Think you found the perfect private spot in Lalbagh to get cosy? Think again. Sly mobile cameras are busy capturing images to share on the net and drool over later. Time they were shut off...
The girl sensed somebody was watching her. She turned round uneasily but all she could see was a harmless looking middle-aged man fiddling with his mobile phone behind a bush. Thinking it was only her imagination, she turned back to her boyfriend and his amorous advances. Little could she have guessed that the ‘harmless’ man’s camera phone was capturing their coochie-cooing, and that their intimate moments would find their way to You Tube and porn sites on the Internet or the grey market for porn videos.
It is unthinkable that the authorities are unaware of the goings-on in the park. But they prefer not to go to town about it. While the horticulture department claims its job is to maintain the garden, the Siddapura police say they prefer not to resort to harsh measures as a clampdown on these couples would be seen as moral policing. Once in a while, a ‘Hoysala’ jeep or a ‘Cheetah’ bike moves around, and the lovers straighten up and turn all formal — for a while. But it’s a field day for the voyeurs, who go about their ‘business’ unsuspected and unchecked.
This appeared in Bangalore Mirror
The girl sensed somebody was watching her. She turned round uneasily but all she could see was a harmless looking middle-aged man fiddling with his mobile phone behind a bush. Thinking it was only her imagination, she turned back to her boyfriend and his amorous advances. Little could she have guessed that the ‘harmless’ man’s camera phone was capturing their coochie-cooing, and that their intimate moments would find their way to You Tube and porn sites on the Internet or the grey market for porn videos.
For all of you who are wondering where this happens, it’s at the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens.
Young couples who frequent the park in their quest for privacy are up against a particularly prurient phenomenon: scores of Peeping Toms lurking behind bushes with the ubiquitous camera phone in hand, ready to capture ‘steamy’ moments for private pleasure or profit.
Two of our reporters spent three days in the park last week posing as tourists, checking out every nook and corner frequented by lovers and vantage points from where voyeurs get the best shots of the ‘action’.
We counted 408 couples — of whom nearly 90 per cent were aged below 25 years, most of them college students. The Peeping Tom count, on the other hand, was a whopping 1,030 men, mostly teenagers or men below 30, but at least 80 over the age of 50 years! While we found 330 of these stalking the couples, camera in hand, we spotted 22 in the act of taking photographs or videos of the lovelorn couples. The places most popular with lovers and voyeurs alike are the bushes near Lalbagh lake, Lotus Pond, Band Stand, Rose Garden, Maharaja’s Statue and Japanese Garden.
The ‘hot’ stuff in the park unfolds around 9 am when the morning joggers move out and lovey-dovey couples, mostly college students with their bags slung across their shoulders, move in. By 11 am, the camera phone tribe becomes increasingly conspicuous. As the unsuspecting couples start to get more adventurous, even going on to the unbuttoning act, the cameras start clicking. However, there are some who prefer feasting on the sight to recording the love-making.
Neither is the cost of this voyeurism prohibitive, thanks to Chinese-made handsets which come with the latest features, including zoom-in lenses, and are a modest Rs 3,500 to Rs 5,000.
Unlike Cubbon Park where entry is free, Lalbagh is particularly attractive to voyeurs. When we asked one of the camera phone tribe, a middle-aged man, why he was there, he replied nonchalantly, “To enter Lalbagh, a couple have to pay Rs 20 for entry tickets. Only those couples who can afford to pay that amount come here and they look like the hi-fi crowd.” The man, who worked in a private company in J P Nagar before quitting his job, claimed he has a collection of photographs of couples, some semi-nude.
It is unthinkable that the authorities are unaware of the goings-on in the park. But they prefer not to go to town about it. While the horticulture department claims its job is to maintain the garden, the Siddapura police say they prefer not to resort to harsh measures as a clampdown on these couples would be seen as moral policing. Once in a while, a ‘Hoysala’ jeep or a ‘Cheetah’ bike moves around, and the lovers straighten up and turn all formal — for a while. But it’s a field day for the voyeurs, who go about their ‘business’ unsuspected and unchecked.
