The moment has arrived for India when we should look back and retrospect what has gone wrong in the past decade.
They said we will be a less poor nation, an economic superpower by the end of some years, the women of this country will be respected and many more things but have we escalated to that level?
The increasing graph of rapes and molestations in our motherland shows us a different conclusion than what we would have imagined if we were back in the past.
But the question lying deep underneath is not the final outcome but should be “Have we at least given it a thought that we might be able to rise ourselves to that level?”
The greatest problem that the youth of this country is facing right now is that they are not asking the right questions. We are all the time engrossed with the question regarding how the country is going to the dogs. In fact the question in this case should have been why this country is going to the dogs. We see patches of feminism throughout the country but a lot of that is misdirected. Many organizations have crept up in the recent years portraying themselves as organizations which render strictly to the needs of the female sex but what have most of them done except filling the mind of the women with thoughts such as “all men are dogs” and the like.
Their way of action has been too amateurish, they are too preoccupied with how the punishments should be given and what the protective measures should be for women but they are very less concerned about the real cause that causes these incidents. I appreciate their methods but to me, they are just thinking f the cure and not the prevention in this case. Their main target should be a time when no women in this country is looked with the eyes having the intention of raping her, but that should be not out of the fear of law but out of understanding and respect.
The commoditization of the female sex has taken the thinking of the present age to such a level that these days nothing comes up in our mind more than a “thing” when the topic of women comes up. The concept of modernization has grown up as to be just a synonym of westernization in our country. Here, if a neighborhood girl wears clothes which defy the social pattern, we call her names(referring to the much acclaimed words of “s….”,”w….”),we think how much better the sex with her would be then some girl who is as much beautiful as her but wearing just some Indian clothes. But is the problem of rape just connected with the clothes, which are mostly western in the present world? No, because in a recent survey the sari has been acclaimed as the sexiest attire by the youth of this country , which leaves us in a dilemma whom or what we should blame for the increasing number of rapes and molestations in this country.
Of course the people who rape and molest are driven by their own urges and not anything else but why will their urges be such. There are a lot of questions in here which mould the urges and thinking of a particular person, every man’s mentality is in fact “a conspiracy of time and history”. There are factors like his up-bringing and the surroundings in which the person resides. The main cause for shaping the mind is in reality the method in which he is brought up by his parents, suppose if a person sees his father molesting his mother all the time though out the span of his childhood, he will in no way, think of women as something more of a thing than something which is the equipment for venting out his anger.
The problem the country is facing has been in the root all the time, it’s just that we have not been able to question it, maybe we are too ashamed and obedient to question the way in which our parents and the society has brought us up in this world. Right from the day that we are born, we are taught regarding the social practices and advised or rather commanded to follow them to the letter, nobody asks us to question. Boys are asked to go around the neighborhood to free their limbs and muscles but the girls are asked to learn how to stay quiet and keep themselves safe. Nobody questions that, because the child in the question is too immature to understand what is really happening to it, but when that child grows up, his or her parents throws them to the world and tell them to adjust. The society does not accept them, and they try their best to mould themselves in the ways of the society. It is precisely in these kinds of situations that “westernization” becomes “modernization”, “sex” becomes “a measure of women’s clothes” and “a girl” becomes “an item or like”.
These people whose mindset are such, are the ones who take up the opportunity of raping a women, for them, a women is just a thing which satisfies their primal desires and nothing else. What we need is a method or rather a system which carves the very seed of the idea commdification of women out of the society and it s then and then only that we can expect a society safe for the women.
The Indian society is a partriarchial one and with the recent upsurge of communalism and the rightwing in the country, we are doing nothing but providing it a new impetus by not questioning the norms of the society.
