On Children's Day, top Indian minister tells students how he watched porn in adolescence
Manohar Parrikar, former Indian defence minister and current chief minsiter of Goa, candidly speaks about how he was almost caught for watching porn films.
A top Indian lawmaker shared incidents from his own adolescence, including watching porn films, with school students while delivering a lecture at an event to mark national Children's Day on Tuesday (14 November).
Manohar Parrikar, chief minister of Goa and former federal defence minister, recounted how he and his brother were almost caught by their mother for watching a soft-porn film in a cinema hall.
Children's Day is India is celebrated to commemorate the birthday of the country's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was popular among children as Chacha (uncle). Various events are often conducted by educational institutions and other organisations to celebrate the occasion on 14 November every year.
In one of such event this year, Parrikar was invited to address a student gathering during when he candidly switched to speaking about watching adult films after a student asked him about the kind of movies he watched in his schooldays.
"We would not just watch movies, we have also watched adult movies of that era," said Parrikar, a top political leader from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). "There was a popular (adult) movie. I was an adult at that time. Me and my brother had gone to watch it. During the interval, when the lights came on and I realised that my neighbour was sitting next to me. This neighbour used to chat with my mother every evening. I told myself, we are dead," he added according to the local news agency IANS.
Parrikar continued describing how he along with his brother left the hall right in the middle of the ongoing porn film and lied to their mother how they mistook it for a regular feature film.
"The next day, the neighbour excitedly called my mother to tell her that Manohar and Avdhoot had gone for an [adult] movie. My mother asked him, I know which movie they went for, but why did you go for the movie? You have to pre-empt certain thing," he said.
While topics related to sex remain largely a taboo in India, soft-porn movies are often screened — sometimes illegally and in between the feature films — in cinema halls in semi-urban and rural areas.