Have a heart, people!

I just love our human rights activists – they know a good opportunity when they see one. The recent allegation against poor Shiney Ahuja (yes, I’m on his side) is perfect human rights material; rich celebrity male exploiting poor female. For added muscle, they’ve combined forces with the experienced Preeti Jain, who was allegedly ‘raped’ by director Madhur Bhandarkar. That fact in itself shows the integrity of their cause. What if Bhandarkar had given Jain a lead role in one of his ‘issue-based’ movies? Would the alleged crime then have been rape, or would it just be the good old casting couch, which Jain would have tried her damnedest to sweep under the carpet?

So coming back to our dear human rights chappies and their worthy cause, they should not have stopped at merely defacing posters of the handsome Shiney. They should have shown some real guts and stoned his house. But maybe that doesn’t fit in with their values. Maybe a week-long fast by one of them, or even a fast-until-Shiney-is-punished, would work better. Chew on that, your excellencies! These strategies will make you look even more virtuous than just the quiet little protest you made.

In Shiney’s case, everyone is speaking for upholding the dignity of the victim. Even the film industry is wary of supporting Shiney. Mahesh Bhatt has large-heartedly said that the industry had supported Deepak Tijori when his daughter was kidnapped, so now they should unite in support of Shiney’s maid – it is the industry’s duty to protect women. He makes it sound as if the industry were a women’s rights outfit. There are people, some of Shiney’s directors and co-actors, who warily say only that this is not the Shiney they knew – a statement that could be flipped around either way depending on the outcome of the trial!

Shiney’s tearful statements that the act “happened, but was consensual” and that this is “the biggest mistake” of his life are not the calculated statements of a guilty person trying to defend himself – they are the emotional response of a remorseful person repenting his indiscretion. At the risk of putting myself out on a limb, and purely from a fan’s point of view, I think Shiney is not the monster he is being made out to be; that he is guilty not of rape but of adultery. And that is nothing new in our film industry, or even our holier-than-thou society as a whole, is it?

Do we deserve a democracy?

The kind of absurdities that our people indulge in sometimes make me wonder whether India deserves to be a democracy at all.

We’ve heard of film music directors lifting tunes from other cultures, genres, even other films to make up for the creativity they lack. Filmmaker Ram Gopal Verma has stretched this to the ultimate extreme – for his next ‘creative’ effort, he wants to use a song based on the tune of, hold your breath, the National Anthem! At times like this, I do feel there is a certain case to be made for intolerant, dictatorial regimes that hand out corporal punishment to traitors and people guilty of contempt.

Then there are the so-called human rights activists who yelled slogans till they were blue in the face, opposing the death penalty to which our courts sentenced Afzal Guru. Remember, he was charged with attacking the Parliament, no less. The sentencing followed the due process of justice, a proper trial was conducted, this was no arbitrary decree. Arbitrariness seems to be the prerogative of the human rights activists alone! Why else would they conveniently neglect the cause of Indian army soldiers who are dying needless deaths at the border, for reasons as pathetic as lack of proper first aid kits and emergency transport helicopters? Such occasions remind me, almost wistfully, of British officers lathi-charging stubborn demonstrators fighting for the release of a captive. Seen from that side of the fence, there was a certain justice in that. (Of course, the key difference is that those earlier demonstrators actually believed in the justice of their cause.)

We are growing immune to our democracy being insulted by our own people. Our cynicism is turning into a shield against the necessity of corrective action. How long are we going to let this continue? At this rate, we will end up re-learning our lessons under the tyranny of some foreign regime that will have taken advantage of our foolish, blind complacency.