Is moral policing needed?

Culture is something that is constantly transforming. Nobody can preserve it as it is. It is evolving all the time. There is nothing wrong with that. If it is evolving naturally, people make choices and make certain changes in their lives. But when your culture is being engineered by commercial forces and certain very aggressive religious forces, some amount of stopping and preserving also needs to happen. If you don't stop it, then when you open your tap tomorrow, some soft drink will flow from it instead of water. It is already happening in India. In restaurants today, they will not serve you water, they will serve you some soft drink instead.

So, commercial forces have a strategy to change the culture. When this is the case, you should also have a strategy not to allow that to happen. How it is done, is a questionable thing. There need not be moral policing, but education about the significance of doing what we have been doing for these thousands of years is definitely needed. When you say culture, there are different types of cultures in the world. If culture is just a social norm, just a certain way that people live because of climatic conditions or other influences, that is different. But Indian culture was engineered to gradually lead people towards their spiritual process. Always, right from ancient times, every aspect of your life - how to sit, how to stand, everything was engineered to slowly lead you towards a spiritual process. There are many aspects of this culture which are essentially yogic science implanted into people's lives, so that without even knowing it, you are practicing yoga. This was done thousands of years ago.

These practices and norms were brought into your life because of the benefits they have for human wellbeing. Now, some commercial force is attempting to replace everything for their benefit. If you don't stop it in some way, they will take everything away.

So, some amount of control is definitely needed. If people are making their choices and slowly evolving into something else, that is nobody's business. Every human being has a right to choose and change his life the way he wants. But right now, most human beings are not choosing. They are being forced to make choices. The marketing departments are larger than the production departments in most companies and they are just campaigning. And of course there are religious forces which are campaigning to change the culture and the basic flavour of the demographics in the country. There has to be some kind of stoppage, but it must be done gently and sensibly. Some education is definitely needed.

But unfortunately, because saner voices in the society never speak, the crude ones get on to the street and do the job. What you call as moral policing is happening in crude ways, so everybody is disgusted with it. If saner voices speak, there will be no room for all these street goons.