Mood:  spacey

Why is there so much outrage over the killing of three Indian students in Australia and all the urban violence? There is a dire need to disabuse people of all misgivings about living Down Under. Australia is still a much better place to live in than many of the metros in India. Let's take it point by point as Arun Jaitley often does on television.

In the 90s when this reporter asked a widely-travelled American tourist at Mumbai airport, according to him which is the most unfriendly country, he promptly said, "India is second only to North Korea". Moments later the blood drained out of his sun-tanned face. He knew what he said was so politically incorrect. Though people around took umbrage of his no-holds-barred opinion, it was more interesting to know how would North Korea beat India in its own game. North Koreans, the American ventured to say, are bred on Leftist ideas which constantly implore them to fight for everything in life. The underlying philosophy of Communism is that unless you fight for everything you will never get what you deserve. Struggle, dissent and, more often than not, violence, unbridled and unapologetic, are fashionable and justifiable. Singur is the best example of the Left getting the taste of its own medicine.

One should admire the Australian prime minister and his ministers trying to calm the situation by being defensive. It was a civilised response and the need of the hour. After Raj Thackeray beat up Bihari boys at Kalyan station near Mumbai, the Congress chief minister of Maharashtra Sushil Kumar Shinde actually told the press that he supported Raj Thackeray on the son-of-the-soil issue, but was only against Raj's violent ways. That is like saying you support Hitler, though gas chambers are unacceptable.

Looking at the way the Australian police picked up Indian students who had blocked traffic at peak hour, again one admires their sensitive handling of people which.Indian news channels called brutality. Australian police should learn brutality from their Indian counterparts. Ticket collectors in Mumbai are seen herding groups of ticketless travellers by a rope. The justification is usually about how people should be humiliated to teach them a lesson, be it ticketless travelling or speeding on highways.

As pointed out in this blogsite long ago even Hindi movies project images of forthright, no-nonsense police officers slapping customers at dance-bars during a raid. That is so close to reality. Indians cheer loudly while watching such scenes, as in the hugely popular Hindi movie, Page 3. A dance bar in Mumbai is a place known for all the vices possible -- but not much of them are illegal and they conform to modern ways of thinking. The Australian lawyer who appeared on News Now was rational enough to point out that every society has its share of racists. And we in India have more than our share.

In a reported case in Mumbai, a young MBA graduate gave up her well-paid job after she was slapped by co-passengers while travelling in train, that too in the car reserved for ladies. In Mumbai suburban trains, passengers are stopped from travelling short distances, and people who defy this unwritten code get a taste of Indian vigilantism. Indians don't cover themselves in glory when they carry their home-bred traditions like eve-teasing onto the global stage. When young men from India get rounded-up for creating a racket at train stations in Japan, police are at a loss to understand their strange behaviour. No one in Japan treats women like that.

Tokyo police also get into frequent  engagements with Indian and Pakistani residents, who after a drinking binge would create a racket in the dead of night. And needless to say, the two communities who live together in the same apartment get into violent brawls discussing political issues of their home countries. The best parallel to be drawn to these unruly behaviour is that of Israelis and Palestanians getting into street fights in Baroda (Gujarat). The police in Baroda remain a mute bystander as both communities have enough political clout to even escape rape charges in India. The gravity of misbehaviour in foreign soil can be guaged from the fact that in most residential areas in Japan local people refrain from flushing their toilets after midnight for the fear of disturbing the neighbourhood! We Indians have a long way to go.

Not long ago, a series of rape incidents at Kovalam beach brought forth the issue of security, or the lack of it in God's Own Country. In spite of all the rape victims being white, there was not even a restrictive travel advisory issued by any European country or the US, leave alone charges of racism. The perpetrators were all locals. The local media had stopped short of blaming white women sun-bathing in the nude to be the cause for giving local young boys the uncontrollable urge to rape them. Very similar to what is being said about Indian students' imprudent ways of living in Australia.

TV channels' penchant for shrill reporting, anchors bouncing on their seat and reporters peddling personal opinion as groundswell support for or against their pet themes have become an established form of journalism in India. The news reporting on the attacks in Australia was so devoid of objectivity or rational thinking that the evening news had become another TV soap -- replete with name-calling, grandstanding and manufactured outrage. Boston Legal series does not have the drama and colour as English news channels in India. News reporters anywhere in India should just get on to the streets near their office and they won't have to go far to find a more outrageous story of racism, facism and violent arrogance.

If police action on students in Australia was really so bad then someone needs to sensitise our own forces in India, before laying charges of brutality for holding up boys by their limbs and clearing the streets for rush-hour Melbourne traffic. The Bihari boy in Mumbai who raided a BEST bus with a gun gave up the custody of all the passengers within minutes. Later he was taken into police custody where he is known to have died. The forensic reports suggest that he was not killed during the police encounter, but in custody with a shot in the head. The presence of gun powder around the bullet wound, according to forensic reports, only mean he was shot at point blank by the police when in custody.

Racism is such a prevalent factor in India that in a city like Bangalore rickshaw drivers get cheeky if you do not speak in Kannada. Bangalore is also the place most known to the developed world, so much so that the name has become a verb. The attitude of the locals do not instil confidence in people from other states with their parochial behaviour. Driving in Bangalore with a Tamil Nadu registration number on your car can be a harrowing experience, as locally registered vehicles would deliberately try to nudge you out of the road.

Television reality music shows in India often brazenly propagate racism by granting marks to contestants singing local language songs as against candidates singing in the language of a neighbouring state. Racist tendencies are so commonplace in this country that Indians are quite inured to that. Aamir Khan's advertisement on harassment meted out to foreign tourists is the best example that could be quoted as a reality check for our chest-thumping national pride, that most often edges on hypocrisy and disdainful arrogance. Have you ever, ever come across an Indian who thinks his culture is outdated and all bunkum. One would rarely find an American who sings peaens to his own culture and lifestyle. Yet they, without any long-held traditions, live a much better and stress-free life in the US than we Indians do with all our cultural baggage. Just because Hollywood movies and American TV shows have a propensity to self-degrade themselves, mock at their own lifestyle and on some occasions, be extremely critical of their national and international state policies, Indians get a stick to beat the US with. Australia is no different, except that in the scale of arrogance it is a notch higher than Europe or the US. But most certainly Australia is much lower on the scale than India. As Mahatma Gandhi once pointed out quite eloquently, "if you point your fore-finger at someone you should realise that the other three fingers are pointed towards you". For India's it's probably all the other four fingers.

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Posted by Anil Nair at 8:31 AM

Updated: Saturday, 6 June 2009 10:17 AM

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Mood:  mischievious

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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Posted by Anil Nair at 10:13 PM

Updated: Thursday, 4 June 2009 7:30 PM

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Mood:  happy

To quote an example of uncontrolled and intemperate speech, Bollywood screenplay writer Vijay Tendulkar twice said during press conferences in December 2004 that if he had a gun he would shoot Narendra Modi. It was reported by almost all television channels on prime time news, just as newspapers had given it front-page coverage. But no one had ever suggested that Mr Tendulkar should be arrested or charged under NSA.

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Just as sub-brokers in Mumbai are known to have their ear to the ground for insider trading, the bookies almost got it right this time round in general election, as far as government formation is concerned. The election results predicted by most news channels incidentally were so off the mark that it gives legitimacy and vindication to the Election Commission’s hardball tactics of banning such surveys during elections. Many have even suggested a total ban on exit polls even after the election results are declared as the television channels have exceedingly shown the propensity to get it wrong, which subsequently has led to imputing charges of advertisement-led opinion polls. After all on many television channels, in these days of economic downturn, advertisement department calls the shots on editorial coverage.

Also, the media has the naïve and unseemly immature way of deriving conclusions on the success and failure of political parties in elections. The BJP candidate from north-west Mumbai constituency Mahesh Jethmalani explained to many people in the television studio post-election debates that it is childish to come to the conclusion that every decision of Congress party had contributed to its success or conversely, every decision taken by BJP had led to its failure to garner majority support for its candidates. It could even have been that some decisions of Congress went against it and hence it could not get a majority and yet some others of BJP could have helped BJP candidates get more votes.

The most striking example is that of Varun Gandhi’s speech in Pilibhit where he made quite some indiscreet statements. The reality is that in the real world people are used to saying much worse things in public discourse that no one gets too shaken by these utterances. The media unnecessarily sanitise a straight talk if it comes from any Hindu camp. And most often it is quite selective in such censorship. To quote an example of uncontrolled and intemperate speech, Bollywood screenplay writer Vijay Tendulkar twice said during press conferences in December 2004 that if he had a gun he would shoot Narendra Modi. It was reported by almost all television channels on prime time news, just as newspapers had given it front-page coverage. But no one had ever suggested that Mr Tendulkar should be arrested or charged under NSA. It didn’t become a major point of debate in favour of Narendra Modi on television news channels as seen in Varun Gandhi’s case where he is being vilified.

On the other hand, Mumbai’s indifference to the elections with voter turnout of less than 41 per cent was widely reported as a shocking display of ennui and apathy. But as this blogsite reported earlier following terrorists attacks on 26/11, people are not stirred by the corporate advertisements on how they should play a proactive role in choosing leaders to change the situation. The fact remains that when Mumbai was attacked six times in the last 15 years corporates never showed any sympathy. Then, offices worked regularly even on election days. That a few CEO-types died at Hotel Taj and Trident should not be taken as a wake-up call. The wake-up call first came to Mumbaikars in 1993 when the present Samajwadi party general secretary Sanjay Dutt and his cohorts in the D-gang were involved in the serial blasts in Mumbai which killed over 480 people in a couple of hours. What the man on the street feels so outraged about is that when bombs go off in crowded trains killing scores of poor people corporates don’t show the same alacrity and sense of purpose in spending money on ads to awaken the society against the menace of terrorism. The corporates raved and ranted only when some among themselves got a hole in the head.

In Mumbai in particular, the Congress has gained this dubious credit for having successfully tamed the threat from Shiv Sena by indirectly giving Raj Thackeray a free rein in his racist propaganda against Biharis. The state government courted overtly and covertly the breakaway faction of Shiv Sena, never intending to take action for all the violence that Raj Thackeray unleashed on the streets and drove a wedge between Shiv Sena party workers and supporters to split the votes between the two. Congress may have romped home in the latest elections in Mumbai, but there is a good lesson in it for the BJP and Shiv Sena. The BJP can go it alone if the votes are getting divided so effectively between the two Senas. Alternatively, Shiv Sena could be persuaded to reach out to the cosmopolitan population of the city for it to embrace wider communities and voter base. If the BJP chooses to do the latter, the combined efforts of both the BJP and the Shiv Sena in wooing the city population which is bred on economic development dream that Mumbai is known for, would be a walkover against the Congress. Raj Thackeray, just as Shiv Sena did, will realise in good time that Marathi manoos philosophy has a short shelf-life. Sooner than later Raj Thackeray will be back to getting a wider support base than just from a parochial population of the city. Growth is the only way for political parties to survive in a democracy, and if Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) wishes to rule the state it will have to concede to larger demands and population demography. It has happened earlier with Mayawati and Jayalalithaa, and it would happen to MNS too.

But many Tamil Brahmin residents this reporter talked to in Matunga have raised suspicion over the death of LTTE leader V Prabhakaran in Sri Lanka just after the elections came to an end in India. The way LTTE started to pack up and leave without even giving the Sri Lankan army a befitting response it was known for and the way the propaganda machinery of the terrorist organisation was fledgling through the days of intense fighting when it was most required—all point to the possibility of how the death of the terror leader in Sri Lanka could have been manipulated by Congress to win the elections. “By all means, Prabhakaran might have been killed weeks ago but the news was never released to the media for that would have created a huge problem for the Congress to win seats in the south”, said a resident from Hindu colony in Dadar. But the death of the LTTE leader is certainly a good news, and India should be indebted to Sri Lanka to have brought Prabhakaran to justice for his role in killing Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Posted by Anil Nair at 6:53 PM

Updated: Saturday, 30 May 2009 1:06 PM

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