An exercise conducted by the TOI reporters proves exactly this. In the past ten years there’s been a spurt of molestations and rapes in the capital and one can be kidnapped in broad daylight. In fact it’d be wrong to pin the blame on just Delhi, as it was mentioned in this post. This phenomenon is not unique to the big, metropolitan cities — even in small towns and villages, where there is lots of inter-social communication, women are not safe.
There are two reasons, in fact three reasons for this:
1. A general sense of lawlessness. Our police is so lazy, dumb and corrupt that criminals are rarely apprehended, and even if by some miracles they are caught, our laws have so many loopholes that a criminal is out before you can say “out”. Even an average criminal is smarter than our police.
2. Social disintegration. This specifically applies to the cities and commercial towns. There is so much migration that you become anonymous, and in anonymity crime breeds easily. There is nobody to recognize you and point a finger at you. Do whatever you want to do, and then disappear into the hubbub. Or best, go to the nearby city, commit an outrage, and come back home to your regular life. It just takes a few hours to go from one city to another, victimize someone, and come back to your own city. There is no danger involved; there is no emotional pang of coming across the victim again and again.
3. An utter absence of morality and respect. This stems from the older roots. Remember how in the Jalian Wala Baag the Indian policemen working under the British rule sprayed bullets on their own helpless countrymen? It is a sad fact but we don’t respect, we don’t revere life of our own citizens. A girl can be teased in a crowded bus and nobody raises an objection, and if someone raises an objection, he or she can be brutalized in front of 40 other people. Just imagine, 4 goons harassing a woman in a crowded bus of 50-60 passengers without facing a single protest. Some actually derive vicarious pleasure out of it. Can it happen in any other civilized country? We have been subjected to humiliation and subjugation for so many centuries that we don’t feel outraged. Our blood doesn’t boil if a helpless woman is publicly humiliated. Our souls have died. We have become lonely, desolate islands, and are not stirred out of our slumber unless evil lands on our own shores. We are not even concerned about our own dear ones because if there is a general breakdown of citizenry, our own family members can become a target.
The third point is the most important point. Unless we, the public take a firm stand, nothing is going to happen. The rapists and the teasers should know how dangerous it can be for them to target a woman. Let’s just take the crowded places. If a culprit is anonymous, so are the people standing around. A crowd of 10 people can easily chase away 2-3 scoundrels. Let there be a general consensus in various colonies that no eve teasing or such untoward incident is going to be allowed in the area. Student unions should make sure that shady elements in the campus are bluntly dealt with. Market associations should make a pact that no such things are going to be tolerated in their markets. Small steps make big differences. If you see a girl or a woman being teased, and if you turn a blind eye, think again, that woman can be your own sister, wife, daughter or mother. Do you want the others to turn a blind eye then?
Once I gave all of my money to a sadhu sitting atop a looming elephant. “What will you do with this money, son? Give it to my elephant and he’ll eat some sugarcanes,” the sadhu had urged. 70 paise was a lot of money for an 8-year-old kid at that time.
The magnificent tusker stretched its delicate trunk towards me, and handed the money over to the sadhu once I had placed the coins within the folds of the trunk. It was awesome to see the elephant in such a close proximity. May be that’s why I gave the money — to feel the trunk of the elephant.
I don’t remember how that sadhu knew I had money in my pocket. I’d been collecting that money for a long time and I knew I’d face my grandmother’s wrath afterwards, but I just couldn’t say no to the sadhu (or may be the elephant). I think they both took me by surprise and didn’t leave a chance for me to ponder over the unexpected benevolence. I was peacefully sitting on a jute cot — engrossed in my thoughts — and they just appeared in front of me out of nowhere. Generally when there is an elephant in the locality, a crowd of kids follows the animal until it has rambled beyond the allowed limits. Besides, there’s always a giant bell that hangs from the elephant’s neck and rings when the elephant walks. You can hear it coming from a long distance. Nothing of that sort happened. I couldn’t have been engrossed so deeply that I didn’t notice an elephant coming my way. So was it a fig of my imagination?
The money was really missing, and I really was at the receiving end of my grandmother’s vexation. There were two reasons behind her anger: I had lost the money, and I lied. She said no elephant had been spotted in the entire cantonment in the past two weeks, so I was just making an excuse. I asked my friends who had been playing in the ground in front of our house at the time of the visit. They all agreed with my grandmother.
I read this post about self-knowledge being an ancient remedy. I remember telling somebody recently that the most important step towards solving an inner conflict is to know the self. We live in a noisy, pompous world where you get very less time to interact with yourself. When did you last sat quietly (not broodingly or depressingly) just to think about what you think about yourself, about things around you, and about people around you?
I’m having homeopathic treatment for my aching knees these days and in homeopathy lots of importance is given to how you think. “Think about getting healed and you get healed,” they say, and this is quite intriguing, because we ARE a sum-total of our thoughts. We become what we think. It may seem absurd that you think of getting well and you get well but I personally know thinking makes a great impact on our bodies. Knowing yourself keeps you in command of your thoughts and your body.
I must write more on this in near future because I too am trying to redefine my thinking these days.
It must be fun to write in a box (you might need to login). Actually, “fun” is not a nice word to describe the feeling…what I mean is, a much-desired isolation that a writer needs in order to write. Just imagine, there is nothing to distract you: no TV, no ringing of the phone or the doorbell, no worrying over meeting the project deadline, no intruding relatives. It’s just you, your word processor (or a writing pad) and your imagination.
This weekend was our movie weekend — sort of. On Friday night we purchased a DVD player. I wanted to go for a Sony, but the shopkeeper in our locality, whom I called to enquire, recommended an LG DVD player, and he promptly delivered it at our house around 9:30 pm. So now that we had a DVD player, we had to see a few movies because I wanted to operate it.
On Friday we saw a maudlin melodrama named Waqt starring Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar and Priyanka Chopra. We liked seeing it on the DVD player but would never spend Rs. 600 to go watch it in the theater (we’d just spent around Rs. 4,500 on the DVD, though). The film is full of senseless sentimentalities but there is some good comedy too. Ever since I saw Black, I’ve begun to like Amitabh Bachchan.
Then on Saturday we saw Meet the Fockers starring Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. The movie is a typical Ben Stiller flick although for me the main attraction was Robert De Niro whom I’ve admired as an actor since my childhood. I don’t like Dustin Hoffman — there’s something in him that makes me dislike him. The movie was a sequel of Meet My Parents in which Ben Stiller’s girlfriend (in the movie) takes him to meet her parents. De Niro is the girl’s over-protective and over-suspicious father who has just retired from the CIA. Ben Stiller goofs up trying to please his future father-in-law and ruins his future sister-in-law’s wedding completely. The first part was better. Meet the Fockers is not worth spending your bucks, sooner or later one movie channel or another will show it.
In the wake of the DVD binge we saw a movie called Chiti Chiti Bang Bang that they were showing on Pogo. I was feeling miserable after a horrible night (vomiting and shitting) and was surfing the channels aimlessly when I stumbled upon this movie. A cute way of spending a crappy Sunday afternoon.
To wrap up the weekend we rented Main Aisa Hi Hoon starring Ajay Devgun, Sushmita Sen and Esha Deol which is a Hindi remake of I Am Sam starring Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer. Storywise, the English version was much, much better as the flow of the narration was lucid. Main Aisa… seems to be in fragments: as if different portions of I Am Sam were picked, Indianized, and then re-assembled. It is the story of an autistic person raising a little girl who is left with him by a drug-addict mother who runs away after giving birth to the child. Everything is fine until the grandfather of the girl arrives from London and wants to take her with him. He files a child custody case in the court. Sushmita Sen acts as the lawyer (Michelle Pfeiffer) who defends Ajay Devgun. Both Ajay Devgun and Sushmita Sen have played their parts well. The ending of the Hindi version is far better and mature. Not a bad deal if seen in the theater.
We’ll see some more movies next weekend.
Blogging has finally entered my subconscious. Today I dreamed about writing a review of a Charles Dickens book I had just finished reading. I’ve never seen the book in my real life, I’ve never even heard of it. The ending — I don’t remember what it was — certainly made an impact because as soon as I realized I had read the last page, I wanted to write about it.
Today in the morning when I was sitting in the car waiting for Alka I saw an elderly woman sitting on the ground at a great distance. She was neither a rag-picker nor a beggar. She was one of the residents of the colony, and that was a dirty lane where she was sitting. It took us (my driver and I, and Alka while she was coming out) more than a minute to realize that she had fallen and was not able to get up. Then a man came from somewhere and helped the elderly woman stand up.
She was either on her morning walk or going to the market to fetch something. She looked around sixty. When she passed us by, I looked at her face. She had this strange, lost look, imbrued with hopelessness. Again and again she raised her salwaar and looked at her bruised ankles. She walked with great difficulty. Every step required great effort, and she was panting. I looked at her going away.
I imagined her when she was a teenager, or when she was at the prime of her age. What a bounce there must had been in every step. The world must have looked so brilliant under her lambent strides. She must have looked forward to every new day. She must have jumped over walls, run here and there, played with her friends or with her own young children. She must have had raucous sex with her husband or a secret lover. And now she couldn’t get up after a tiny fall, and every step made her pant.
There’s a lesson to learn! I must get my knees back in action soon.
The TV news channel Aajtak has done a commendable job recording on camera the top Tihar jail cops accepting bribes to perform various prohibited tasks inside the jail. Sadly, there is no text news on the channel’s website but you can read it here. Strangely, no mainstream newspaper website seems to be covering it even when around seven top cops have been suspending and an enquiry has been setup.
The good thing about showing such things on the mainstream channels is that many people can see the actual acts. The faces of the police officers that were accepting the bribe must have been seen by neighbors, relatives, and their own children. It’d be interesting to know how they’ll face the world around them. While they were being secretly recorded, they were openly asking for money to do various things. There was such brazenness in their manners as if they had no fear of ever being questioned for their conduct. This is the sense of impunity people in the government departments have are operating with: they have no fear of any sorts — neither the authority, nor the conscience.
A good thing would be, all the people who have been captured in the footage, should be followed around like celebrities. We would like to see what they do now, how they operate, how they move around in their localities. Public memory is short. We don’t want it to be short. In fact there should be a website that permanently archives their profiles, including the photographs.
It was shocking to hear that the person who raped a nurse wants to marry her as a compensation if he is pardoned. More shocking was, the judge actually asked the girl and her family to come and file a reply! This judge needs psychiatric counselling urgently. The judge should have actually increased his punishment for insulting the girl, as well as the nation, for such a loathsome offer. I think most of our judges need some education on values.
The rapist, Bhura, had the temerity to request:
…the court to take a lenient view as he is now a reformed man and said since no one would be ready to marry the young victim due to the stigma, he would like to tie the knot with her.
This person not only raped the 22-year-old nurse, he also gorged out her eyes with his fingers so that she would not recognize her. The girl rightly demanded the death sentence for him. He has been awarded life imprisonment. Sadly, our jails in India cannot afford to keep such ghastly criminals for life as it happens in the US where a criminal can be put in jail for the rest of his or her living years.
Scientists have identified a new planet orbiting a brown dwarf (a star that fails to ignite properly) 225 light-years away from earth. This is exciting. This planet has moisture in it.
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