Column

A Malvani mother attempts to murder her daughter by strangulation because she disapproved of her paramour. A seven-year-old girl from Dharavi is beaten and branded with hot spoons, tortured by her stepmother for two months running, needing hospitalisation. A drunk domestic help brutally slashes his employers in Goregaon because he would reportedly rather pocket the money they send to his relatives in his hometown. A battered baby lies in AIIMS Delhi, battling for life for more than two weeks, possibly needing a fourth surgery to help get over the damage inflicted to her little person by perpetrators still missing. And these are only some of the incidents of manic rage and the resulting havoc wrought, that we battle with today.

It is an uneasy head that wears such a crown, the crown of boiling fury that allows aggression to translate to bodily harm and a breakdown of all moral barriers — socio-economic, cultural, and most heart-wrenching — familial.

How to make sense of the repeated attacks on a victim by malicious perpetrators possibly known to her, not even stopping when she moved to another part of town. Not by superfluous emails or verbal threats, but very clear and present danger: death-stalking blades and then the sure-fire disfiguring agent, acid. Such malice, such anger spewing, the intention not just obliteration, but torture in the process. What have we as a society fallen to? Worse, this aggression, should we say bloodlust, has percolated all levels of society.

All levels, such that the recent cover story of a leading news magazine captures the angst of domestic violence, never so sharp or so threatening, as now. Such that it is reported how even children today (as young as three years) need anger management classes or are increasingly being referred to mental health experts to help tide over their relentless aggression. Bollywood, always a mirror to current society, is thus in free flow as regards a return to maar-dhaad — action heroes spewing aggression and vehemence, a throwback to the genre popularised in the 1970s by Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man, at that time without such overwhelming, underlying angst. Today’s action spews violence with such terrifying menace that even remakes of the 1970s pathbreakers (Agneepath, Don), unsurprisingly become blockbusters.

What to attribute to this rise in levels of frustration, such that it boils over, why, really, this Kolaveri Di? The bleak state of the global economy, the discontented fiscal rumblings in the US and Europe being felt here, the constant conflict that the West Asia and surrounding areas go through, even climatic conditions right now (Europe’s cold wave is killing many, basic services and transport were hit this week) — there are so many possible reasons for the rising frustration, hence aggression, on the world stage.

Add to that our local woes — intangible monsters like rampant corruption and scams, or the ever-present ghost of female infanticide or the precarious state of the current government, or more tangible civic issues like the dismal state of city roads or lack of basic amenities to those in need — where to stop?

But stop it must, this raging fury in our society, before its destruction reaches unimaginable proportions. What we need to introspect on, is how to contain it before it becomes unmanageable, before the social fabric is rent beyond repair, beforethe non-violence our country’s founding fathers were so emphatic about, becomes an anachronism to be found only in history texts and nostalgia.