Truly Nirbhaya

Nirbhaya has been on my mind since yesterday when the four accused in the December 16, 2012 gang rape in Delhi were declared guilty.

That in a system such as ours, where we have become used to law breakers getting away scot free, these four men have been pronounced guilty of murder, rape, and several other crimes is I believe, solely due to Nirbhaya's bravery, immense physical and mental strength. She had the courage to relive again and again in her mind the horrendous things that were done to her. She had the strongest will ...only this kept her alive to make sure she could give a lucid, detailed account of what happened on that bus in the late evening of December 16. Her physical strength and fighting spirit is proved by the very fact that she survived a whole fortnight with the most extreme injuries to her vital organs.

Today, September 13, 2013 brings satisfaction that by due process of law over 9 long months, the rapists have been handed a sentence they truly deserve. Today is the day the accused have been sentenced to death by hanging. The case was 'fast tracked' but not hurried in any way..... it is heartening to know that the judiciary did its job in being responsive to the needs of society but followed due procedure and found society's need to be justified.

Many thoughts are going through my mind, as I am sure are going through the minds of millions of others all over India, as I mull over the death sentence for the four adult rapists and the three year sentence awarded to the juvenile. Uppermost is this.....the rapists in this case have been awarded death because it was a "rarest of rare crime". So, is this going to deter other rapists who do not 'torture' their victim? Is the act of rape itself not 'torture' for the victim? Second, how can such rapists be deterred? Are we only going to sit up and take notice and action against gang rapists who 'torture' their victims? Third, what sentence will be awarded to rapists who just rape and torture but not kill or cause injury that causes the death of the victim? Will it be a life sentence? Will it be a life sentence of 14 years, which would be ridiculous for a young person? (And in this context how incredibly irresponsible of our juvenile judicial system is it to award 3 years to the juvenile rapist who was not only just a few months short of 18 years of age but who is also deemed to have served several months of this sentence while being held in custody? What is going to stop him raping women again if not gang raping, torturing, killing?) To return to the length of  a life sentence, if it cannot be changed to imprisonment till death, then can sentences for the various crimes for which the accused are convicted not all be added up and applied, as is done in some countries like the US? And if this cannot happen in our system then can the juvenile not serve his sentence and leave jail with an ankle bracelet for instance that will help the enforcement agencies to monitor his movements and whereabouts?

To end my ramblings..... a few simplistic, probably naive, even slightly stupid thoughts but I'm going to put them down anyway...... when Amnesty International protests against the sentence, (and as expected it is already making the usual negative noises against the death penalty and other human rights organisation will echo these noises), do they not consider the rights to life and safety of the victim? If we allow a child prodigy, who is for instance all of 13, 14 or 15 years of age, to enter university because intellectually he has the capability of an 18 year old, then can he/she not be considered an adult who can and should take responsibility for his adult crimes?      

At the risk of sounding blasphemous........!

A journalist friend of mine who just happens to be male, was annoyed and quite incredulous when some of the nation's most respected newspapers called the July 2012 mob molestation of a young woman in Gauhati a case of 'eve teasing', a term which diluted the seriousness of the incident and trivialized it, although this was probably not the intention. Or was it?????

Incidentally, on the one  occasion I  used this term in an international setting among friends from various foreign countries, there was complete incomprehension on their faces. It would seem then that 'eve teasing' is a term exclusively coined and used in India!

So is 'eve teasing' really something exclusive to our culture?  At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I see in pure, original and physically unthreatening (though no less objectionable) 'eve teasing' behaviours (such as whistling, making catcalls, singing a romantic song as a girl walks past, passing stupid or lecherous comments about a girl within her earshot, winking, etc.) a license that the perpetrators of such acts have given themselves, thinking themselves to be clones of Lord Krishna who often 'teased' the gopis! 

Inspired (to my mind) directly by the good Lord Krishna, Bollywood of the 60s, 70s and 80s carried this indigenous 'eve teasing' or 'chhed-chhaad' culture to the level of physicality by having the hero roughly manhandle the coy and unwilling heroine who by the end of the song almost invariably became willing and pliant. Unfortunately, the above Bollywood formula has become romanticized, amusing, acceptable, and is considered playful and harmless even though it sometimes borders on violence as in shoving and pushing and arm twisting (immortalised in song as baiyyan marodna)! It has given the stupid 'roadside romeo' the stupid idea that this is how even real women want to be wooed....and who knows, perhaps at one time they did, because it probably seemed appropriate for a good Indian woman to be falling in love 'unwillingly'! Given our addiction to Bollywood films, is it surprising then that this celluloid sanction sometimes acts itself out on the streets in the form of violence against women?

Today the manhandling Bollywood hero sometimes gets a dose of his own medicine from the less than coy, and often man-eating vamp cum heroine cum item number girl. At other times he is a true metrosexual and tries less rough, more cerebral or simply, openly sensual wooing tactics.

In these confusing times, what is the pea-brained romeo on the street to do? He does not have the wherewithal to be cerebral, the finesse or experience to be subtly sensual, or the looks, attitude or means to be metrosexual. So he uses crude physically sexual overtures, and because the sexily dressed, immensely desirable object of his unwanted attention is not only no longer secretly elated, but openly contemptuous of him and resists his advances, he uses violence, telling himself she needs to be taught a lesson or alternately convincing himself that she like her sisters of yesteryear wants it, but only as a fait accompli and if she can appear unwilling.

And that's what he gets completely wrong - that when a woman says 'no' (at least today if not in earlier times as well), she means NO, that any kind of unwanted attention is a crime, that 'eve teasing' and rape and molestation are all as bad, no matter how physically threatening or unthreatening each of them may be, no matter how she is dressed or how she behaves, and no matter what the cause or level of his arousal may be! On a parting note and again at the risk of sounding irreverent, in order to rid our dictionary of this 'eve teasing' euphemism, it may help to stop and think that maybe even Krishna's gopis actually really did not want to be eve teased or harassed or molested (call it what you will) at all, and that all we hear to the contrary was wishful thinking on the good Lord Krishna's part!

             

Remembering with smiles....

Remembering with smiles....

how you got mad at the Mills & Boons I read and exhorted me to read and watch 'real' love stories like  'Waterloo Bridge'
how I read your favourite book 'How green was my valley' and loved it too
how I trusted you more than myself to give my newborn babies their first manicures
how your knotty, almost workman's hands could be that gentle and tender and careful
how I loved to listen to your stories of wartime Britain and postwar Germany and your favourite quote 'history is written by the victor'
how you got mad when an admirer from college called up every evening and hung up the minute he heard your deep, deep voice
how you always thought such boys had something 'hanky panky' in their minds or they would not hang up
how I wanted to say "yes of course they do", but did not
how my girlfriends loved your deep, deep voice on the phone
how you invariably caught me running out of the house without an umbrella on a rainy Mumbai day and pushed that infernal umbrella into my hands
how you always said "OK, OK, you are looking beautiful, now move away from the mirror", when you caught me looking at myself in the mirror
how you tiptoed into my room and smeared my sleeping face with stinky Odomos because I did not do it myself and you were worried I would catch malaria
how you said I was old enough now and handed me my first glass of wine at 16
how you loved to make even tone deaf people sit down and listen to your Tchaikovsky symphonies
how you loved to dance the foxtrot, the waltz, the cha cha cha, the quickstep and all those 'oldie' dances
how I regret that I did not learn from you
how you and I shared a love of that king of fruits... the alphonso mango and could polish off half a dozen in one sitting
how you bought me kilograms and kilograms of the choicest seedless grapes at exam time because I needed to keep plopping them into my mouth as I studied
how you could be trusted to wake me up at 3 am on exam mornings with a sprinkling of water if I did not heed the first half dozen calls
how you loved a house full of people, music, jokes and laughter
how people you helped find a job almost worship you to this day
how you loved taking the family for post dinner drives to Marine Drive
how nervous you were when I had my Cesarean deliveries
how proud you were when at 16 I wore my first saree to a family wedding and your mother thought I looked like a  'princess'
how you wore your uniform with such pride and insisted on washing and ironing it yourself
how you did not trust washing machines because they ruined your shirt collars
how paranoid you were on Diwali nights when I went out to light firecrackers and you personally made sure I changed out of silks into safer cottons
how you taught me to always compose a picture before unthinkingly clicking the camera
how you loved to drive but drove so safely (and slowly) that we laughed and called it 'royal speed'
how you trusted only yourself with our safety on those long road trips (on 60s and 70s roads) from Bombay to Delhi or Bangalore
how proud you were of me when you and I were the only ones standing upright in a cyclone at sea that had veteran sailors retching and heaving
how you always took the best, most expressive pictures of my babies
how you insisted that people with 'shifty eyes' were not to be trusted
how you hated Bollywood movies with a passion and never forgot to ridicule them, especially when the heroine had several changes of clothes in the course of one song
how we all still benefit from the goodwill you left behind Baba .......
and how a million little things a million times a day still remind me of you ......