PEOPLE IN our country get embarrassed the moment you utter the S-word. Most of all our politicians. They are the gate-keepers of morality in our country after all. Where would we be without them? That’s why, in their wisdom, they have stopped sex education being introduced in our state for the umpteenth year in a row. Having lived and gone to school in the US for four years, I am one of the few students in the state who has actually been given sex education. I didn’t actually know it at the time because it was taught under Health Education.

There are many misconceptions about sex education. The first is that it teaches innocent young children how to have sex. Firstly, by ninth standard there really aren’t any innocent students. They say school kids, nowadays, are experimenting more with sex than the previous generation. Well this may make me sound pretty old, even though it’s just been 4 years since I left school. But I knew kids in school in India who’d had sex in standard eight. Secondly, sex education doesn’t teach students the mechanics of sex. It’s much more like a biology lesson than anything else. I actually learned about the act when I observed some of my schoolmates making some obscene gestures and then realised that what I’d learned this in health class.

I think the problem of introducing sex education in India is political more than anything else. A lot of what we learned in health class in seventh standard is actually in the biology syllabus of class twelve in India. But since not everybody takes biology in Std 12, many students miss out on some essential information.

It would be a capital idea to simply introduce the human reproductive system into the science syllabus in Std 9. When it’s science, after all, nobody, not even politicians take much offence. And students get some much needed information. Such as how AIDS spreads. How pregnancy occurs (no more Aishwarya Rai in ’Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam’, thinking Salman will get her pregnant by kissing her). And how to be safe and healthy. They deserve that much.