I don’t know what to say about the Delhi tragedy that hasn’t been said already. I can’t offer any magic solutions, and it will not change the country you and I live in. It reeks of helplessness, and of a young woman whose nightmarish experience were seared into national consciousness, destroying the notion of Indian propriety that we’d been cuddling with all these years. Then again, neither does anyone else in the media and social media. That’s because incidents like this generate a series of reactions that are as predictable as a Rohit Shetty movie (Step 1. Be obnoxious. Step 2. “Look, flying Scorpio!” Step 3. Someone please introduce Ajay Devgn to a toothbrush.) The pattern in this case played out as follows:
1. A Medical student gets horrifically assaulted on the streets of Delhi after she boarded an private bus. A news channel airs the news, and soon enough, the news goes viral, displacing last week’s viral star, Rakhi Sawant’s divorced husband.
2. Talking heads start asking the right questions: Why was the girl on the road with a boy ? Was she drunk? Why are people asking us for opinions when it is clear that we have the brains of goat poop? The PCC president of Andhra Pradesh even said that “Getting freedom at midnight doesn’t mean to roam around roads at midnight”( the incident happened at 9:30 PM). Yes Sir, and your mom’s legs should have stayed shut on your parents’ honeymoon.
3. Then it was time for a BJP to jump into the fray, who did so with all the grace of a tightrope walker splattering against the ground. According to the official spokesperson of the party, Western culture promotes hooliganism and lust, while holy places are centres of peace and virtue. I’m sure devdasis, altar boys and people in Ayodhya would agree.
It is incidents like these that inspire a slew of “I’m ashamed to be an Indian” reactions. (Not that national pride is a great benchmark to begin with. Saying you’re proud of being Indian is like saying you’re proud of being 70% water. You had nothing to do with it.)
Having said that, many things – Delhi, Bombay, Gurgaon, religion, the caste system, dowry, Dahod – do make you want to move to someplace more sane, like Saudi Arabia. And according to a recent survey of the G20 nations, India is actually the worst place to be a woman, ahead of Saudi Arabia. It takes real talent to fall behind Saudi, a country where a woman could get whipped for showing too much eyelash. Then again, in India you could apparently get raped for not dressing in a bed sheet.
Another example of idiocy was seen in Haryana, wherein a Panchayat outlawed love marriages, cellphones and common sense. It also banned women under 40 from going out unescorted, thus teaching perverts a lesson by forcing them to harass only old women. I think the only way for women to be safe is to not be born here. See, the Haryanvis were right all along.
It’s the kind of week that makes you wonder what would happen if we just relinquished governance to women. All of it. Everything, just run by women. Sure, I anticipate a sudden glut of inventions such as handbags that can hold smaller handbags, and there would be ambulances on hold to deal with bad hair days” and creams would promise to get rid of all Daddy issues in “just seven days!”, but all that aside, it might just work. Women can work wonders if we just let them be. Just look at Sherlyn Chopra and Poonam Pandey
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