http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_vVmeUf6QU
It's here. Yet again.
Never felt so helpless in my life ever before.
We all can overcome personal problems: a bad marriage, divroce, a bad job, a bad relationship, bad finances - anything. But when it comes to the falling rupee against the dollar or women getting raped, kids being molested, there's nothing we can do, except to feel outraged, tired, disturbed, and ultimately, helpless. For crimes against humanity, we look at the people who control the law and order or the economics of the nation. And it is not a pretty picture.
Every problem has a root. The problem of gang rape - especially 16 Dec 2012 and 22 August 2013 -
are deep rooted in our social and mental ethos. It's hard even to blame. Boys from affluent families don't do such things. Yet boys from downtrodden families go on to achieve a great many things. Not all Muslims are bad people. Not all women want attention. Not all cops take bribe. It's so hard to generalize. So where must we begin to understand the problem? It is important because we must solve it.
Family is the basic unit, or so we were taught in Sociology. The values a person imbibes - or fails to - determines his character in the long run. And no matter how uncomfortable our families make us feel, we always return to our nest to trace our first emotions and reactions.
So what goes wrong with our mentality? Didn't the mothers of rapists teach their sons to respect women? I find it hard to understand that a sexually deprived man would go out and rape a lone woman.
Man cannot fall to such levels. But he has. Is sex so important that he is willing to beat the genitals of the opposite sex, that would take a woman's life? Is anything worth that? What exactly goes wrong in the minds of these criminals?
We hear of suicide bombers taking the lives of innocent people. This justification of mass killing can be found in the hands of a calculated, misled belief and conveniently misconstrued doctrines of religion, economics and politics. What about rape, crimes against women and molestation of new born babies? What justification can lie beneath this lust? And to what end?
Why cannot a woman go out and watch a movie with a friend/ lover/ colleague at 7PM in the Capital? Why cannot a woman go and wander, explore for aesthetics at 6PM in the country's financial capital and the most developed city? We all know the lengths photo-journalists go to capture a stunning scene that holds our breaths on magazine covers. Why cannot a woman take a lone bike ride on a highway, see the sky complete its journey from dusk to dawn?
There were answers to these questions. A woman must always look after her shoulder, must not wander alone at odd hours or step out in the night, or apply make-up, or wear anything that would make a man want to lust after her. So will wearing a burqa rid our society of all the crimes? What about molestation of kids aged 6? What kind of make-up do they apply? Or what kind of soliciting clothes do 5 month old babies wear that makes men want to violate them?
Or a woman is only allowed to live - and not met by female infanticide - for the sake of amusing men, for procreation, for doing laundry, cooking. She cannot go and watch movies, she cannot be a daring photojournalist, a traveler. She is here to meet the demands made by man. She is a mother, sister, a wife. That's all. Is she not a human being, a person in her own right?
A man can walk safely at night, alone. At the most, he might be mugged, or murdered. But he won't be violated or left to die because of his biological anatomy.
And though we didn't ask our maker for this anatomy, we will have to always look over our shoulder when we walk the streets of this country.
