Despite my determined resolutions, I am here to post after a two-month gap instead of the two-week or one-week gap I had envisioned...anyways...so much did happen that I wanted to pen down but here it is...cooled and distilled...It is methinks imperative that we stop using the phrase 'moral policing' and start referring to certain personalities who graced the newspapers recently as 'moral terrorists' or 'social terrorists'. Though a rose is a rose no matter what it is called, I am beginning to realise the immense power of renaming or naming...People who want to grab eyeballs through their 'cultural sanitisation' should not be given front page coverage definitely but whenever they are referred to, anywhere in the media they should be necessarily called 'terrorists'.Not only because they attack women/girls/men, but also because what they are essentially doing is exactly what all world leaders and activists and the most importantly, The Common Man, strongly condemn all the time, everywhere...terrorism. Terrorising human beings in the name of religion/culture/ whatever ideology the barbarians can conveniently latch onto. While I do not think that wearing jeans/drinking/smoking/even education is the act of emanicipation of women, I do recognise that it goes a small way in forming a world where women are considered human with a will of their own and not an object men have to take care of. But what amazed me was that nobody, man/woman reacted to a news story that appeared later in the week after all the hullabaloo. There was a court judgement in TOI just last week where the judgement read that the rape victim could not have been raped because no Indian woman allows another woman to be raped in front of her. The victim in question had alleged that the wife of the rapist had abetted the crime. I do not know the facts of the case but what shocked me was the judgement which in my friend 's words was 'regressive'. The victim may have been lying, the man might be innocent, his wife again innocent. But why does this judge feel that Indian women are incapable of heinous crimes when there are criminals of the female sex ? Or maybe he meant married Indian women are incapable of anything immoral/heinous ? oh so is that why mothers-in-law kill their daughters-in-law ? Is that why well-off mothers do not hesitate to kill a foetus if found to be a girl ? Or is it only rape that they will not tolerate ? When a judge who metes out justice can bring his personal prejudices into his judgement in the year 2009, and nobody reacts to that statement when it was across the front pages, I can happily predict many more moral terrorists creeping in.
The Indian woman seems to be an alloy of purity, chastity, resilience, goodness and silence in the face of suffering. Nothing more, nothing less !
Meanwhile, Swat valley has been taken over by Neanderthal Men. The world including India(which had a woman PM and still has a woman behind the throne apparently) or the US of A(headed by a charming young Prez) doesnt seem to be able to do much abt it...Though I am pinnin my hopes on Obama who seems to be genuine enough abt removal of terrorism. If some kind soul does not liberate Swat soon, the female species of homo sapiens (this must be the way the Neanderthals regard girls/women) there might soon be driven to extinction or a fate worse than that and obviously India will soon be at the receiving end of more Mumbai-like attacks. [Interestingly and on a very different tangent, I must say that the recent Mumbai attack seems to have opened many more eyes than usual for the simple fact that the upper classes were also victims this time around. Random, innocent but rich and influential people...now is tht my bias?!]
Hmm...the next thing tht had caught my attention was of course the ubiquitous 'Slumdog Millionaire'. Yet to see it, though it seems to have swept up almost all the awards worth their salt, the music seems to sound average to me. Anyways...good to see the Oscar winners especially Winslet who won after 6 nominations...
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at last...I almost had forgotten your blog link. I always liked your passion for stuff. Though most times your lazy self rules.
ReplyDeleteAbout the Mumbai/Mangalore attacks I really wish more good comes out of it in the form of awareness.
We still have tougher and better times to witness
Anilaaaaaaa...read this just now...love the passion with which u write...god!
ReplyDeleteOn the first topic..to think people still hold this image of the "Indian woman" is kind of shocking not because they think she is capable of not doing wrong...but because people who have such views about the indian woman also believe that the indian woman should assist and help the patidev no matter what he does...so shouldn't they logically have believed that the woman in question helped her husband rape the other woman? On another note, have u ever thought of how some of us(indians) still think our society is free of pedophilia and incest. We have seen and experienced such things around us at some point of time and still some of us talk of these things like they don't exist!
Regarding the Bombay blasts,i think you could be right thought that point never struck me..i kept thinking that if people with American passports had not been attacked, things wouldn't have been talked of at the intl level quite this way.
And about Slumdog Millionaire...yes the music is very average when u think of what A.R.Rahman is capable of.In which way does the album compare to Dil Se or Roja or even Rangeela for that matter! Even the movie Anne...it's good but I don't know if it's worth winning an Oscar...then again when u think of the recent Oscar winning movies...i guess this is more than justified:)
btw i think rahman deserved it for the background score re..only not for jai ho..what say?
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