Sometimes it feels like a crime to speak of justice, goodness, basic manners and equality or (in)justice. That too, while being in the eye of a storm called Covid-19 which has lashed us a second time over so fiercely that the first wave looks minuscule. People have lost lives, and their loved ones in more than horrifying ways. Hardly any deaths have been given due dignity. In a country of 136 cr people and 13.4 cr living under poverty now (it was 6 cr earlier) owing to Covid-induced distress, life is cheap; and death is cheaper. With the fear of death driving us to the edge, it seems like a luxury to speak of genders, of the imbalance and the nonchalance to issues such as this.
How else can you ignore those messages on Twitter where responsible doctors, nurses and citizens helped people access information about beds, oxygen, medicines, amplified messages seeking help, offered video consultation, helped the families of loved ones see their relatives one last time through video calls during their work? Both men and women had been holding forth for anybody who needed to save their loved ones.
While men got messages seeking help, women got messages seeking help as well. But then in addition to that, they were also generously sent pictures of the penis. In ‘civil’ language, they are called ‘obscene’ pictures. A doctor exploded on Twitter one of those days. For god’s sake, she sees naked bodies EVERY DAY. She examines them and operates on them. A male sex organ that operates on the gush of blood surely has some purpose in evolution. Someone sending d**k pics is rather nauseating. How can a male mind operate with such disconnection to the havoc and bloodiness of what’s happening around them?
One more case that was reported made our minds downright numb. At the height of oxygen cylinder scarcity, a girl seeking oxygen for her gasping father was offered help by a man on one condition. She had to sleep with him. One would wonder which one knots up our stomach more. Whether it’s the helplessness of the girl, or the heinous mind of the man, or the overall depravity of the society per se. While that was that, we were also witness to some splendid orders passed by our institutions upholding law recently. The words spoken in two cases were of special interest. One was the acquittal order of journalist Tarun Tejpal. The other was in the case of a girl alleging rape by her ex-lover who had spurned her off after engaging in a sexual relationship with her. In both cases, our lords were rather observant about what they considered as the ‘normal’ behaviour of the girl (s) concerned, especially after they were subjected to the abuse. Are the lords unaware of the sexual harassments/advances/ molestation/groping women face every day in soft or harsh form? And how women return to work or survive in the same space/with the same person day after day because women have no agency over their preferences. The institutes that have to protect women are yet to evolve. How does the nation acknowledge this rot?
(The author is a journalist deeply seeped into the theatre of (&) politics.)