A father reportedly shot his 7-year-old son before attempting to commit suicide himself, supposedly after a fight with his wife on Sunday. The mutilated body of a baby was found in a garden in Vile Parle, also on Sunday, so badly gnawed, possibly by animals, that it was difficult to ascertain its gender. A homemaker who likes TV, burned herself to death, apparently after her husband got angry at her for watching too much of it on Saturday. And in a case, so very familiar now in India, a 23-year-old hung herself last Thursday for dowry related harassment in Tardeo.
As you can see, these are incidents not spread over weeks and months, but a span of a few days. No wonder then that in reports of recent information available under the RTI act, family problems are the biggest cause of despair amongst Mumbaikars at present — despair of such overwhelming proportions that it is apparently driving suicides around us. The figures tell a sorry story — 2001 saw 185 deaths due to family problems in the city, 2010 saw 528.
For India it’s no less worrisome: 2001 had 15% suicides due to family problems, this rose to over twice the number, to 44% in 2010.
We are a culture that embraces the family more closely than many others — the joint family as unshakable foundation, as support system has been with us for aeons. As filmmaker Karan Johar has memorably shown in his movies (despite propensity to be modified and lampooned several times), ‘It’s all about loving your family.’ And the success of those films has shown that it always has been, traditionally. Then why this kolaveri di in recent times?
It is not an easy question to answer. That a Versova mother reportedly admitted to sensing something terribly amiss, but yet kept quiet about her 14-year-old daughter’s constant molestation at the hands of her father because she was scared of both her husband and social stigma is only one such horrifying family saga pointing to a psychologically self-destructing city, a socio-cultural breakdown staring us in the face (and not in slow mo). Moreover, incidents like these are not intrinsic or confined to the city itself, rather a worrying sign of the times we live in. Because global headlines are just as disheartening — France was reeling under a boarding school scandal last month after a boy allegedly raped and murdered a 13-year-old. The alleged killer had been conditionally freed of earlier rape charges and parents were horrified that the school had allowed him admission. In Mexico, a girl gave birth to a baby at the age of 10. Yes, you read it right, age 10: a baby herself. Reportedly, authorities are investigating if she might have been raped. And then if not family related, general headlines around the world tend to evoke as much grief as depression — What to say when one reads that Syrian troops killed a 2-year-old girl to prevent her from growing up a protester, one of 256 children to have been murdered by troops since the March uprising, according to a UN probe?
The red flags are all around us, not just on the micro level as Maximum city, but on a macro, global one. Isn’t it time we realised, as Neo from the Matrix movies did — To change the game, we
must be the game changers. The enemy is not outside. The enemy is us.
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