No family channels

Breakfast is rarely a leisurely meal at the Patels, my home away from home in Mumbai. Psychotherapist Udayan Patel heads off to work fairly early. But last week he wanted to talk about something that had been bothering him. Small talk went missing that morning. “Why don’t you write about sexuality and violence,” he suddenly said, the furrow in his brow deepening uncharacteristically, as he pointed to the morning’s papers that lay strewn across the coffee table.

There they were, the shrieking headlines above stories spilling over luridly with conjectures and details about the two grisly murders of a 14-year-old, along with her family’s domestic help in Noida on the outskirts of Delhi; and, over 1,000 km away in Mumbai of a young media entertainment executive. The latter was apparently a crime of passion involving a starlet, a naval officer and the victim, whose body had been chopped into pieces before being disposed. Lascivious insinuations about those involved were not just hinted at; between the lines as it were: the imagination of the police and the press had free reign.

However, this column is not about these tragedies. Too much ink continues to spill over them, much of it with ghoulish glee. Not to speak of ambulance-chaser filmmakers already penning scripts about the Mumbai murder. It is an attempt to find out what’s going wrong in our society. Why is this dangerous tango between sexuality and violence taking place? When did we pass the tipping point? When did the line between life and very dark reality shows start to blur?

For Udayan Patel it largely boils down to the lack of family intimacy, and ‘hierarchical violence’ in many families. “Have you noticed how people eat in villages? They turn their back to others when they eat. Those in small towns look down and eat, seldom looking up.” (The big city has both kinds — families with more than perfunctory conversations and those who carry the baggage of small town mentality with them. I don’t mean to imply that all villagers and small towners fall in the latter category.)

So when do children and parents look each other in the eye and talk? That all-important topic of sexuality is usually left untouched. Discussions within the family are essential; they allow knowledge to come into play. Awareness about limits and limitlessness is essential according to Patel: “Knowledge makes discrimination and choice possible.

Discrimination is creating limits with knowledge. Inhibition is creating limits without knowledge…desire without knowledge.”

It’s not just the lack of discussion about sex that worries him. It is the absence of discussion about any subject in the family home — from buying a cell phone to a car. Blissfully unaware of — or indifferent to — the financial problems their parents might be facing, young people run up bills that are shockingly high. You can always blame consumerism, but that does not provide the complete answer. The empathy factor is sorely missing. Were parents to talk about their limitations with their children, they might put a limit on their splurging.

Evidently, the mantra is family intimacy, the lack of which could also be responsible for the prevailing addiction to brands or anything that is ‘in’. ‘Adhesive identification’ is a catchy label that Patel once came across and uses (borrowed from a British psychoanalyst he once knew) to describe this predilection. It describes those who ‘stick to surface qualities’, to images.

Breakfast that morning left a sombre aftertaste. I thought of all the small items relegated to side columns of newspapers about brother killing brother, father killing daughter, son killing father — and more recently about a son killing his mother because she had scolded him for doing poorly in the IAS exams. Such little reports have become so prevalent that one hardly notices them. Blood is getting as thin, if not thinner, than water.
Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com