We are all molestors…

The furore over the Guwahati mob molestation case makes me laugh.

Not because I thought it was hyped, or am cynical about it. Such incidents cannot be hyped enough. It made me laugh for another reason.

Most of the people who called out to the public to “hang the culprits”, “chop their balls off”, and “stone them to death”, were the same people who propogate the exact mentality that instigates such an incident.

Where does this perversion begin?

I don’t know. It’s deeply ingrained in our ethos. In small, subtle, implicit ways, the Indian way of thinking propagates what I term as the ‘slut’ mentality. Whether its the film where the heroine transforms from a pelvic thrusting bombshell to a Saree-donning apsara, or the television serial where the wife waits piously for her husband to rise from the dead, or even simple discussions with friends about girls who’ve been in relationships earlier.

You remember those Govinda films where he flirts around with the skirt-wearing heroine and settles down with the homely girl? That too.

I’m simply exaggerating, right? How can a harmless film, just mindless entertainment, instigate a violent thought?

Such visuals help us develop our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad. They teach us to look at certain kind of people as good, and certain kind as bad.

I remember in college, there was a girl who was what people would call a ‘bomb’. Since she was way out of the league of most of the guys, most of the guys took the easy way out by calling her a slut. If given a chance, they’d sleep with her too, but that’s only because she was loose-charactered enough to let them do so.

In our everyday lives, there are thousands of such instances, where we assassinate characters, drawing judgements, passing remarks, and generally contributing to the idea of good and bad, angel and slut.
Now, to the second problem I had with the reactions.

The whole hatred spewed against the molesters typifies why they did it in the first place.

Hang them, chop their balls off, etc. are rhetorical statements that I’d expect Sunny Deol to use in a film, not educated youngsters. Why? Don’t they deserve to die for a gruesome crime?

May be they do. But not at your hands. The same mentality that angers you enough to chop their balls off, gave them the impetus to molest the girl. The power of taking matters into our own hands is irresistible. If given a chance, we’d hang our ministers, chop their balls off, slit the throats of rapists, stab Kasab to death. See the similarity between you and the molesters?

It’s preposterous to compare the two crimes, you say? Looting a country is not the same as molesting a girl, you say?

Well, who decides that? For the crowd at Guwahati, a girl coming out of a pub at eleven must have been a serious offence as well.

For all practical purposes, we have a common law. Skewed as it might be, it decides what’s right and what’s wrong. When you intend to take matters into your own hands, you’re behaving exactly like the crowd.

So don’t give me the bullshit about what you’d do to the criminals.

The next time you stare at a girl on the road, pass a comment about how many boyfriends she’s had, and stare at her clothes, congratulate yourself.

You’re the typical Indian male. You molest a girl’s character, you rape her image, and do it in the anonymity of a crowd.

How are you any different?