selective outrage.

Speaking of culture — what culture are we even talking about? The same one where cursing in the name of someone’s mother or sister is a national pastime? Let’s not pretend we are paragons of purity.

In North India, studies show that an average adult male casually drops a ‘Maa-Behen’ slur over 60 times a day, often in front of children.

In some parts of Karnataka, calling someone’s mother a sex worker is supposedly a term                                 of endearment!

The culture of misogynist cursing is so bad that even the Prime Minister addressed this problem in his 2022 Independence Day speech.

PM Modi himself said, “We have been casually using expletives and cuss words which are abusive and against our women. Can we not pledge to get rid of every behaviour and culture that humiliates and demeans women?”

It is very clear that our children learn to cuss in the most misogynistic manner from their elders.

Yet, somehow, Ranveer and his band of potty-mouthed pranksters are the real villains?

If crude humour offends you, the solution is simple — don’t watch it.

As for concerns about children, it is the responsibility of adults to teach them discernment.

If you fear that teenagers cannot distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate humour or between what is real and hypothetical, then your worries will likely extend far beyond comedy. After all, teenagers will soon have to make far more significant and complex decisions in life.

Today, people will make the crassest statements  to boost their likes, just as news anchors will scream about irrelevant issues to boost their TRPs.

But if we’re going to scream about threats to our culture, maybe we should start with real ones — like politicians normalising violence-triggering statements — rather than targeting two youngsters making dumb jokes online.

For now, the biggest joke here is the outrage itself.

e-mail: vikram@starofmysore.com