Time to shed the blood drippers at all levels
As I write this piece, one more girl has been put to death, very, very violently and by none other than the two people who were meant to protect her from every vagary of life. Apparently in a Meerut village, a father and brother dragged the teenaged girl out of the house, forced an animal deworming bottle of liquid down her throat, pushed her into the mound of sun-dried cow dung cakes and set her afire. She died burning under weight of the cow dung mound as the entire village watched in silence. Her crime? She said she did not want to get married just yet.
Such cases and the like have become too frequent for cover. Maria Susairaj assists in cutting a body of her friend into more than 200 pieces, without any qualms. She goes scot-free in just three years, which makes her brazen enough to actually get out and hold a Press conference of all the things she could’ve done!
A man kills a woman and parcels her body through a courier company from Delhi to Ajmer. No one knows where he came from and where he disappeared.
Another man, this time a husband, cuts up his wife into pieces and carries her in a suitcase in his car for two days! Yet another one actually kills, cuts and freezes his wife before disposing of her body parts on a long winding highway to a hill station, and then, he operates her email account to fob off suspicion!
Where is this society, really, going? Just a murder seems to be no longer enough. It has to be brutal to the core and often beyond comprehension in its violence. As British playwright and actor Edward Bond says, “I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent, we have no future.”
He is rather apt. Committing of a crime has become as natural as sensationalising it even further. Experts defend it as an act of feeding the innate voyeurism of society, of it being the USP of selling news, views and even information windows. Talk to media planners and they will tell you how crime shows have always been chartbusters, much like a film which tags itself as a true life dramatisation.
The problem, social scientists say, lies in the fact that we as a society have developed a very high, almost superhuman (call it insensitive) tolerance level to violence. Be it war killings, terror killings, familial killings or of-the-street killings, we have developed the ability to take it all in our stride. And that’s the reason why, the unfortunate Meerut village girl who got burnt down by her own father and brother without any remorse in them, will become just another of those many files which get dusted for recalls when other equally, similar or more violent cases happen.
This brings us to the other more subtle but no less potent crime of showcasing violence. The more detailed and sensational the story, the bigger spread it gets. Murder2, for example, will do well at the box office because it shows a psychopath’s killing sprees in graphic detail. He tells you on screen how cutting a body into pieces “ka kuch alagh hi mazaa hai.” The audience oohs and aahs, often unable to believe the extent of the violence portrayed, and at the same time allowing itself to indulge in the ultimate seat-gripping excitement of watching blood spurt out of a badgered woman’s dismembered body!
Not just films, but now the online saga of violent abetment has added to the multifarious platforms selling, teaching and disseminating violence in all its forms. The beheading video of journalist Daniel Pearl is said to be the biggest grosser of hits online. Same is the case with whacky videos which turn up on YouTube every now and then. The one on unimaginable violence (one doesn’t even want to mention the atrocities shown) on a toddler figures in the top 10 most viewed list. The instances are too many to list.
To conclude, to control aggression the only way is to give it a mass burial at the societal level and top it up with extremely stiff and quick punishment mechanism which deters crime from happening. Other than that, we as a generation, need to shape up — in our own minds, so as to not perpetrate, propel or propagate violence in any form.
Such cases and the like have become too frequent for cover. Maria Susairaj assists in cutting a body of her friend into more than 200 pieces, without any qualms. She goes scot-free in just three years, which makes her brazen enough to actually get out and hold a Press conference of all the things she could’ve done!
A man kills a woman and parcels her body through a courier company from Delhi to Ajmer. No one knows where he came from and where he disappeared.
Another man, this time a husband, cuts up his wife into pieces and carries her in a suitcase in his car for two days! Yet another one actually kills, cuts and freezes his wife before disposing of her body parts on a long winding highway to a hill station, and then, he operates her email account to fob off suspicion!
Where is this society, really, going? Just a murder seems to be no longer enough. It has to be brutal to the core and often beyond comprehension in its violence. As British playwright and actor Edward Bond says, “I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent, we have no future.”
He is rather apt. Committing of a crime has become as natural as sensationalising it even further. Experts defend it as an act of feeding the innate voyeurism of society, of it being the USP of selling news, views and even information windows. Talk to media planners and they will tell you how crime shows have always been chartbusters, much like a film which tags itself as a true life dramatisation.
The problem, social scientists say, lies in the fact that we as a society have developed a very high, almost superhuman (call it insensitive) tolerance level to violence. Be it war killings, terror killings, familial killings or of-the-street killings, we have developed the ability to take it all in our stride. And that’s the reason why, the unfortunate Meerut village girl who got burnt down by her own father and brother without any remorse in them, will become just another of those many files which get dusted for recalls when other equally, similar or more violent cases happen.
This brings us to the other more subtle but no less potent crime of showcasing violence. The more detailed and sensational the story, the bigger spread it gets. Murder2, for example, will do well at the box office because it shows a psychopath’s killing sprees in graphic detail. He tells you on screen how cutting a body into pieces “ka kuch alagh hi mazaa hai.” The audience oohs and aahs, often unable to believe the extent of the violence portrayed, and at the same time allowing itself to indulge in the ultimate seat-gripping excitement of watching blood spurt out of a badgered woman’s dismembered body!
Not just films, but now the online saga of violent abetment has added to the multifarious platforms selling, teaching and disseminating violence in all its forms. The beheading video of journalist Daniel Pearl is said to be the biggest grosser of hits online. Same is the case with whacky videos which turn up on YouTube every now and then. The one on unimaginable violence (one doesn’t even want to mention the atrocities shown) on a toddler figures in the top 10 most viewed list. The instances are too many to list.
To conclude, to control aggression the only way is to give it a mass burial at the societal level and top it up with extremely stiff and quick punishment mechanism which deters crime from happening. Other than that, we as a generation, need to shape up — in our own minds, so as to not perpetrate, propel or propagate violence in any form.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, July 10, 2011
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