I watched the movie NH-10 last night and I was disturbed. And then I watched Sunny Leone careening and prancing around on the song Meri Desi Look, Meri Desi Look, Meri Desi Look pe….. And I was disturbed a lot more. There seem to be two Indias.
One which kills its daughters and sisters for being friends with a male, or having a marriage out of love. And the other which lusts and pines for an Internet Porn celebrity turned main stream Bollywood Actress.
Where is the male of this nation going? They kill ordinary god fearing unborn/born girls and worship a porn actress. I think we are a far more tolerant society than any in the world. Nowhere in the world has a female porn star turned into a main stream actress with a 600 million plus following. And at the same time nowhere do we have Khap Panchayats which run their own law and order enterprise and who can pass orders to kill a female foetus or an adult female at their own behest. Nowhere do we see a social structure where a practising lawyer says that he may kill his daughter if she so much as looks at a boy before marriage. I am referring to the Udwin documentary on Nirbhaya.
No wonder we have cases like that of Nirbhaya, which shake us up to the core. The perpetrators of Nirbhaya are a product of this society. They watch, they observe and they grow. In their warped minds, women become an object of derision, an object of dominance and an object of surrender. If she doesn’t give in, she is punished, raped and pillaged.
I am very anguished. We cannot ignore the transformation media is bringing in. Our maid servant also is on Whats App, she also watches You Tube and she follows the same Hindi soaps as my wife. The world is indeed flat, Mr Friedman. There’s no time differential or strata differential. And this is resulting in changes in the society which are occurring at a very rapid pace.
What should we do? Humbly accept the fact that our children will be exposed to thousands of things. Time will be at a premium. People will multi task a lot — Reply to mails on shitpot. Send forwards while in the Metro. Listen to music while cooking and watch television while brushing teeth. Our minds will be constantly bombarded. The short term memory will be supreme. Nobody will look or wait for the long term, because in the long term we will all be dead. In the midst of all this we need to teach our boys to respect girls, to be polite to them, to share with them equally. And we also need to teach our older women, mothers and sisters to again respect the girls in the house, the wives in the house and the daughters in the house. End of the day, women bring misery upon women.
Please also remember, the rule of the farm which I wrote in my earlier blog posts. We need to take long term views. Social mores and rules which are archaic and redundant need to be discarded and thrown away. We need to adapt fast and adapt a lot to be of relevance in the future. But to be rich we need to forget the noise of short term and think only long term. IPCA Labs at current rates for example is one buy for the long road.