A brass plate preserved as a heirloom by a Muslim family of Velan, off Thanjavur, deciphered by the archaeological department in 1983, tells this story: Along a lonely woody road three rogues tried to molest a woman.
Her frantic cries for help attracted a solitary traveller, Pakir Saheb, to the spot. He shouted at the rogues, “Being Hindus, how do you forget that every woman has in her an emanation of the Divine Mother, Parvati? Leave her alone.” As the rogues pooh-poohed his advice, he fought them valiantly and got killed. The woman managed to snatch a knife from her tormentors and killed herself.
A terrible darkness descended on the gang of three and struck them blind. They confessed to their crime before the ruler of the region and gathering their resources together, dedicated a shrine to Goddess Parvati. It still stands in a corner of the recently built medical college campus. The ruler awarded that plaque of honour to Pakir Saheb’s family.
India today: In a major city, in broad daylight, a destitute woman lying on a pavement is pounced upon by a rogue. The woman cries for help. Of course a few passers-by stop, but they adjust their mobiles to photography mode. Another pedestrian passes by the very sight; a kick would have sufficed to topple the drunken rapist, but the citizen walks on.
Now let’s recollect the face of Inspector Mahesh Kumar of Mysuru who, on January 28, lay gasping after an accident while appealing to people to shift him to a hospital. “A few witnesses pulled out their mobile phones and recorded the police officer bleeding to death. Precious moments trickled by, but no one bothered to respond to his request,” reported a major newspaper. Three days later, one Anwar of Koppal, aged 18, was hit by a bus and lay writhing in pain.“While the hospital was just a stone’s throw away, some used their cell phones and videos.”
No doubt, the majority of us who have read these reports in newspapers and seen the pictures stand shocked, but if that is all we do, our reaction, even though genuinely remorseful, will be equal to hypocrisy in regard to its practical value. The grim fact is, there is a worldwide epidemic of desensitisation, caution psychologists.
An example of desensitisation in our native context: This was some three decades ago. A village boy from a needy but orthodox stock was brought by a businessman to his town. The sway of video parlours was sweeping across our towns and bazaars and the boy’s boss too had launched one.
The rustic was taught how to operate the gadget. Late every night he was to show some exclusive pictures to a somewhat surreptitiously gathered audience. To begin with, the boy could not believe his own eyes. Are these men and women who are filmed in their intimate, often perverse actions, real? Could townsfolk perform such acts before the camera just for money? Does his boss know what is being exhibited? He stood perplexed and tormented. One night the boss himself came with a few of his pals. Suddenly, at the middle of the show, they heard a shriek; the rustic employee, running amuck, tried to smash the TV. He was checked, thrashed and packed off to his village. A social worker led him to a psychiatrist. His derangement was cured.
Ten years later he was found to have become a parlour owner in a hick town near his village, also running prohibited stuff. Apparently he had not only overpowered his Samskara, but also acclimatised himself to a radically new “culture”, obviously at the cost of something innocent, probably what was the best in him.
The same process has worked with those who stood shooting the rape scene. For them it was just another edition of the motions they enjoyed in their mobiles to which their minds were attuned. Hence, for them, there was nothing abominable happening in the street.
And all over India countless young souls are sacrificing the most valuable qualities of their inner being to this vampire of pornography. Romance is perverted to titillation, love to brute lust. Some years ago Dr. Gerald Crabtree of Stanford University had suggested, in an issue of “Trends in Genetics”, that the human race was losing its intellectual and emotional abilities. Now the result of a serious research undertaken by a team led by Michael Woodley of the Free University, Brussels, concludes that our mental abilities are on the decline and genes promoting intelligence are growing rarer.
If that is so, the dynamics of evolution must be having one of the two motives in its hidden calendar: either a phase of evolution’s experiment is over and men can now be counted as future fossils or some loftier power must replace man’s consciousness presently dominated by mind.
It is said that an election is perpetually going on in the heavens, the franchise limited to three votes. God votes for man; Satan votes against it. The deciding vote is man’s. It is time we cast that vote. Everybody directly and indirectly involved in acting, making and distributing the pornographic pictures must be ruthlessly stopped. These moral murderers are often far more vicious and despicable than ordinary killers.
And so far as those insensitive witnesses to the two deaths cited above are concerned, they are victims of overexposure to violence on social media. The faculty of sympathy in them is dulled. So limit your exposure, advises the Director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety Disorders. Teach children at the earliest that scientific research by United Health Group establishes that when we help someone, our brain vibrates in the same way it does when we receive any reward. The gesture spontaneously enlivens our spirit. We must start employing all the means at our disposal immediately to re-sensitivise ourselves.
Manoj Das
Eminent author and recipient of several awards including the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship
Email: prof.manojdas@gmail.com