Wandering through the streets of Delhi, mobile phone virtually in his mouth, screeching loudly because he has not quite comprehended that a phone brings the distant voice close, the urban Indian male has become a caricature of himself! More often than not he intersperses his conversation with regular abuses, usually against mothers and sisters. If one stayed put in one spot, in Connaught Place for example, and watched, much like a voyeur, the happenings around one, it would be a live and real enactment of a scene from an absurd drama. Scratching themselves, picking their noses, spitting and peeing wherever they can — against a wall or aiming at the trunk of a tree — these anonymous men, as a collective, inspire both a sense of disgust and deep pity.
The abnormal, public display of their ablutions done, they begin to hold hands with their best friends and leer at any woman that walks past. Titillated by the female form and her dignity, the small, frustrated little men squeeze each other’s hands, releasing their mild passions! The act that follows manifests the perverse, obsessive reality that has enveloped most Indian men who strut the streets, who embarrass all women — vulgar gestures and obscene comments directed at anonymous representatives of their mothers and sisters, wives and daughters.
This is urban India. This is a description of a majority of urban Indian males! Children, both male and female, adolescent girls and boys, adult women are manhandled, raped and brutalized every day on the streets, in joint families, and by their legitimate husbands. The scale of this kind of activity is large and all-encompassing in the public domain.
Right cause
The devi has ceased to be respected and venerated by the mentally and emotionally insecure purusha, who finds it increasingly tough to compete in the professional and intellectual space with his female counterpart, and therefore resorts to physical combat because he just happens to be stronger. The men kick where it hurts, and women, in their dignity, do not retaliate. They bear the physical and mental burden in an effort to retain a semblance of dignity for the sake of their children and other sane members of the larger community.
The time has come for women in the family to stop ignoring and condoning the brash and uncouth behaviour of the macho, and therefore, weak and frustrated male members — husbands, sons, sons-in-law, and surprisingly, more often than not, the widowed matriarch. Often, it is she who eggs the men on, if only to rule her tiny kingdom and take revenge, in a manner of speaking, for the personal horrors inflicted upon her in her time. This chicken-and-egg situation has thrived over the generations, except in matriarchal and in some tribal societies.
As women go out to work in an effort to add to the family income, they begin to assert themselves, which drives average men bananas, and they respond by being brutish. All the dreadful truths we witness day in and day out in the media, stem from this new competitiveness. When men begin to share their workplace experiences, take equal responsibilities in running the house and in bringing up the children, defend their wives against their mothers’ whims, life would begin to change for both the emaciated male who is dominated by his mother and brings out the venom on his wife, and for the woman too, who would be confident and socially secure with the support of her spouse and other male family members. Will they jointly share the responsibility of being the repository of our cultural traditions, of preserving our life skills and creativity? The fringe will always be perverse, frayed and unworthy, but if the majority, both male and female, come together, we could take our civilization to another plane and civil society to a level of dignity.
