Flawed Society Model...

My previous post on Rape led me to seriously consider what our Indian Society is all about. We do take pride in our Indian Heritage/Culture and the unique family values we seem to have compared to the west. Our culture had thousands of years to develop and the unique thing about it is that, it was organic (deliberately used the past tense here). It was ever growing and never stagnant. 

We should understand that it was never a monolithic structure that could be used to paint the whole of India with a single brush. In contrast it was diverse with many constituent sub-cultures. These sub-cultures  found space to co-exist without any serious conflict. In that sense, our Indian Culture is unique. And it will continue to be unique only if it retains its organic structure, discarding those aspects which are not in tune with the prevalent society and gaining new contours making it ever colorful. 

The family values we see now grew with this culture. However, It is not an unique aspect to India. It would be highly ignorant of us to say that the West never had any family values and were always promiscuous...etc.  Though i am no expert on Western culture nor Indian, taking into consideration the various literature available (visual and written), i can say with confidence that our Family values are not unique. 

It is said that if we have a set of monkeys in a enclosure and give them typewriters, they eventually would end up giving you Shakespeare's plays. The question would be who got it first, and that is what makes Shakespeare special but not unique. With billions of human beings teeming the earth, nothing is unique.

The West did have family values analogous to us and still do. Before the hippie era, the west's sense of family was congruent to ours. The Family was an all important unit and patriarchal. However, with the advent of modern education and empowerment, the family concept grew to its current form. They were right in doing so, because sticking to the old rigid concept would have led to serious conflict of what they were being taught through education and what they were led to believe through Culture.

This is what is happening in India. As usual, we experience things 20 to 40 years after the west. We do not need to accept the Western model and it would be equally wrong if we do not learn from them. Our Model of Family is a flawed concept in the modern state. It is highly selfish and anti-thesis to democracy as enshrined in our Constitution. Ideology is always bad when it borders on fanaticism.

For example, Dynasty politics is an offshoot of this concept and it is eating into our nation. (seeds for which were sown when Kamaraj unwittingly favored Indra Gandhi). We keep our house clean, but throw the garbage out into the street. Our complacency to all and every thing stems from the fact that as long as it doesn't affect our family everything is hunky dory. But what we do not realize is that, by the time it affects us, it would be too late to do anything. Unless we do a rethink of what a Family is, we would not press into action even if the city burns provided our houses are not burnt. This selfish streak has permeated the core of our being and is such that we are no longer fit candidates for effective democracy.

Various governments in India have given importance to the concept of JUSTICE, LIBERTY and EQUALITY as given in the preamble of our Constitution. However what we have missed is FRATERNITY. This cannot be brought about by any legislation. It requires action on the part of us, Citizens. However, our Family Model on which the society prides itself on doesn't recognize the concept of FRATERNITY. It is limited either to our family members or caste or region or religion  It is not all encompassing as the framers of our constitutions expected it to be. Unless that is achieved justice, liberty and equality can never be fully realized and will remain a half dream. To err is human. But so is to learn from it.

Does it mean that the family concept that had been followed for thousands of years is wrong. Definitely not. In its purest form as practiced long ago, family was the concept of fraternity. However, somewhere down the lane, we have ignored its true spirit and given it its current narrower meaning.

Our fraternity at present goes only to the extent of finding an Indian connection wherever and in whatever we can. In today's The Hindu, there was an article (EU promoted Potatoes to replace rice in Asia). At the end of the article, the author had written about a particular farmer and out of the blue, how he had an Indian Connection (Apparently his daughter had come to Puducherry once.) This is sad. It is high time we discarded this flawed model on which our society is based on.

Back to the Future...

I have been away from the blog scene for a long time. To be frank i was not doing justice to the blog and i attributed this to paucity of time. I know what u are thinking. How can an unemployed  complain about paucity of time. If at all, he has extra time at hand. Well, that's a debate for another time. What is important is that i found out the solution and here i am, back to writing. The solution is a simple one. I decided to keep off Facebook for a while and voila, my calender got freed up big time. :)

It is sad that the flavour of the season seems to be Rape in the Capital. There  has been outrage over the incident and various organisations and people had called for stringent punishments...etc.  Let me ask you one question, does having strict legislation make it any more safer? It never will. Rape is a multifaceted problem and it needs to be approached as such.

Rape in the Indian Legal System is a flawed concept. The IPC categorizes rape under Sexual offenses. What we need to understand is that Rape has nothing to do with anything sexual. It is an aggravated form of violence. The person committing rape doesn't derive pleasure from coitus. They derive a sense of satisfaction and pleasure from the domination of the other, the pain and helplessness of the other and the brutality of it all. This aspect of the crime needs to be kept in mind while framing the law. Moreover, the legislation needs to be gender neutral. In that sense, our legislation and approach is outdated.

These are nothing new and have been doing the rounds of legislative corridors for long with nothing to show for it. But do you think a legislation alone can stop this. Nope. If at all, it shows that one can rape and the only consolation for the victim is that he will be just punished for it. And ofcourse it goes without saying that if you have money and power, one can altogether escape punishment (in most cases). Does it do anything to prevent rape?

I remember my childhood days when our hostel warden used to inspect our rooms. Our rooms used to look spotless and clean. But that is all, it just LOOKED clean. We used to hide all the junk underneath all the cleanliness. I have even seen this approach of patchwork in many aspects of the society. We are happy as long as everything goes back to normal. Not to weed out the root cause of the problem.

The first approach that needs to be taken care of is our children. Todays criminals were yesterdays children. So to protect the future, we need to instill our young the concept of right and wrong. I have seen parents who revel in their child's capacity to cheat the examiner and even encourage them to sponge off others. These are the seeds for tomorrows crimes. We should teach them to differentiate between right/wrong and to do the right thing. The children also need to be taught to respect women from their childhood days.
Now is this alone enough. Definitely not.

Of course, It is not correct to blame the women for the dress they wear. Nor is it a valid defense to say that she asked for it.  But what can we learn from this? Doesn't it show that our society is stifling of any signs of sexuality. Pre-marital sex is frowned upon and in some parts of india, even beaten upon (pun intended). Ofcourse, some would argue that it is not in our culture. But what i ask you is, in a patriarchal society like India, isn't it setting a collision course when on one side where there is an increased awareness of sexuality and on the other side stifling its expression and thereby not equipping the society to deal with such modernity?

So to conclude, i would say that we have been barking upon the wrong tree. If we don't wake up to that fact and do something about it, stricter punishments are not going to change anything. This will still be our future.