My Dear Hypocritical Indian,

Yes, you with that post-coital glow on your face in buses and metros, checking out your pout in the rear-view mirror. You men who throng gyms for rock-hard shoulders and proud abs that your partners who hit salons for the latest bedhead styles are turned on by. You who quietly order sizzling lingerie via mobile apps from e-retailers like Zivame, Masalatoys.com and ThatsPersonal.com. You who swipe left for sex, summoning uber-satisfaction on the go and don't mind the surchage. You chhupa rustams you. We know who you are. We have the numbers on you. All 75 per cent of you, from Guwahati and Patna to Mumbai, who believe sex is important to a relationship, all 64 per cent who ranked your sex drive as high, all 71 per cent of you who rate your partner's performance as 'good', and all 55 per cent of you who are adventurous in bed.

Rasa-Replete trilogy from 'Sauptik': Amruta Patil Rasa-Replete trilogy from 'Sauptik': Amruta Patil

You hide away in your tall towers of middle-class morality quietly accepting the diktats of censor board chief Pahlaj Nihalani on how much titillation is too much for you. James Bond couldn't kiss Monica Bellucci in our movie halls because of you. Can you blame him? You, who chee chee at Mastizaade promos but made porn-com a legitimate box office gamble with Grand Masti, that Rs 100 crore film. You, who call Deepika Padukone 'shameless' for sitting through a sexual-innuendo fest of an All India Bakchod roast, but make former porn star Sunny Leone the most-searched-for celebrity in 2015 on Google, second year in a row. In the cinematic version of the Indian dream, Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol reunite in Dilwale after 25 years and still don't kiss. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan still won't agree to a kissing scene with Ranbir Kapoor. But the indie-loving Indian circuit, the mark of true cultural evolution in urban life, admits it has already downloaded and watched the uncensored version of Oscar-potential winner lesbian drama Carol. As if any true Indian film lover wouldn't. And Bandra Congressman Stephen Noronha may have pulled down the anonymous kissing posters 'Limits Within' last year, but clearly, you are tearing up the rule book with your own hands as well.

India tops the sign-ins at infidelity site AshleyMadison.com, and on matrimonial and dating sites it's not gotras that young men and women are discussing. "Nobody wants to get divorced because of incompatibility. It's not uncommon to be sexually sure before one takes the plunge," says Gauri Phadnis, a 34-year-old Mumbai-based writer who's seeking a match but isn't in so much of a hurry that she'll plunge into untested waters. Even the facade of virginity, that pretension to honour, has been dropped by 36 per cent of you who couldn't care less if your partners are virgins (in fact 28.3 per cent women aren't). Look at you, quietly using your first sexual experience as merely a precursor to the joys of experience. The golden mean you've set yourselves, busy lives and all, is 30 minutes of sex a few times a week with 37.7 per cent of you dubbing the orgasm the ultimate pleasure. Orgasm, how you twirl that word around. You women who would pleasure your partners ahead of yourselves, you self-pleasuring 36.1 per cent Noida denizens, you 41.8 per cent fetish-happy moaners. You're talking dirty now.

You, whose favourite four-letter word is now 'Talk', as sexologist at KEM hospital Dr Prakash Kothari puts it. You, whose sex lives once used women as tools to the process, and today see them drive the change. "Men once had sex, turned over and went to sleep. Today, couples talk to each other," Kothari says. Women, who line up at his clinic, or call or Whatsapp or Skype with questions as basic as 'why do I feel pain during intercourse?' to 'I want those multiple orgasms I keep reading about'. Never being satisfied is the new key to a satisfactory sex life, and you're all over the Internet, television and film exploring options for more. All 40.3 per cent of you watch porn, but Bangalore tops metros at 20.9 per cent. There's national moaning with 38 per cent of you vocalising to your partner how best to turn you on, 57 per cent of you picking the traditional caress over the 4 per cent toying with props. Still, you're an emotional bunch, the 34 per cent turned on by emotion (you big softies, you). No thanks to Nihalani, what you, the nation, really wants to know is how to be happier in bed.

Then again, says India's leading Hyderabad-based andrologist Dr Sudhakar Krishnamurthi, it's also you men being proactive about it: "Society has opened up and allowed an acceptance of sex not as some pornographic fantasy, but as an integral part of a happy life." So you want to be better at it and have an acquiescing partner. It's that your family has made room for finding medical solutions to your issues, like frigidity, performance anxiety or impotence, once issues that only raised shame. If 22.7 per cent face sexual dysfunction, you're seeking medical help. Your finding solutions for problematic sex is making it better sex.

Rasa-Replete trilogy from 'Sauptik': Amruta Patil Rasa-Replete trilogy from 'Sauptik': Amruta Patil

Your ying and yang is in better harmony because not only are women taking the initiative and men communicating, but there is also well-rounded mutual support. In couples living away from each other for reasons such as work, 74 per cent remain in love. You're also making your own rules for making it work, like Pradeep and Neha Nair, the young Bangalore start-up couple in their late twenties who have been in a committed partnership for four years now, a longevity easily attained even without the social approval of marriage by one quarter of those surveyed. You're doing what it takes to keep it together, and you've thrown out the rule books, good for you. As New Delhi-based yoga instructor Mini Shastri says, she definitely sees happier spouses of clients. "Partners are willing to pick up the load, handle the children, the cooking, telling their partners, go, make time for yourself, your health, your mental and physical fitness, eat healthy, we've made the money, now let's find harmony and balance." The pursuit of balance eventually percolates to a sexual harmony which helps relationships immensely.

This has also been the year when you've dropped the judgement. "Sex holidays are in," says Priya Venkateswaran, an acquisitions manager with a Fortune 500 company, who says the thrill is not how many times a week but being locked into an impromptu sexting session with your partner in the middle of a heavy workday. She and her husband leave their two children with the in-laws and take a weekend pleasure-themselves break every now and then. They check into a local five-star if they can't go out of town, order room service and "just have sex". A double-income family with a heavy workload and travel schedule for both, extended family and friends' circuit, and the demands of running a household and handling the children means they're not necessarily having sex more often, but when they do they make it count, the Venkateswarans say. "It's become easier because there are cheap flights, you're always wired, and have back-up in domestic help-everyone has more money now to spend on these things and also frankly because the extended family is now more accepting of a couple taking time off from them. No one's judging," says husband Sriram, a principal at a financial firm.

Thank social media and apps like Tinder and Truly Madly Deeply that keep the random hook-up easy and casual-17.2 per cent of you are having fun with people you don't really know, Hyderabad topping that list with 67 per cent, and 3.8 per cent of you homemakers, hiding behind your matronly home-cooked meals and spotless homes, have also paid for sex. Sunil Singh, a Bandra-based restaurateur who cruises apps for sex, says even he blushes when the partner he meets suggests they skip dinner to "go have sex". "It really is as simple as that, it's upfront, direct, there are barely names exchanged let alone personal details, it's impersonal and it's easy" he says. And if they don't get the new codes of casual dating, you can always ignore or block them and never see them again. It's all good, everyone's keeping each others' secrets. Even orgy-happy Patna, Bhubaneswar and Kochi where group sex peaks. You've also acquired the very mature ability to distinguish between love and sex, so fulfilling needs is a whole other thing from having sex-32.1 per cent of men and 22.9 per cent of women are able to make that distinction and not confuse one for the other. "Which means more of India is getting quite sure what they want from each other," says Swapan Verma, a 37-year-old legal consultant to a Bangalore-based pharmaceutical major, who's dating four women non-exclusively at any given point.

As a result, says Kothari, whether with multiple partners or not, whether watching, or doing, or speaking, together in loving duos or in experimental couplings of more than two, sexually India is hotly engaged in the pursuit of pleasure. One-fifth of India said they were fine with their partners experimenting outside the relationship, a fact psychologists like Mumbai-based Sonali Gupta say is an increasing consensual arrangement between a small number of couples. "If infidelity is the cause of a break up today, it's more a result of several factors and not the only cause of a break up, there was so much more behind that. Some couples do see experimentation within their commitment as okay if it takes the pressures off the relationship," she explains.

So the next time you label India's propensity to entangle limb to limb as raucous and against Indian culture, remember that 81 per cent of women and 75 per cent men experience love with their partners and only 7.5 per cent cheat. Those are not small numbers, that's a whole big large chunk of happy, smiling post-coital people. So elite Mumbai school principals may grumble that they have to put in CCTVs to monitor all the PDA in classes, but it's all trickling down, from satisfied men to consensual women, from 56 per cent elderly enjoying their partners, to 54 per cent of young adults in the throes of their first sexual experience who've said 'I love you' to someone within the last month. Yes, awwww.

And you, the seeking-censorship, unhappy campers, the ones who complain about all these young people getting corrupted by outside influences that the Internet and television and 35mm blow up of a sensuous kiss brings, and are constantly ranting about banning this and that, remember that you're the minority, the 28 per cent of you bored of your marriages, the 16.6 per cent unhappy with your sex lives, the 43.4 per cent in Pune and the 38 per cent in Hyderabad who lie there miserably staring at the ceiling after sex. Do us all a favour, grab a condom, and join The Great Indian Orgy.

Yours sincerely, Gayatri Jayaraman