27 Jan 2007
Great Expectations
If one can sit back and pay fleeting attention, the drama that unfolds on the world's stage is very enjoyable. The same shit happens again and again and you wonder if the characters have the capacity to learn from experiences at all. Insanity fuels the situations and mediocrity shapes the script. A few samples:
1.Members of Blank Noise chose Brigade Road, Bangalore, last Sunday, to implement their latest project as a part of their campaign against eve-teasing. These girls would stand at strategic locations on the road and stare at male passersby. If a chap construes that as some encouraging signal and approaches the girl, rest of her friends would join her and collectively stare at the chap to unsettle him, so to make him - by their logic - realise how uncomfortable girls feel when they are ogled at. Adam-teasing to counter and eliminate eve-teasing! I don't endorse male chaivinism, but I don't buy female chauvinism either. To condemn oppression of women is fine, but to suggest that all men are bastards and compulsive perverts is certainly ridiculous.
A group of staunch feminists, with zero understanding of human behaviour, come together and believe that they can upstage male-female equation by some stupid campaigns! Males are programmed to court and seek mates; so far as evolution process is concerned, penning poetry to woo a woman is at the same level as ogling at her is. The associations that we give to each of these are our own conventions, based on our cultural background. As long as the chap respects the woman's decisions and preferences, it's insensible to read too much into his gestures. When he obstinately sticks to his preferences and demands the woman to oblige, the level of offence is same whether he passes the message with his unblinking stare or a beautiful poem.
That aside, there's always a small percentage of people who cross lines, no matter what. Make all the people in the world into cops and you will still have crimes. Practise adam-teasing for two centuries and you will still have eve-teasing. It's absurd to draw conclusions from specific cases and pass them as generalisations. Men take as much humiliation in this world as women do. To look at it all with a skewed perspective and expect preferential treatment is sheer rubbish. Eve-teasing is just a facet of a deeper problem - that of disrespect for other person's space and freedom. To consider it exclusively won't help anything. It's like trying to curb murder and believing that you are curbing all forms of crime.
2.Shilpa Shetty and her Big Brother! I still don't get why there was that much fuss. When you volunteer to be part of a farcical, nasty reality show (among other things, I don't understand what they mean by that), and have the choice to walk out if you can't take it any more, why do you project as if you are being exploited? She passes some blatant remarks against you, your race and your country, you have the freedom to give it back to her. It's not a bilateral meet between Britain and India, damn it! It's just a fucken circus for the idiot box and it's between you and her. Keep it at that. Media thought otherwise and made it an unnecessary political issue.
Every country, every group, without exception, is racist. It's only when there's a reference to color that we seem to infer the remark or gesture as racist. Discrimination is rampant everywhere. Every damn country, every damn group is racist. Before spicing up the story and jumping to conclusions, it'd do good if media spare some time for introspection. Racism is as rife in India as it is in Britain. Limit such issues to gossip columns in magazines, give the dame her crores, switch off the cameras and kill the fucken Big Brother. In celebrity-obsessed cultures, such shows and fuss do more harm than a decade of addiction to pornography does.
3.Bangalore is content with gloss and hype, and a riot is among the last things to happen here. A few days back, however, a pro-Saddam rally, led by a few politicians, almost effected a riot. Normalcy returned in no time, but only after loss of a life, injuries to many, unrest at a few places and much damage to property. It was nothing to do with Saddam or Bush or any noble idealism, but a gamble made for political interests. Coming after nearly a month after Saddam's execution, the rally happened a couple of days before a religious procession was to be. It succeeded in its mission, in that the unrest it effected was enough to cut short the procession and render it ineffective.
I don't know how effective rallies are, but if it comes to that, I can understand the objectives of an anti-Bush rally. But a pro-Saddam rally? In India? Bush is a first-rate criminal, but Saddam was a despot. Is your complaint against his execution? But when you say a pro-Saddam rally, it doesn't suggest you are protesting the execution, but that Saddam was a good man and was meted out injustice. Effectively, you are saying despot is a good man! That such a rally was led by politicians and was approved of by the authorities concerned is, to my mind, a blatant exploitation of power and another kick on the common man's butt. The blessings of democary! Let's, then, do away with Gandhis, Tagores, pacifism from the school syllabi and let's study Saddams, Hitlers, and their heroic deeds. Politicians and their fucken games! But then in a country where you can lure people to vote for you just by supplying a packet each of chicken biryani and cheap liquor, will politics ever get better than this?
Afzal should certainly be hanged. For making fiasco of a great opportunity to eliminate the most heinous species on the planet.
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