Where did we go wrong? (And how to right it)

I will not spend time explaining why this post came to be. The horror of India's daughter's murder is too painful to recount. I have been wondering how we came to be a society where people of my gender think it is ok to rape and mutilate a woman. Is it about power? Is it depravity? Is it sexual urges finding release? Is it pent up frustrations finding an outlet? Is it anarchy where people just think they can get away with anything? Is it lack of education? Bad upbringing? Absence of role models?

There have been so many questions and so few answers. I have tried to stay away from rants of instant justice - castration, hanging, stoning, mutilating. I don't want to become one of them. I want justice to be done and I want to it to be done with due process. I just want the process to be fast. I don't want to see the accused going out on bail, the witness turning hostile, the judge falling ill or the police officer getting transferred. One thing going for the case (if anything could!) is that the accused are not high profile, politically influential, rich people. They are easy targets for hostility - illiterate, uncouth bus drivers and their friends. They are people we can imagine to be indulging in such heinous crime. God forbid, if it were some politician's nephew or some industrialist's son. Facts would have been distorted, PR machineries would be activated and the victim would have been turned into a vamp.

None of that thankfully happened in this case and hence, the battle lines are clearly drawn. This polarization gives us the opportunity to see the problem clearly and without any smokescreens. This gives us the opportunity to do something about it. And after all the rage, it is time to reflect on what led to this and resolve to act against it.

Shireesh, my ex-boss and friend rightly pointed out that it has come to be about 'what is it that we can get away with'? In a civil society, we are supposed to live by some rules. Power has checks and balances. Sex is consensual. Money is legally earned and taxes paid on it. Ownership to property and wealth is protected by law. If someone steps out of the legal framework, he is given punishment commensurate with the crime.

These rules hold if everyone plays by them. Or those who do not play by them, at least publicly accord themselves specials rights to not play by them - some use religion, some use force and others invoke royal lineage. The problem occurs when we say we are all equal but behave unequally. Democracy in theory means everyone is equal and government is by the people, of the people and for the people. Democracy in action though is very different. It is feudalism in disguise. True, you choose your government but in effect you choose who you'll be ruled by.

When some people start to regard themselves above the law, it frays the fabric of civil society. More and more people start to test how much they can get away with. The problem is exacerbated when minor crimes are left unpunished. This emboldens petty criminals to try for bigger and bolder adventures. And slowly anarchy sets in. Then everything goes.

Anger, Lust, Envy and Greed are base human tendencies present in everyone. They stay in check because our education and upbringing creates a strong context against them, that they are BAD. Civil society creates more barriers by creating a punitive framework where acts emerging out of these basal instincts are met with severe punishment thereby creating deterrents.

In India today, neither of these exist. Our law and order system has gone for a toss. People see politicians and the rich get away with crimes of murder, bribery, extortion and adultery. Nothing happens to them. Whether it is ND Tiwari, A Raja, Lalu Yadav, Jagan Reddy, Sharad Pawar, Vijay Mallya, Navin Jindal....the list is endless. They think anything goes - why not have a go. After all, our basal instincts are at play all the time!

Our education system and our value system is terribly frayed. Moral science is just a subject - often inconsequential since it is without marks. Teachers are very rarely role models - they are typically bottom of class and choose this as a vocation of last resort. Families perpetuate existing prejudices. When boys see themselves treated better than their sisters or nieces, they think this how it is supposed to be. Mothers often ask their daughters to help them in cooking, cleaning and sweeping while their sons can eat, drink and be merry.

Unless, this triad of education, family and deterrent works, this anarchy will continue.

People need to understand what is right and what is wrong. And they need to see that when someone does wrong, he meets with the consequence commensurate with his wrongdoing.

For this to happen, we need to hire more judges. We need to hire more policewomen and free up policemen from VIP security to common man. We need to train them better and we need to pay them better. We need to free the police and judges free from political influence. We need to pass stronger laws for the safety of women.

We need to create a national movement that questions are existing biases and prejudices. Bollywood, TV channels, NCERT, UGC and NCTE - all have a role to play in education because formally and informally, they both create and mirror societal values.

But the most important one is the need to decriminalize our politics. The whole economics of elections where a person needs to 'invest' crores of rupees, forces a person to 'recover' that investment with a decent return over his term of 5 years. And since legal and above-board ways of recovering those crores don't exist, we are creating a system that necessitates corruption, cronyism and favoritism. The profile of our Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha is a testimony to the cliche - politics is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Electoral reform is the biggest lever we have to improve our society. Election funding has to be made more transparent. Criminals have to be barred from contesting elections. Unfortunately, the very leaders who are supposed to create these laws are products of the same system - so there is a conflict of interest.

It is us, civil society, who will have to demand this and make it happen. And more of us have to join politics. These ideas are not for instant gratification. While the hanging of the 6 accused will assuage our anger (and mine too), we need to go deeper and longer to see real change!

My father's son

3 years ago, this day, my father became a star in the sky. Well, when Zoya asked me where is Dadupa, that's what I told her - Dadupa has become a star in the sky. She was fascinated by the thought that suddenly, the person who used to tell her stories in his lap was now showering a dull, calming light in the night sky. Since then, we refer to his death as him becoming a star in the sky.

I feel that death indicates a stop. A shuddering halt to a journey in motion. A full stop. A curtain call. Star in the sky indicates a transition. A journey from 'here' to 'there'. There's a continuity to it, a fluidity to it that is reminiscent of life itself. It is as if in death, a new life is achieved.

Today, on the occasion of his becoming a star in the sky, I am assaulted by a lot of thoughts - a lot of them conflicting, colliding but then coalescing into the same dull, calming light inside that he emanates outside.

These thoughts are like passing slides of a motion picture. Actually no, they flit across the firmament of my mind like the dust particles that suddenly appear out of nothing when a ray of sunlight peeks into my room.

The first thought I was hit by was that time is indeed a big healer. Today, in the morning havan for my star's shanti, my whole life with him flashed past me as a series of images. And amazingly, all images were from the happy times we had spent together - him visiting us in Singapore, in Mumbai, our holidays in Thailand and our visits to Pathankot. Him playing with Zoya on her 1st birthday, him teaching us in Govt College Talwara. The last month before he left us did not come up! At all! When people, in the immediate aftermath of his passing away, told me 'samay ke saath sab theek ho jayega', I would scream inside, 'you don't know what I'm going through! So don't tell me it'll be ok' and manage a silent nod outside. But now, it appears to be true. When I spread out our lives together on a timeline, the last month of pain diminishes in import compared to the 34 years of joy! Time is indeed a big healer and the more we let it do its job, the better it does its job!

The second that hit me was our preoccupation with the past. We commemorate, we relive, we analyze our past at the expense of our present. We mourn our dead at the expense of the living. There are people in my life who are the flesh of his flesh and the blood of his blood - they are the celebration of what he created. My brother and my sister - who hurt everyday from losing his presence around them. My mother - who has emerged a giant from the time her world collapsed around her. Maybe the best way to keep him alive is to keep my love for them alive.

Hurt is a funny thing. When you are hurting, you think hurting others will make your hurt go away. It doesn't work that way. Hurt is a vicious cycle - the more we are hurt, the more we hurt and then the more we are hurt. I don't know how to break the cycle. Different things work for different people. Some people get tired of carrying so much bile in them that they give in to their greater self. Some people get shaken out of their stupor of the hurt cycle by someone - who is objective and is trusted. Some people undergo moments where their hurt suddenly appears insignificant in front of life. But one thing is for sure - hurt erodes the wholeness of life. It nibbles at you every time you act out of hurt. And the more you indulge in minor quibbles to hurt others, the less you are left of yourself. I only wish everyone can find within or around him, the impulse that will pull him out of the cycle of hurt and put him on the path of love.

Another thing that lives beyond my dad are the values that he lived by. Everyday that I stand up for what I believe in, I live him. Everyday, that I do my duty without worrying about results, I live him. Everyday, that I disallow people from hurting me by having no expectations from them, I live him. These are not recipes for happy living - no way am I saying these are great ideas or that he was a saint. This is the way he lived life and I become him when I live my life this way. Isn't this a wonderful way of keeping someone alive by moving forward via his values? Instead, we mop and mourn and yearn for what could have been!

So today, when I got up from the havan, I had a sense of peace about me. I knew that I was my father's son. And in living his values and loving his creations, I was him.