The U.S. news media dutifully monitors India's electoral politics on the premise that the public arena is where American democratic values are exerting their most profound impact. But all across the subcontinent, Indian families who deeply disapprove of public kissing crowd around satellite-transmitted TV sit-coms showing bedroom sex. Far from trying to control it, India's state owned television is trying to cash in on the act. PNS commentator Andrew Robinson is an American writer who lives and works in South Asia.

VISHAKAPATNAM, INDIA -- In a middle-class neighborhood of this average-sized city (pop. 900,000) on India's eastern coast, I'm watching television in my neighbor's house and asking my hosts -- a middle-aged man wearing a dhoti, his sari-clad wife and three daughters -- to change the channel. The current selection reveals two American women engaged in a furious wrestling match, one in a hole-punched lycra bathing suit, the other in a gold and silver leotard that purposely reveals her right buttock.

"Is this a popular sport in your country?" asks my host, smirking.

The youngest daughter selects another channel. Click. Three bikinied women, armed with life guard buoys, run across a beach. Click. Donahue asks, "So then you called your daughter on the telephone and told her to stop dating your boyfriend?" Click. Madonna fingering herself.

Just three years ago, none of this existed in India, a mostly family-oriented country where on-screen kissing is considered pornographic and public displays of flesh and affection are frowned upon. Imported Hollywood films (largely censored) and their lurid advertisements have always offered Indian audiences a sexually hyperactive rendition of Americans. But today's abundant television sets, satellite linked even in poor households and watched mostly by children, are making the image more prevalent -- and more profane -- than ever before.

"What are these young boys thinking?" asks Vijaya Laxmi, a local homemaker, about the new generation of satellite television viewers in Indian. "Here I am, in my forties, and I can't even look at the images they're watching. I feel too ashamed."

While in the U.S. various groups have mobilized to curb sex and violence on television, no such well-organized movement exists in India. Even once-fervently protectionist Hindu fundamentalist politicians no longer campaign against the invasion of western culture.

Such a platform would be politically disastrous. Baywatch, an American television serial depicting the scantily clad lifeguards, was rated the most popular television show in India this year (The Bold and the Beautiful, a well-known American soap opera, was second). Lured by these high ratings, and eager to compete in the rapidly expanding market of private television channels, the state-owned television channel, Doordarshan, has decided to dub Baywatch into regional Indian languages -- a procedure usually reserved for high quality national programs.

"Most of the dialogue will be untranslatable," says Surendranath Talla, a Telugu computer engineer who has lived in the U.S. for many years. "The phrase 'my Dad's girlfriend,' for example, would sound absurd in Telugu. There's no concept for such a thing. But what does it matter? For the townspeople and villagers who watch these programs, it's all a kind of craziness anyway -- a cross between the naked African bodies in a National Geographic special and some carnival freakshow."

Even Schindler's List was received in India as a pornographic adult film, and the young men who lined up to see it were more eager to catch a glimpse of the "naked women exposed to merciless humiliations and rapes" (as advertised in the movie posters) than explore the horrifying dimensions of the Holocaust. As everyone knows throughout the subcontinent, American entertainment is nothing more than an elaborate charade whose sole purpose is to undress the female form.

"What local people don't realize," complains an American scholar living in Benares, "is that they're getting a very distorted view of the West." The scholar compares the sexual harassment she faces on city streets to "walking through a minefield."

But this tele-distortion of the culture no doubt exerts its most adverse effects not on American tourists but on India itself -- a country that looks to the West as the paragon of modernization.

"There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavor and then leave it half done," wrote the noted British economist Barbara Ward in the 1960s. "This is what the West has done ... It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbor in the end."

So is fake female wrestling a popular sport in my country? I'm still trying to think of an appropriate answer to that question. Being the de facto emissary of the country with the most powerful media in the world often leaves one speechless and blushing -- with a lot of explaining to do.