Mood:
mischieviousNow Playing: Can the truth ever be told?!
Dev Colabawala, all of 21 years, is spending his seventh week in jail for a rape that was not. It is easy to strait-jacket events, fall into the groove of established notions and then pass judgments. But the truth is always grey, neither here nor there. Just take the incidents of rapes in Mumbai in the past few weeks. Incidentally, rapes have become so frequent that people have to be wiser than to just nurse a skewed pro-women, politically correct outlook. For Dev, the case is loaded in his favour, except that the media has so much influence on the judiciary these days that Dev might spend the rest of his life in jail. It is so tragic that no one seems to talk about the other side of the story, even in the media.
The media, as said on this blog-site earlier, only try to sanitise the happenings. If any reporter bothers to go and visit a few colleges he will know what today’s generation thinks of all this. Casual sex is so common amongst today’s teenagers that they are shocked at the ‘manufactured outrage’ in the media. A parent in Mumbai who would tell his teenage daughter to be alert to older men trying to molest, and “enjoy good company with boys of her age” is hardly the kind of modernity media has reached in India. Media is always 15 years behind, probably because it is manned by grey-haired men belonging to another generation.
Let’s look at the train of events in the first instance. The American girl studying at Tata Institute of Social Science (TISS) on that non-fateful day had been pub-hopping with four of her closest friends. If they were not close enough to her then she should not have been going with them all around the town from Chembur to Andheri through the night. At about 2 in the morning, the four boys decide to call it a day by going to an unoccupied house of an acquaintance. The girl is game for that too and joins them to the house in Andheri. Nowhere in the FIR lodged by the girl there has been a mention of any force used on her. Now the story gets a little hazy. The girl claims that the boys took turns to get fresh with her the moment she hoped into the bed. Graphic details are given in her FIR which says how the boys took her on from all sides. Then she says she went into the bathroom and hid herself to escape from the clutches of the four marauding young men. She finally agreed to come out when the four boys banged the bathroom door in the dead of night. She came out of the bath and went back to the same bed to sleep. In the morning when she woke up she found that she was stripped and the four boys sleeping in the same bed were also nude. Quite some sight there. Then suspecting the worst she went into the bathroom to check sexual assault. She is graphic enough to tell the police about finding her tampon embedded deep inside and signs of the semen on her private parts. The FIR is so Hollywood-like that it reads like the screenplay of the Original Sin. When she found that the boys have had sex with her when she was sleeping, she trooped out of the house and walked into a police station and lodged a complaint about atrocities committed on her. The whole sequence of events is so filmy that one can raise many questions on the veracity of her claims. And if the police are not influenced by media colouring of the event, they should be able to crack this one without much strain.
First, it is rather very naïve for an American girl not to expect the obvious through that evening and the morning after. The boys were pub-hopping, which is quite a trend among the youth in Mumbai, at least till Ram Sene does not interfere. They were truly on a pub-bharo andolan, and for sure, Renuka Chowdhary should be on their side. Second, TISS is known to be a hot and heaving place, again, among the college-going youth – Americans will find themselves at home there. Third, if the girl was so caught up with chastity she should have never gone with the four boys. Fourth, if there was another girl in the same group that evening the American girl should have returned home before midnight with her. Fifth, when the four boys invited her to join them to the vacant house, she should have known what was coming. There is no sign of any force used to get her to the house, except perhaps for the boys’ charm that worked on her that night. Sixth, the visit was nocturnal and when four young boys want to share their bed with a girl, you shouldn’t expect some Satyanarayana pooja to happen instead. Seventh, when the four boys started to make out with her, she should have by now got the message loud and clear, unless of course, she was also consumed by passion. Eighth, when she came out of the bathroom where she was hiding she could have simply walked out of the house, hailed a taxi or a rickshaw and gone home paying cold tribute to the boys’ raging desires. In that event, their state would have been even worse than going to jail. All Mumbaikar would vouch for this, one will find very secure and safe transport at any time of day or night anywhere in the city.
What is so intriguing is that we Indians are otherwise quite clued-in when it comes to sexual behaviour of people. If a boy and a girl spend a night together at home because of bad weather or flight delays we immediately come to the conclusion that they ended up having sex! A young unmarried couple working in a bank in Mumbai had spent the night in a building terrace on July 26, 2005 when torrential rains accompanied by high tide flooded the suburbs. The girl was found to be pregnant after six weeks and all fingers started pointing towards the young boy. But he was lucky enough to have recently undergone a sperm-count test which revealed that he was grossly incapable of impregnating women. The doctors at a well-known hospital in Mumbai saved the day for him by testifying before the girl’s parents. It is amazing that a girl, and an American that too, does not know what to expect if four boys sleep with her. It would have been very disappointing if all the four boys came out of that house the morning after with testimonials from the girl for ‘correct behaviour’.
There is so much sex and sexual imagery floating around us that it is inescapable. Even coffee ads and chocolate ads meant for five-year olds are about “what is on your stick?!” In the 90s when this reporter once asked the managing director of Air-India & Indian Airlines (the two PSUs were just merged then) about how bad its in-flight service was, the newly sworn-in chief was calm enough to tell a select few reporters that airlines business is considered a “sexy business” by everyone – the passengers, the investors, the management and the government. It could be one of the reasons why we have to pay Rs5,000 tax when the actual fare is only Rs500. Airline ads even in Muslim countries, are all about sexy women being at your beck and call and serving you fruit juices. Do the train or bus services in India advertise their women service staff. There are no women to serve in the first place, unlike in Europe.
Once when a Tata group company had taken a press party to south India on a chartered plane for a site visit, journalists almost threw a collective fit seeing elderly men serving them in flight. The best retort which never became quotable was when the chief of the newly merged airlines said, “if I decide to give the best in-flight service then I will have to run a whore house in mid-air!” His logic was unbeatable. One does not spend more than 2 hours on any flight in India. What all do you as a passenger expect from the airline crew. What if an elderly man gives you the air-sickness bag when you are tasting bile in your mouth at take-off. Does it really matter if it had been a girl full of oomph showing you any part of her anatomy? Can that make you less sick? So what if the same elderly man also delivers you the newspaper or the fruit juice at your seat? Do you complain of lack of service in first class train, when you are paying much more than the flight ticket cost? All pertinent questions, which any passenger would parry, for lack of conviction in his argument.
It is in light of all these facts that one feels sorry for a young manager who is being jailed for masturbating in his seat while watching the air-hostesses flit up and down the aisle with food trays. The airline ads have hit the bull’s eye, one must admit -- the young manager only did what was expected of him by the ads. The hypocrisy of it all is that one is enticed into travelling in air planes for the girls on offer, and then when he rises to the occasion in full measure, he is jailed for contemptuous behaviour. If you expected to get your moral moorings so right then one should follow an African-Muslim country which has introduced moral tourism, where no one is allowed to have sex, drink liquor, gamble or even check internet porn while on the conducted tour for eleven days. Wonder if they would allow men to shave their beard or skip the prayers five times a day.
The other rape accused in Mumbai belongs to an upper class family in Andheri, who is supposed to have molested actor Deepak Tijori’s daughter too. Here again, the story is familiar – the young boy (24) chats up with good-looking girls on the street and then takes them to hotels at Madh Island and have sex with them. It may be labouring over the same points, but it is hard to see how girls can accompany a stranger to a hotel in public transport so far away, check into the hotel room and then get laid (a whole street of hotels at Madh Island cater to this sort of clientele – impulsive, one-night standers). And the morning after they cry rape! There is no mention of force used in these cases too. The boy is rich and resourceful, so no question of proving his manhood, as often suggested by psychiatrists. It is simply that the young boy, true to his age, cannot control his sexual urge. The girls also get attracted to him, naturally. He takes the courtship to logical conclusions. It is as natural and obvious as dogs copulating on the streets of Mumbai. But in all these reported cases, the girls cry rape and get sympathy, while the males become the villain of the piece.
In all likelihood, and this the police must investigate, there might have been attempts at blackmail the morning after. If the demands made by the victim of rape on the accused cannot be met, one of the thousands of sexual encounters in the city, can become a rape story for prime time news. Also, the victim girl could be taking revenge on the boys for something that had happened earlier and has no relation to the sexcapades. But the fact remains the young boys accused of rape have lost precious time, their reputation lying in tatters, and a future jeopardized by a justice system that is most of the time non-existent.
In another aside, how can NGOs propagate the idea of use of condoms and free sex when even consensual sex is mostly considered as rape by law. It is best not to get into these issues, and call the TISS rape case as a fate that was ordained on the four boys. Very Hindu, very moral.
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