In
her regular weekly piece Ms. Kalpana Sharma asks, “What’s wrong with Indian
men?” [1] From the title, I expected an analysis. What did I get? I will let
you be the judge, down the line.
In
the context of recent spate of sexual crimes in Mumbai, the Joint Commissioner
of Police (Crime), Himanshu Roy said in Mumbai, “The most obvious method of
preventing such crimes is that women should be aware of their environment. This
does not mean that they should be suspicious of all (my emphasis) their male relatives, friends or colleagues, but
it would be wrong to assume that none
(my emphasis) of these will ever harm them.”
Now,
that did not sound all that awful to me. Of course, I am a man and what would I
know about crimes against women. Another reason it sounded OK was an article I
had referred to in an earlier post, by one Nilanjana S. Roy [2] Executing the neighbor in which the
author, taking support of statistics, argued that rapes by acquaintances,
relatives are far more numerous as compared to by strangers. The environment
contains strangers as well as people you know. Further, in a series of articles
in a newspaper on how unsafe women feel in Delhi, one writer mentioned that she
crosses the road when she espies a group of men ahead [3]. I thought this is what
the policeman must have referred to in his comment about women being “aware of
the environment.”
But,
no I got it all wrong. The policeman was “suggesting that the onus of preventing
the crimes is really on women,” Ms. Kalpana Sharma says [1]. Unless Himanshu Roy
had said more about women’s responsibility and for some mysterious reasons the
writer failed to include it – after all, it would have helped her case to no
end – she had gone way wrong; particularly when she throws this gem of a
sentence: “Roy needs to be reminded that the job of the police and law
enforcement is not (my emphasis) to
tell women what they should do, but to do their own job more effectively.”
Sorry, both are the tasks of policemen. Police must tell both men and women,
and children too, what they should do in the interest of their own safety,
while discharging its other duties effectively.
It
is more than likely that the writer has been swept away by the current hysteria.
No, I am not discounting the horror visited upon the lady, and I as a male citizen
of Delhi feel ashamed. But, unthinking finger-pointing does no one any good.
And, hysteria carries a negative premium in charting out a path out of the mess
through discussions and debates.
The
irony of the whole article is in the conclusion that for the many troubling
questions, including why men are this way, “There are no easy answers. We can
begin by debating and discussing this issue much more than we do, in our
schools and colleges, in the columns of our newspapers, and in our families,”
after doing everything she could have done to undermine debates and
discussions!
What
I have got by reading the article is that I should title my post in the
interrogative and proceed to give no answer. And, that gets me to American,
Australian, Scottish men. Parallel to the Delhi gang-rape, the other unspeakable
crime on the world stage is the massacre of 20 children aged six or seven in
the US.
Bill
Moyers, a left-leaning doyen of the American press, starts an article in the Huffington Post [4] naming the 20
children and six adults who were shot dead in Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut,
USA – the full address and you can locate it on your iPad. If he had wanted he
could have likewise listed the most recent dozen are so such massacres. Indeed,
he lists four: Newtown, Columbine, Arora and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University. Why he missed Norway, I am curious. What is common to all of the above and the other unlisted
massacres? All were carried out by men. Now, you get why I titled this What’s wrong with …men?
Bill
Moyers took care of American men. What about Scottish and Australian men? For
that I have to take you to an article in The
Economist of December 22, 2012,
their annual double number [5], a nice Christmas gift this massacre was. In the
piece, we read that after a similar massacre in Scotland, Britain banned private
ownership of most handguns. That is, Britons do not trust their men. Likewise
in Australia, after a massacre in Tasmania. Australians don’t trust their “Mates”!
But,
in the US, apparently the distrust of men is not quite so severe. Charlton
Heston, aka Moses, you remember, don’t you? He had come down from the mountain
carrying, instead of the stone tablets, a couple of assault rifles. This is
what his God, the National Rifle Association, had given him. But, NRA got the
rifles as a gift from the US Constitution, its Second Amendment, the right to
bear arms. You may challenge God, but how do you challenge God’s donor? You
cannot. Hence, gun laws remain porous, as porous as the villain in any of the Dirty Harry movies will be after Clint
Eastwood riddles them. There is no solution.
One
thing to note though. Both articles with the Newtown massacre as their backdrop
are not titled in the form of a question. Yet, they too failed to offer any
solutions, except suggesting that the impossible must be tried!
So,
it all comes to whether I like the title in the form of a question or not! I am
never going to give any answer anyway.
Raghuram
Ekambaram
References
5.
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21568764-if-even-slaughter-20-small-children-cannot-end-americas-infatuation-guns
(This article is likely to get behind a pay wall, the Scrooge that The Economist is!)
4 comments:
Ms Sharma was probably trying to win some Brownie points. But I must grant that she is a good writer and usually writes far better articles than the one you've caught her with.
Are men really bad?
This is a question that deserves an answer.
I wish I could say more... some bloody expert who is a woman is calling me for a workshop!
There was a time many monsoons ago I used to like her, Matheikal. But she became irreversibly shrill by the week. I am not exactly sure she has not written worse pieces ( I have similar feelings about Praful Bidwai). These columnists overtime trade their sanity for money, if I be allowed to be cynical.
RE
I am working with a lot of Sharmas. Interesting. Do you think the very name has something to do with Brownie points?
I can raise this question boldly because...
no Sharma will read it ,,, ?
I don't know a whole lot of Sharmas! The ones I know are not on my mailing list through which I bother others. My department secretary is a Sharma but he is far from that kind of a guy!
The brownie points in my company are typically claimed by another set of names, which look and sound suspiciously like Bengali names, like Mukherjee, Banerjee, Chatterjee.
By the way, why Chattopadhyay is Chatterjee but Gangopadhyay is not Gangerjee :)
RE
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