Why is a society of Sunny Leones, Power-Money, Ramdev/Hazare-bashing so clueless about the Rape Epidemic?

Dec 18, 2012

When Gautam Buddha was setting up his Sangha, he admitted only male monks. He is supposed to have said that if he admits women as well, his spiritual path that he was offering, will remain spiritually active for about 700-800 years. With male only students, it will remain active for over 2500 years.

Even Buddha didn’t trust his own monks beyond a certain limit.

And that was in isolation, with hard spiritual sadhanas and austerities.

India of today has porn stars like Sunny Leone, Poonam Pandey, Sheryl Chopra, and Priya Rai as staple diets of the TV audience. To watch and be acquainted with Sunny Leone or Priya Rai, the American audience, where Leone is amongst the top 20 porn stars, you need to go behind a age-checking website; in India, you can watch them slithering suggestively on prime time TV.

Meanwhile, religious and traditional systems and rituals as well as behaviour is passe. Do you still live with your parents? Do you still go to temple? Are you religious? Really??!!

Religiosity was a lay man’s proxy for Spiritual Pursuit. Some would get the point and move to the real stuff at some point. No more. Spiritual Gurus have to literally sell Spiritual Sadhana to make it worth the while.

Also, India as a society has been hijacked by the combination of Power and Money. And the guy with Power and Money is not just powerful, but abusively so. If you have to get work done, it is not enough to shove it down people’s throat. It should be done accompanied with choicest of abuses and insulting the other guy.

Added to that, we have a society which is full of passionate, Secularly/Politically/Religiously/and “Rats ass” correct individuals that instead of discussing a situation from all angles – including uncomfortable ones, expertly use the weapon of denial. Lest it may piss someone off.

In such a situation, Single ladies come along wondering where her freedom to wear short skirts in public on a lonely road at night went? (I Am Scared, I am a Single Woman in Delhi).

When Pooja Bhatt cast Sunny Leone as the epitome of sexuality and titillated the audience which was already drunk on power and money, without any social structures left to reign in with “good sense”, this “Single Woman from Delhi” was quiet. She probably celebrated it by reminding everyone and sundry about Kamasutras and Khajurahoes.

I often wonder if feeding alcohol to a toddler and hoping that he will not become an alcoholic and start committing crime when he has the wherewithal – is bravado or lunacy? Is it Freedom of Expression? Freedom of life?

More importantly, once I have triumphantly fed this toddler alcohol in his formative years, can I suddenly show up at a crime scene when he is 20 and lament the degradation in social values?

Karma is the central theme of Indian Spiritual traditions. Contrary to popular lore, it is NOT a proxy for punishing or rewarding someone’s socially relevant or inappropriate (which is different in every society and time) acts. It is the expression of CAUSE and EFFECT. Essentially, it means in simplest terms – if you smoke, you get ailments like cancer. If you drink alcohol, you get drunk. So, when you find yourself DRUNK, please be rest assured that YOU drank alcohol at some point in the past. As simple as that. And no, your being drunk is NEITHER God’s doing nor your bloody destiny! You… YOU.. AND ONLY YOU are responsible for your drunkenness!

If I have to feed porn to the masses, I need to have MATURE masses. Maturity can mean different things to different people. Some would say that Frida Kahlo lived in a society of “Mature” individuals. But sometimes one is not sure if she was raped by so many men or she consensually had casual sex because she had poor self image? Our “Single woman from Delhi” may have termed it as rape for all you know.

Even Buddha knew the limits and terms of “Sexual Maturity” when he evaluated his own Monks. Buddha was Buddha. But Monks as disciples were not. They were ordinary individuals of society yet to proceed ahead. He knew he dangers. And he wasn’t in denial, however gender-wise political incorrect his stand may have been.

Reasons??

Someone I know declares “I am not ashamed to be an Indian – I am ashamed to be MALE!”

All the well-meaning people stand around and applaud this self-deprecating “honesty”. But it does nothing to stop the next rape. If rhetorical indignation was enough to stop a society’s slide to crime, then poets and writers should have made the greatest leaders and reformers.

Unfortunately, even the rhetoric is only so deep in our society now. Just enough deep so it can cause tingling, but not deep enough to cause pain or hurt. That is a taboo.

The next rapist-wannabe is happy with all this. He laughs his head off at the pusillanimous and the rhetorically confused generation. He knows that no laws would be changed. Even if they are, no one would give a “Rat’s ass” about their implementation. And if someone like Ramdev, Kejriwal or Anna Hazare do take up the fight, these same so-called “violated people” will build careers and greatness out of running them down because “Yoga and politics don’t mix”.. “Because Activism and Politics don’t mix”.. because…. well.. “Humanity and Politics don’t mix”.

And then we wonder why we are a society of animals being governed by yet more ruthless animals. Forget Divinity, we have placed even good ol’ Humanity on a pedestal!

Of course, our “Single woman from Delhi” will never realize that there is DIRECT relation between silence on Sunny Leone’s mainstream acceptance, Ramdev’s bashing, and her being molested, as well as that girl’s gang rape.

Oh well! But then, as the story goes….

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Why is a society of Sunny Leones, Power-Money, Ramdev/Hazare-bashing so clueless about the Rape Epidemic?

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