We want to have the best of two worlds
Muvattupuzha, our taluk’s capital town, witnessed a bizarre incident a few months ago. A 18-year-old girl was forcibly hugged and kissed by a young man in broad daylight on the public road. Being caught totally off guard, the girl screamed for help. Seeing that a beautiful young lady was crying for help the onlookers who normally turn a blind eye to road accident victims sprang to action and the miscreant was instantly apprehended. Some over-smart Samaritans smacked the boy to pulp to prove a point to the hapless girl. Needless to say, the prey and the predator were both taken to the nearby police station.
The first question darted to the girl by the police inspector was:“Why don’t you dress decently?” The plumb girl was wearing a pair of skinny jeans and a low cut top that liberally exposed her cleavage. Incidentally she was on her way to a job interview. Guilt ridden, the boy admitted he couldn’t get a grip of himself and just went berserk on seeing her in that attire. The boy and girl were travelling in the same bus but he just freaked out at her sight and though bound elsewhere, he alighted at the same stop where the girl got out. And then, the unimaginable thing in the Indian circumstances happened. The boy was put behind bars and the girl was made to wait at the police station until her elder brother came to take her home. The inspector admonished her brother, “Be advised, she needs to get dressed properly in future. After all, indecent exposure is a criminal offence, isn’t it?”
Of late, it is lamented by one and all that, harassment of women has touched an all-time high.The recent New Delhi gang rape has triggered widespread outrage. The fact is that we are trying to blindly ape the West in everything as a show of keeping abreast with changed times. Sadly, we the Indians are under the wrong notion that we can’t lag behind the West and need to catch up with them in every respect, be it in food or clothes because that is what is called progress.The West has got a dating system to have a first hand knowledge of the subtle nuances of man-woman relationship. Isn’t it true that the Indian psyche still can’t stand the sight of a girl with her male friend at odd hours? The Indian male still wants an untouched virgin as his wife.
When the testosterone levels of the young people are about to break the barriers of self- control, sanity and civility just go by the board and the primal instincts avariciously take the centrestage. It is ridiculous to assume that we can permanently arrest the onslaught of hormone revolution by rules and regulations. Never judge a book by its cover. We need to delve deep down. We either go back to the old days of child marriages (Of course, with timely innovations and a tight leash on population explosion), or as Kushboo suggested, let us have a healthy taboo-free pre-marital sex culture. The irony is, we want to have the best of two worlds. It is nothing but hypocrisy at its best, to say the least.