Questions.. Questions..Questions.. ( A guest post )

Shruthi Iyer is the guest blogger today . Its her article . She is studying pharma and loves to sing . She can be reached at shruthi2612@yahoo.co.in

 

It was the night before our management exam. Malavika (my friend) and I were lying on the couch surrounded by a sea of notes, when we started talking. Yeah, yeah we should have been studying, judge all you want people, but at 1a.m. in the morning all those concepts of marketing and finance just seem to fuse into one big blob of nonsense. Anyway, we were discussing about the recent brutal rape of the five year old girl in Delhi and we stumbled upon a few interesting thoughts. Now now, all those people who dismissed this article as yet another preachy write up ten seconds ago, refer back to the title please; it says ‘questions’, and unless ‘questions’ means preaching in Hebrew, you can still read this article with an open mind.

 In a moment of pure brilliance Malavika said that night, “A part of our population is becoming like cancer; spreading through the veins of our country reaching out to us, killing us.” The sheer genius of this analogy is in its objectivity, because when it comes to cancer there are just three objectives that we need to address; where is the cancer, how to detect it and how to cure it…

So where is the cancer? Where is this breeding ground of rapists, sadists and pedophiles in India? As Mumbaikars, we want to believe it is in Delhi, Haryana or some other northern state far far away from our little bubble of safety, but then again we happily choose to ignore those creepy stares in our local trains, the inappropriate touching in our buses or those lewd comments when you are with a guy friend at marine drive. As a Tamilian I want to believe that it cannot be someone from my community, but if that were true all the Indian women would have permanently emigrated to Tamil Nadu long back. So where has the cancer not spread yet? Where exactly can I venture out at night without watching my back? Where is it safe for me?

One can wonder that why this world is not a peaceful, happy place, why there is this need of violence and power? Well that one’s easy to answer; it’s the nature’s rule, there’s got to be a predator and a prey because the fight for survival is perhaps the perfect balance mechanism. However, even a deer knows that it is the lion she has to run from, that within her herd she is safe. A cat knows that while her kitten could be hunted by a tomcat, it would never be raped for mating.

 What do we know about our predator? When somebody says rapist, the image that pops in our heads is that of a filthy, sweaty unshaven sex deprived illiterate vermin who lurks in the dark corners of our cities with his other sleaze ball friends. But rapists come in all shapes and sizes you know; that same sexy smile which dazzled you on the hot guy’s face book DP might haunt his child victims for years to come, that class nerd you thought to be naïve and sweet might shock you with a date rape drug. While these are perhaps exaggerations, you do see my point right?

So media, psychologist forums and talk shows, save your psychobabble and give me something concrete. Give me a name… a sketch… a profile, at least one attribute to distinguish my predator from the rest. I don’t want be afraid of every guy I meet, I don’t want to treat every cell as cancerous!

Lastly, the cure. The cure for this cancer; the point that has been under much discussion for the past months. People have been demanding death rows and life imprisonment for rapists to induce fear in other potential miscreants. But guys tell me honestly has confiscation of our fellow classmate’s mobile ever prevented us from using our own in classrooms? Why do you think this logic doesn’t apply to larger crimes? Yes, it does! Imprisonment is certainly a punishment to the perpetrator directly, a way of obtaining justice for the victim and perhaps avenging the victim’s anguish retrospectively. But believing the fact that it will be a lesson to all the other potential criminals of the world is being a little too optimistic. It is like believing in the innate sense of goodness and conscience of people and frankly, if that existed, then we wouldn’t need this discussion in the first place. So is there really a way to restore our country’s mental health? Or are we all destined to rot and die?