Societal Hypocrisy

Have you ever come across a bit of news that, when you first read it in a newspaper or an on-line news website, or in a link to it forwarded to you by a friend or acquaintance in a usual careless forwarding of an email which our generation so often does without a second thought, makes your eyelids fly open in disgust, aversive wonder and disbelief at the unbelievable sickness of itself? The kind of news that makes you wonder to yourself or aloud to your friends in turn, what the world and its madmen are coming to? Like, for example, the news about a father imprisoning his children for decades in his cellar to satisfy whatever his carnal needs are, delusional as they may be, or a report on the rape of a two year old girl and so forth; there's no dearth of such news these days. It is also a possibility that there's nothing new about these things; that they've been happening for decades and every generation comes across these bits of news and wonders what their times are coming to, and what times the generations to come will go through when it's their time to live.

Social networking has enhanced the spreading of news by leaps and bounds; and by this means I came across this horrible piece of news about how a man, apparently in a drunken stupor raped a stray female dog. (I use the phrase because the term used for female dogs has more than one denotation these days). Disbelief and disgust at the sickness of the act hits the reader first (in some cases maybe even amusement, but that's not on my mind). Rape in itself is terrible enough and committed in abandon despite what the right of mind would want to think about an improvement in social life, without it being committed on animals. I don't suppose I could ever describe the disgust and indignation I felt when reading it.

The news also mentioned that the dog was horribly traumatized after the incident, and was in a kind of unstoppable frenzy, with nothing anybody could that could calm her down. Such was the trauma of it all that she had stopped eating altogether. Street dogs in Indian mohallas, although stray normally have pseudo homes; they feed on leftovers from houses; they sleep on porches; and in most cases they do attain a slight attachment of sorts with the people in these mohallas. Naturally, the dog in this case had several to sympathize with her, and one of the families had volunteered to care for the dog post her trauma, and to try and get her to eat again. (A thought, aside from the context of the episode, which arose in my mind, was the completely contrasting meaning it gave to the commonly used phrase ‘treated like a dog’.)

While I do appreciate the kindness and sympathy of the family that did so, I cannot help but wonder at the hypocrisy of society, if I can call it that, which made itself evident in this very act. When a woman, a fellow human being, is subjected to such a crime, she immediately gets ostracized without a second thought; is boycotted by all other 'respectable' citizens; gets looked down upon in the same light as someone in the flesh trade or as someone to be avoided, if possible banished from social life altogether as though it was her fault for getting raped in the first place; her chances of getting married into a good family by the traditional arranged marriage system are as of that moment shattered for ever; and this is typical of majority of Indian society.

I know there are laws in place to deal with the criminals who commit these crimes, but I can’t say with conviction as to whether they are enforced to the full extent when it comes to bringing them to book.

I cannot help but wonder at the apathy when it comes to the woman's plight; that few would bother to care about the physical and mental trauma she inevitably has to go through; that she would become the object of ridicule and mental abuse when she needs, on the contrary, support and solidarity from the society in bringing the criminal or criminals, as the case may be, to justice; that she would find it next to impossible to find acceptance in society because a heinous crime was committed against her, as opposed to the sympathy which ought to be shown, like the kind being shown to the dog in the incident mentioned. I wonder what values and ideals of right and wrong we are imbibing in ourselves; what we in turn will imbibe in our future generations.

And while talking about the larger realm of right and wrong when it comes to the imbibing of the values, this is probably the tip of the iceberg.