Rape, Molestation and Eve-teasing

Audio Format : http://bit.ly/JudyaR

Why is there an increasing trend in the violence against women? Have men lost their sane in the recent times?  Why there isn’t any popular phrase called “Violence against men?” Why isn’t there?

Let us rewind back 3500 years and put the same questions to the great religions which governed our polity for centuries? If Hinduism answers saying “we are egalitarians”, then ask it why there hasn't been a single goddess taking avatar like Vishnu? Also ask it, why no one questioned the man, when ' Maha Pathni' was left in the woods? Don’t leave it with that, also ask why Draupadi was a wager material, why didn’t Yudhishthira use his brothers for the same game of dice? If you think Christianity or Islam will answer, “Not us, it was them who gave less respect” then ask them why there hasn’t been any woman prophet in their ages of history? If you think the valiant Sikhism showed no partiality then ask them why there hasn’t been a single women guru in the whole of history.

By now Gods might be angry, so let us start putting some questions on our fellow humans. Why wasn’t a queen given the power to dispatch outside the palace? Of all the 3 Sangam ages and rest of the time in the Tamil Literature, I have just heard about Avvaiar, that's it for the whole of last 3500 years ? For all the medieval time poetry I have read, I haven't come across even a single women poet, but, why? (Now of course we have our every own Lady Gaga). Why is there so much low representation of women? Where did we lose women in the ‘out-of-home’ world? The questions just remain unanswered for years.

I define a philosopher as someone who can clearly distinguish between good and bad, justice and injustice but when one of the greatest philosopher of the first "democratic land" said "Women are defective by Nature", I was little surprised and startled as well. And this sentence of Aristotle helps us understand how the whole idea of "lesser of human" was sown in the hearts of mankind and how it has been nurtured in the minds of people at every stages of the history.

And this idea holding hands with the natures principle of dominance of "Stronger over weaker" took humans down the gloomy lane called rape, molestation and eve-teasing.

What?

What would you do if you are battered, what would you do if you are branded with hot iron on your cheeks?  What would you do if you are beat so much that your skull gets fractured? What would you do? Baby Afreen didn't know what to do, she just passed away. The only mistake the three year old did was to be born as a girl.

That was just one such case, on the whole the crimes against women are on the high in India and the National crime records reported in 1998 that the growth rate of crimes against women would be higher than the population growth by 2010 and I guess that was second report that gave an under-estimated projection other than the fiscal and monetary deficit report of Reserve Bank of India and Ministry of Finance. To simplify, In our national capital for every 26 minutes a woman is molested, for every 34 minutes a rape takes place and for every 43 minutes a woman is kidnapped. More than 8% of the total Indian Penal Code crimes are against women and the other stat says that most of the women crimes go unreported! What the hell, huh?

From Panjali times women have always been mistreated but that's not the questions. What is the level of victimization is the question. When a pub "helper" is raped by 6 men then there is something serious.  When Juvenile girls are raped every now and then then there is something serious happening in the society.

How?


Now, let us weave our imagination. Let us imagine a world where everyone is, Krishna, Jesus, Gandhi and Luther King. How is it? Boring right?  Now let us imagine a world full of universal villains like Hitler, Idi Amin and many more. How is it? I know by this time you would have prayed for the successful execution of “End of World 2012” pogrom.

Yes, world was created as a heterogeneous set and therefore force your heart to accept the fact. But, this shouldn’t be an excuse for the violence propagated, the criminals in this case are the sociopaths who are suffering from serious complex issues and law should do its duty with no excuse.

How about violence against "scantily clad women"? Is it justified? No, they should be punished as well. But still, the women carry some percent of responsibility as well. If you want to live in a complete fashion then you should be prepared to take up the consequence of it as well.  If you are eating meat before an unleashed dog, what happens? A few dogs eyeball it and a few will fight with you to swindle your food. You cannot blame the dog fully, if you are eating meat before a dog, you should have a stick to shoo it as well. Right? Yes. And the same holds here as well. Free-will is a fire and if you don’t know how to use it then you don’t deserve to live free.

And Then What?


Molestation happens. Rape happens. And Then What? Victim takes it to district magistrate.  Someone loses. They appeal again. Now it is in high court. Someone loses. They appeal it again. What now? Someone takes it Supreme Court. Then what? Iteration continues on and on. Let’s say, the probability works and the verdict is in favor of victim. But while all these happen, most of the criminal's would have kicked the bucket. Now, what should we do?

Molestation happens. Rape happens. And Then What? Media covers the story. We watch all the news relating to it.  We see the girl/women who get victimized. We see her cry. She tries to hide. But still, somehow we get to see her on screen.  Later, after a week, we see police arrest someone. We see a fully covered man walking. We see him being taken into the white police van then what?  Yes, that would be the last time you see him. But, the ill-used girl/women carrying the wound mentally and physically is deemed untouchable not by birth, but by someone's touch. Does she deserve it?

What should we do?

What should we do? Let me categorize into short-term and long-term goals.

Short term goals,
             • We should put a separate court in place to deal with this special type of crime. Fastening up of justice and execution of the same should be done.
            • All the National highways should be decorated with the "thug behind the bar" banner and saying, "Raped!” Yes, media should inflict fear in the minds of the potential criminals and their family.

Long term goals,
            • Stop taking about equality, feminism, reservation for women and all the others. Only if you behave like equal being, you will get equality.
            • Men, neither patronize nor subjugate.  Let them compete on a leveled field.

Short-term goals will heal the wounds and long term goals will be a vaccine of the society. As it took its own time to eradicate polio, it might take its but I’m sure this will be cent percent efficient like polio vaccine.

World will change someday, but that day we might not be here to see the vivid change, but, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t sow the seeds of Change. If not us let at least the future generation enjoy the toils of our social revolution.

Ray of hope is over there and we should move towards it.

Hopefully,
Alagiri Samy.S
                      


* Special thanks to Gopikrishnan.NS for his valuable inputs
* Intention of this post is not to hurt feelings of any individual. if I had, I’m sorry.

Divide And Rule - Evolution of Human-Race?

Audio Format : http://soundcloud.com/alagirisamy/divide-and-rule Or http://www.4shared.com/mp3/apoig7vE/file.html

In my apartments, there is this little kid called Chinnu, it is very usual thing of mine to give a small talk to him. Being just a another day I saw him, he was holding a big coffee mug in his hand; The principle of “perceive and ask” made me ask the most boring rhetoric question yet again, “Hey dude, whats up?” Fearing the swindle of his health drink, he instantaneously moved his cup away from me and said, “I’m drinking ‘Junior Horlicks 1-2-3’” and leaving no pause he drank a little from the cup, to assert his ownership over the drink.

It is an intuitive answer to which even a mute person would try to question using his sign language, me being no exception I asked “Junior? Is it just you who drinks it?” I could hear his inner voice, “What world are you in!” but then he suppressed all those inner feeling and said loudly “Mom drinks Women Horlicks and dad drinks the ‘Normal’ one”, bored by the conversation he just ran away without a bidding a bye. “Oh boy, you made the boy run again!”, I said to myself.

The point just remains the same, when I was a kid I was never given Junior Horlicks but, I did survive. Yes, a small thought changed the status quo of market, idea that hit the strategist mind should have been, “If I’m able to make x amount of money by selling 1 Horlicks at a house. Won’t it be great to sell y Horlicks in the same house for the same Rs.x or something more than that?” The very thought brought different types of Horlicks inside the same house. They just found the difference of age and sex in the same house and now Horlicks is valued at 1300 crore, in the Indian health drink industry alone.

When you just look at it as a business, the jargon is Market segmentation but think, little deeper, it is nothing more than the doctrine of British East India company, the divide and rule. You make the same house drink different products from the same company by just saying “You are different!”

Yes, it is divide and Rule!

It was a sober atmosphere lighted up by a serious thinking brain. The voice intrigued by my statement interrogated me, but with a condescending laugh, “Then tell me, why is it the best?” Taking a sip of the drink I tried to explain the same in simple words, “It makes a man live in an imaginary world where people are constantly made to confront each other though they never wish to. And at the end, all these confrontation neither yields monetary benefit nor happiness to a common man”.

I guess he went to the listening mode, my heart wanted to throw out all the unhappiness like a shmacked man and I started doing the same,” It was the time when Jesus Christ was just out of Mary’s womb. And that was the time when Madurai was commemorating its rich language’s proud son Kaniyan Poongundranar for his “Yaathum Oore, Yaavarum Kelir”.  Though people say, it has polymorphic, but let us try to keep this in our context. The literal meaning of it in English is, “'every country is my own and all the people are my kinsmen.'”. It isn’t a big statement to understand but on deeper analysis you will find the modus operandi of the world before 2000 years. Yes, they lived as a one global village and they had their identity as “Mankind”.


Let us check how we were in 1780’s, a period of political upheaval in France, when the social class took a war against the bourgeois class. It was the time, when people were first overdosed with social class feelings than being human. It took a toll of more than 2, 00,000 people and it became the starting point of many parties to become the powerbrokers of the  present day administrative circles and you and me are just their pawns for their personal benefits. People were forced to take a stand of either being a  “right” or a “left” than being a normal human being.

And from that day till this day, we have been fighting all along. 60,000 Armenian and Greek Christian in 1570’s in the name of religion were salvaged and more than 5,00,00 were killed during partition in the name of Sriram and Sri Muhammad Nabi. And even after this the thirst of blood mongering politicians and separatist never got quenched. After Independence, 10,000 of loved lives were paid as a tribute to the never satisfied demon called "religious hatred".

And many parties in the national level have their hopes pinned in this religious vendetta that they have sown in the minds of people for either holding back or coming back to the great Indian throne.
On the state level, you have the entire league of lingual nationalist who try to galvanize the votes using the languages. The incidents that happened after 1950’s when the central government decided to ‘decentralize’/ divide states for the administrative purposes will always remain as a standing example and this period saw the rise of Dravidian and other regional parties which took an oath of getting rights for a group or a sect but this bone for people successfully got them votes but today, where are we? Every summer you find the aftermath of it in many states, where governments make the upper and lower riparian issue, a lingual problem. You will fear having a bike registered at Tamilnadu in Bangalore and a person from Kerala would fear the safety of his jewellery shop in Tamilnadu. This doesn’t stop with Tamilnadu or Karnataka but it is in everywhere.


Telangana, Bodoland, division of Uttar Pradesh, partitioning of Maharashtra have started coming into limelight. After all the national level parties which segregated us in terms of religion, after all the states level parties which divided us based upon language and ethnicity, now you can find these petty “district “parties, the once caste groups asking for separate state for personal benefit. When is it going to stop?  When will they stop dividing us?

In this last two thousand years, we were “segmented” based on all possible things, from race to religion, from geography to profession and even from caste to creed.

In every day’s newspaper we find many shocking news, 10.7 Lakh crore coalgate loot, 1.76 Lakh crore 2G spectrum burglary, anti-nuclear energy protest and many others. But, it didn’t affect me; the point that our society has lost its oneness is the most worrying part of all. My heart trembles whenever I think about this.

All the above monetary loss can be regained by sheer hard work and good policy making but the cost we incurred for social degeneration can never be redeemed.

Can we get that 10,00,000 lost lives of the ethnic cleansing in Srilanka? Is it possible to bring back the 11 Million victims of holocaust? Can we bring back the 2000 innocent victims of Godhra riot?
No, we cannot. These things can never be regained or recreated. What happened to the affection of the mothers for their lost small kids? What happened to the dreams of lost dads?

They are dead!

I can agree if someone dies of an epidemic disease but never I can digest if someone loses his life because of the difference that was sown in their hearts!

Horlicks is monetizing by segmenting houses and politicians or the “so called revolutionaries” are monetizing by killing innocent lives.

After hearing all this, my conscious said, “I’m sure some day we will live as our ancestors lived before 2000 years. And that day it will be one for all, all for one!”

For one global village,
Alagiri Samy.S
www.rebelspath.blogspot.in