Murder she wrote

There was a time not so long ago when the routine way to end a love affair gone awry was for the couple in question to snub each other. You fell out with a paramour, you stonewalled him at your next encounter; if he persisted in contacting you, you got friends and family to make excuses about your whereabouts; if more drastic measures were called for, you changed your phone number — and in the direst circumstances, you moved to a new location.

But if one goes by present trends, it seems none of these options are viable. Today's India is indicating that the best way to end an affair is murder! You don't like the way a romance has turned out? Poof — you get rid of your ex-lover!

Everyone seems to be doing it: MBA students, BPO employees, private airline crew, TV actors, defence personnel, politicians, middle class housewives… I can't remember a time when we have woken up each morning to so many crimes of passion.

I come from a generation when the Nanavati case involving a Mumbai-based Parsi naval officer shooting his wife's alleged Sindhi lover brought the chattering classes in India to a standstill. As kids we sang ‘Hang down your head, Nanavati’, to the tune of a popular song. The papers wrote about nothing else for days. The court trial changed the face of courtroom procedures. Its impact was unprecedented.

Today, urban murder for matters of the heart seems to be one more facet of reform India — like multiplexes and caramelised pop corn.

And there are corpses strewn everywhere. Attractive, upwardly mobile, Japanese car-driving, Macdonald's burger-eating, mobile phone-using corpses, who all lived the middle class Indian dream… until an ex-lover's ire caught up with them.

And we as a public are subjected to the minutiae of murder like never before: weapons, forensic evidence, motives, passion, parental remorse, subterfuge and keyhole voyeurism.

Welcome to the Balaji films version of a nation as a work in progress — vamps who scream, men who cheat and things that go bump in the night. A deadly cocktail of rapidly changing social mores, the breaking down of communities, a transient society, new money and the ghastly, lurid influence of TV soap operas and Bollywood plots.

Think about it: What else can a nation that consumes the facile, cynical, immature and self serving output of TV and film screen writers do but internalise what they see and apply it to their own lives?

Where have ideas of doing away with irritants in one's lives with mithai-laced arsenic, or stashing bodies in garbage bags come from but TV and films? When there exists an all- pervasive culture of cliffhangers, TRP ratings, box office figures and eyeball-grabbing plots, is anyone surprised that the outcome is lurid plots where murder is the inevitable — and mandatory — end to a failed love affair?

What happened to counselling? To good old ‘let's be friends’, to ‘forgive and forget’, to ‘hey — it didn't work out but it's time to move on’?

Does anyone out there remember a time when to signal the end of a love affair you went out and bought an Archie's card to send — or horrors — dedicated a syrupy song on a Saturday night radio programme to your ex-paramour?

Today, unfortunately, it seems the card is replaced by arsenic and the song by a gun.

Email: _malavika@dnaindia.net