Let's talk about sex
For decades, octogenarian Dr Mahinder Watsa has been ruffling the feathers - and bed sheets - of Mumbai with his open and candid approach to copulation, writes Amrit Dhillon
Years ago, a distressed young woman walked into Dr Mahinder Watsa's clinic in Mumbai. She was not unwell, just sick at heart. Her parents had arranged her marriage. She liked the young man but she was terrified about her wedding night. As a child, she had been sexually abused by a male relative. What would happen when her husband discovered she was not a virgin?
"He will throw me out and my parents will die of shame and I will be ruined," she said. "What do I do?"
Watsa was an obstetrician and gynaecologist. What the woman needed was advice and counselling "but there was no one I could refer her to", says the doctor. "There were no counsellors in India then who could deal with these problems. So I took it up myself."
That decision, taken in the mid-1970s, proved to be a good career move. More than three decades later, Watsa is a household name in the city, thanks to his hugely popular Ask the Sexpert column, which appears in the Mumbai Mirror tabloid. In the column, he answers readers' questions about sex in an inimitably terse, direct and witty fashion.
"Every month, he gets about 8,000 queries. He's vastly popular, not just because he is upfront and direct about sex, which is unusual in India, but because he is very practical," says Meenal Baghel, the editor of the Mumbai Mirror.
