कुटाई-पिटाई और जन-तंत्र
One picture that has become viral and has drawn encomiums is the one in which someone kicks the protestors who tried to disrupt the AI Summit in Delhi. The manner of protest and its venue angered the entire nation and no one except some intransigent Congress die-hards has tried to defend the act. When the public are angry, they expect to see direct and immediate punishment and not prolonged court-cases.
The only label one could think of for the picture is GET OUT!
Relevant but Somewhat Scattered
I have just returned after watching the movie Assi. Before I had seen the movie, I thought Assi was the name of some girl. But it turned out that assi or 80 is the number of rapes that take place in India every day. The rape-victim in the movie makes a calculation and says this works out to an annual figure of 30,000, which could fill up a stadium.
The movie raises a number of issues that need to be considered seriously. When people lose faith in the system they begin to take law into their own hands. in the movie when it becomes clear that the lengthy and compromised procedures of the courts will not be able to deliver justice, an umbrella man emerges and dispenses on-the-spot justice by killing the culprits. The heroine, who is the public prosecutor, reminds the audience that such informal justice will only create a chain of revenge and counter-revenge, and is not the solution.
The rape-victim was a teacher and, after recovering from the physical battering inflicted by the rape, when she goes to re-join as a teacher, the principal refuses to take her, not because of some "blot" but because she has become the source of memes and comments by the students in the school, who run their own WhatsApp groups. One of the comments by a 9th class student is that he should have been invited to participate in the event. This comment blows back to a so-called stand up comedy show in Mumbai a year ago in which someone had said that he would like to be included in a threesome with his parents. Such comments indicate the total erosion of our cultural values. Just anyone feels comfortable saying anything about persons who should be held in veneration. The concept of बड़ों की इज़्जत has been washed off by the so-called freedom.
Netflix and other OTT channels are working with missionary zeal to make dirty abuses a part of the Hindi vocabulary of our homes. It is as if literary quality consists of expletives. This is happening in the land that produced Rabindranath Tagore, Ramdhari Singh Dinakar and Munshi Prem Chand. The adults probably enjoy the spicy expletives, not bothered about the scalding it is producing on the minds of the next generation.
Assi is a good thematic movie, but the story element is not as strong as that of Haq or Pink or MOM.
I plan shortly to start a page titled "Parenting" in which I would not only share my views but also invite parents to share the techniques they use to inculcate discipline and values in their children