Mumbai: Popular sexologist Dr Mahinder Watsa died on December 28 at the age of 96.

Watsa was most popular for his column in the Mumbai Mirror ‘Ask the Sexpert,’ in which he combined wit and knowledge to answer questions on sexual health and intimacy. Altogether, Watsa was a sex columnist for over 50 years.

An official statement from his children in Mumbai Mirror noted, “Dad was a man of many dimensions. He lived a glorious life and on his terms…”

Watsa, an obstetrician-gynecologist, began writing ‘Ask the Sexpert’ in Mumbai Mirror when he was 80. A profile of Watsa on Mumbai Mirror noted, “In the Mirror alone, on a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he would have answered about 20,000 readers’ queries. Through his career as a sex counselor, it would be over 40,000…”

The BBC profiled Watsa in 2014, describing him as “The 90-year-old sex guru”. Watsa told BBC he began writing a ‘dear doctor’ column in a woman’s magazine in the 1960s.

” 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,’” the BBC wrote of Watsa in 2014.

Watsa used biting wit to respond to queries on seemingly taboo topics like sexual intercourse, masturbation and virginity.

While a trailblazer, Watsa also criticized some aspects of modernity such as porn, which he considered a big problem that caused separations and divorces.

Watsa told the BBC about the benefits of the joint family system, where elders in the family explained aspects about sexuality. “There were always aunts or grandmothers who could explain things to the younger couples. 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,” Watsa told BBC in 2014.

Watsa was the subject of a documentary, Ask the Sexpert, in 2017. “Ask the Sexpert follows Dr Mahinder Watsa as he potters about his Mumbai apartment, peers at his computer and reads emails that tells him, among others, about someone with a compulsive habit of adding urine to his tea,” Reuters reported in 2017.

https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2020/12/28/mahinder-watsa-indias-most-famous-sex-guru-dies-at-96.html