Hypocrisy and India are like illegitimate children sprung from an awkward consummation between two diabolic parasites. The moment the sub-continent got cut at its umbilical cord in ‘47, so did the sense of everything else that once made any sort of sense. Among them, was our understanding of who gets noticed and why. Even if it means in a context as grotesque as violating a woman’s honor. This, from a land that can’t stop going blue in the face with incessant browbeating about it being that cultural nest where ‘woman is God’. Bah! What a load of steaming fresh horse dung!
Take the lackluster (pun intended!) fate that a certain ‘Shiney’ B-City chap is currently going through. No sooner had the victim of his wile libido (or so we are told!) sniffed her way into the police station with her tears emerging from behind moist lashes laced with atomic hints of a certain famous film wallah’s climactic essence, the entire nation was rubbed in the face with unprepared seeming nervous correspondents standing in front of garishly audacious bungalows screaming speculations into their microphones. Amid this horrid cacophony laced with the humdrum of loud human emotions was buried that O-too-obvious query – Why? For the sake of all that is good and pure…why?
Why was it that a crime that the country has witnessed since time immemorial was suddenly being shouted into deafening loudspeakers just because a known face was involved? Why is this victim more important than those tens of thousands of nameless faceless and, now, honor-less (some lifeless!) girls who lost the toes on their feet to the frostbite that ate into them by the administration’s frozen attitudes? Is it not shameful that such a heinous crime becomes front page news just because it has a known name attached to it like an unwanted finger? This – right here – is where India can never claim to be a ‘developed nation’. A classic case of misplaced ideologies sits bare like the shame of that unfortunate woman right here. This moment, this sentence. A point in time where the governing bodies burp out regulations to the commoners who go to hell and back while feeding fresh strawberries to the ‘alleged famous’ while telling the world – ‘O but they are being treated like the rest! Like common people!’
Are they? If they were then why is this rape incident major news? Should it also not have disappeared in that minuscule five line small print in the seventh page of that unknown daily with minimal readership? If they were then should not the reporters make this a spicy Page 3 item and brush it off as just another part of their hedonistic lives where they get to play the divine role of choosing what is worth our ears and what is not? If they were then shouldn’t this ‘Shiney’ chap be roaming around trying to find a good lawyer to fight for him so that he doesn’t get his derriere rammed into in the darkness of the rat infested prison cells haunted by the memories darker than the night? Given the coverage he has received in the last 48 hours, it is suffice to say – there is nothing ‘common’ about it. Never has been. Never will be.
It is in this deep seeded double standard that the difference between the India that is and the India that the world is being told about stands naked like a wailing orphan next to a canine friendly garbage mound. The stink it raises here is far too obvious to our trained nostrils. It is here that we frown, nod our heads disbelievingly and say ‘BS! Had this fellow not been a poster boy for so long then none of this would have even reached the ear of his own neighbor. Let alone the entire nation.’
I really don’t care what happens in this case. At the risk of being portrayed as someone who doesn’t care for a girl’s honor (Shame! Blasphemy!) my real concern is with the extremely skewed context behind this mess. Is the girl telling the truth? Did he really do it? Or is he the victim of some bizarre ploy and getting pounded meaninglessly amid two dozen photographers trying to take a picture of his innocent eyes? Or is this all a disgusting set up to get him into the public eye just before the release of his next B-City venture? I don’t give a damn. My trouble is that I suddenly feel shortchanged that I belong to a country where being raped by a celebrity is the only way to get anything remote to ‘justice’.
Sick.
0 reflections:
Post a Comment