With ever-increasing atrocities against women and girls (even those as young as eight), there is anger among the masses. We blame the politicians, the Opposition blames the government – and the government comes out with a weak Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance without, perhaps, looking into the number of actual convictions that happen in rape cases.
Well, criticising the Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 2018, may perhaps be a debate for another day. But before that, we need to look at ourselves before the blaming the government. Perhaps, we need to think about it this way- such strict laws didn’t exist earlier, and the number of rape cases was considerably lesser in the past (around the 1990s). Such harsh laws don’t exist in the US, but still, women feel way safer on the streets there than they do in the ‘cultured state of India’. What the hell has gone wrong?
The problem, in my opinion, does not relate to the ‘leniency’ (or ‘strictness’) of the courts or the government. It relates to something that lakhs of people would give their lives to defend, something for which hundreds of thousands go crazy. It is not about #MeToo either; it is about Bollywood.
Why Bollywood? See, it’s simple. Which film industry portrays women to be nothing more than the ‘property of men’, whose sole goal in life is to fall in love with the ‘hero of the story’? Which film industry portrays women as weak and super-sensitive? Which film industry thinks that women are the ‘spice’ of the films? Sadly, it is our great Bollywood.
If this doesn’t make sense, just recall the last Bollywood movie you saw. Most of the Bollywood movies, in my opinion, are crazy love stories, with hardly any good content in them. Then, what about being realistic? To this, I would say: when has being ‘realistic’ ever yielded money for our ever-so-greedy film makers. No wonder we don’t make it to the Oscars very often – we just don’t deserve it! And then, people say, “We don’t need the Oscars.” Laughable! Yeah, we don’t want the Oscars, and we don’t want any medals for the Olympics either – that’s what you’re saying, right?
And how can I forget the recent ‘casting couch‘ controversy that has popped up? This clearly shows that our Bollywood stars don’t really care much about issues, but in front of the camera, they make witty feminist statements. It’s ironical, especially when they don’t really respect feminism themselves. No star raised their voices against this issue In fact, some of them even made it into a joke. Why doesn’t this infuriate the minds of young India?
Being a student myself, this is not the kind of India I want to grow up in. Wake up people!