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By Vibeke Venema From BBC World Service

Sex education is a controversial issue in India, but one man has done more than anyone to promote discussion of the subject. Dr Mahinder Watsa’s unusually frank and funny daily newspaper column has become a cult hit. But why does the country that gave the world the Kama Sutra need a straight-talking 90-year-old to teach it about sex?

“Sex is a joyful thing,” says Watsa, “but a number of writers tend to become rather medical and serious.” Rather than taking the scientific or moral high ground, he prefers to put the reader at ease with a witty one-liner. As a columnist for the past 50 years, Watsa has been privy to the deepest, darkest sexual fears of his countrymen and women. His replies are short, sharp and to the point – occasionally bruising, often hilarious. But whether he chastises or reassures, with every shared reply he educates his readers. “I’m talking their language, they accept it better,” he says. “The man talking to you is one of you.”

Q: Two days ago, I had unprotected sex with my girlfriend. To prevent pregnancy, we bought an i-Pill. [emergency contraceptive] But in the heat of the moment I popped it instead of her. Can it cause any complications for me?

A: Next time round please use a condom and make sure you don’t swallow that too.

Q: I have heard that any kind of acidic substance can prevent pregnancy. Can I pour some drops of lemon or orange juice in my girlfriend’s vagina after the intercourse? Will it harm her?

A: Are you a bhel puri [snack] vendor? Where did you get this weird idea from? There are many other safe and easy methods of birth control. You can consider using a condom.

Q: After having sex four times a day, I feel weak the next day. For about five minutes, my vision goes blank and I can’t see anything properly. Please help.

A: What do you expect? Shouts of hurray and I am a champion all over town?

He gets about 60 letters and emails a day and responds to them all. “People who got married and are unable to consummate, or women writing they are no longer in love,” he says. “I try to help them.” Over the years he reckons he has answered more than 35,000 queries – long enough to spot the fake ones. “One knows when someone is trying to pull your leg or whether they are really genuinely in trouble,” he says.

Q: What First Aid will we require after having sex for the first time? My fiancée and I have had oral sex many times. How safe is that?

A: You need not join the Red Cross; just visit a sexpert for some pre-marriage counselling. Oral sex is safe and healthy, and she will not conceive through it.

Watsa was first asked to write a Dear Doctor column back in the 1960s by a woman’s magazine [Trend]. He was in his late 30s and had recently qualified as a doctor. “I didn’t have much experience, I must confess,” he says.

For the first few months the questions were of a general medical nature – about childhood diseases and so on – but then a different kind of letter began to arrive, from distressed young women in remote areas. They told him that an uncle or an elder had interfered with them when they were teenagers, and now they worried that they would not be married because they’d lost their virginity. “Many even suggested that they’d commit suicide,” says Watsa. “This thing about the hymen being intact is very important in this part of the world.”

He realised there was a lot of shame and need for advice out there. “These women had no-one to turn to, so they wrote to the magazine,” says Watsa. All he could do was tell them not to panic about the wedding night. “I had to advise them to just remain quiet,” he says. “Don’t worry, your husband won’t notice. Nothing will happen.” Nowadays Watsa can be more explicit. He explains that the hymen can break in many ways, including physical exercise or some kinds of masturbation – but at the time he couldn’t use such plain language.

He realised that many of their problems stemmed from a lack of sex education, and this set him off on a life-long mission to provide it, first through the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI) and later through his own organisation, the Council of Sex Education and Parenthood International, (CSEPI). Throughout it all, he carried on writing.

He still receives letters on the subject of broken hymens today. “That inflames me,” he says. “Unfortunately it is still very prevalent.” Any men who write in to cast doubt on their partner’s virginity get short shrift.

Q: My family is demanding that I get married. How can I ascertain if the girl is a virgin?

A: I suggest you don’t get married. Unless you appoint detectives, there is no way to find out. Spare any poor girl of your suspicious mind.

It’s a credit to Watsa’s wit, inventiveness and endless patience that he finds new ways to reply to the same questions that he has been asked for decades.

Much of his work involves something known as permission-giving – reassuring people that their sexual behaviour is normal and harmless. “The real problem is still masturbation,” says Watsa. He gets endless letters from anxious men who worry that masturbation will cause them to lose their strength, their hair, or their ability to have children. The belief that losing semen is detrimental to a man’s health is reinforced by traditional belief systems. As a consequence, Watsa has to dismiss a lot of quackery.

Traditional thinking can cause all sorts of problems, says Watsa, who remembers an army doctor telling him how his soldiers would often return from leave in their native hill country with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) – it turned out they thought living in the plains affected their potency, so before catching the bus home they would have a sexual experience, just to check everything was in working order.

But Watsa has also witnessed massive changes. “India is a very different country now,” he says. “Thirty years ago there were very few women writing in. Now it’s changed, many women are getting in touch with me.” And they don’t just have practical questions about how to get pregnant or not – in the past few years they have also started asking about sexual fulfilment and masturbation. He replies with the same humour.

Q: My friend thinks that her breasts are getting larger because of masturbation. Is this possible?

A: No. Does she think her clitoris is an air pump?

And not all change is positive. For a start, there’s porn. “That’s a big problem,” says Watsa, who sees how it affects relationships. “The man is looking at porn but he doesn’t go to his wife and she gets very upset about it. This is leading to a lot of separations and divorces.”

Watsa also laments the loss of joint families, where many generations lived under one roof. “There were always aunts or grandmothers who could explain things to the younger couples,” he says. “Now there are more nuclear families and nobody is there to explain how sex works. I hear of a lot of unconsummated marriages. There is no sex education in schools so it’s hard for youngsters.” Arranged marriages between people who don’t know each other is still common, says Watsa. “They expect to consummate a marriage immediately, but in the Kama Sutra there is a section that says it takes four to five days to make friends and understand each other,” he says.

Watsa receives the odd letter of thanks from people who benefited from his advice. And when he attended a wedding recently a woman pointed him out to her son, saying: You are here thanks to that man. Watsa blushed – but in this case it was in the delivery room that his help had been so vital.

“I’m still standing on my feet,” says Watsa. “Perhaps I can carry on for a bit longer.”

IMAGE: Dr Mahinder Watsa

Dr Watsa spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service. Listen again on iPlayer or get the Outlook podcast.

To read the whole story and much more go to: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28353027