You know, incidents like these — where a couple was beaten up in the Kolkata metro — really make me wonder about certain things: why these heinous things happen at all?
Of course, I wonder why people, especially the yester-generations, fail to give others liberty and why they do not have their long noses shortened to check on themselves instead of others. But, you know, thinking further, deeper questions do arise. Questions that ask how these moral-police justify their actions even to themselves.
The answers seem quite alarming actually, because it’s not the first time this has happened. It has just never been so amplified. When was the last time some elderly person passed remarks or openly chided two youngsters minding their own business? When was the last time even a verbal moral policing was encountered in any public space or even one’s own home? Not too long ago, I believe, because in our lives I see it as an everyday occurrence almost.
You know, it reminds me of certain incidents — a lot of them actually.
A boy in class 12 being punished severely because he and his girlfriend hugged during a youth festival.
Two girls, who were best friends, almost sisters in fact, were often scolded because they hugged each other inside campus. Amusingly, the two heterosexual girls, who the teachers thought were lesbians, didn’t even know about homosexuality then.
Couples are often harassed in the parks because they’re destroying it’s sanctity. Of course, at their homes, the moral policing they face here would only amplify into physical and verbal abuses if not into honour killings.
In colleges or in public places, students are often being punished or harassed just because they hung out with the opposite sex, in uniform.
Of course, homosexual couples or transgender youngsters are discriminated against and looked down upon.
And the list continues endlessly.
So I really wish to ask everyone, what the fuck are you even doing? Why even? The sad thing is that the only answer I get is that you’re ‘protecting your culture’, ‘protecting values’, ‘protecting society’, and protecting whatever else you say you protect.
But what is this ‘culture’, ‘values’, ‘norms’, ‘society’ that you protect so dearly? Like really, what? Who even told you what’s right or what’s wrong and how are you so sure that that is right and all else is wrong in a world that follows the randomness and survivor-bias of Darwinian evolution?
The only answer I sadly get is that you’re plainly and simply religious, your religion being what your generation had practised, what you’d been forced to comply to in your schools, in your jobs, and so on and so forth for you entire fucked up lives!
So, in essence, what you all are doing is nothing above what a Taliban or ISIS or North Korea does day in and day out, only not at such horrific scales, lacking the munitions they have. Yes, you’re no less than a religious fundamentalist, a jihadi terrorist.
And that’s each time you spew your poison about society, culture, etc. to protect the morals you dogmatically hold with such sanctity, leaving logic to die in the dry desert where you’ve left it.
So next time you do these stupid things, please remember two things. We don’t give a fuck to religious fundamentalists. On the contrary, we simply defend ourselves with full force. And second, you’re just old or elder, not wiser. The notion that elders need to be respected for their age is stupid because if that were the case, then dowry to sati would have been respectful practices.
So stop thinking yourselves to be perfect and your practices to be divine because neither is there any supernatural, nor is there any metric to compare cultural practices. So in essence, keep your vile words, your feudal, patriarchal, casteist, classist, colonial beliefs to yourselves, and if you have any bit of wisdom inside those ancient skulls, then just start being open-minded and liberal like the many in your generation we actually respect. Otherwise, just fuck off!
Also, a special note to educational institutions, whose practices are similar, who just can’t stand young people in love, because sex is a taboo in your antediluvian belief systems: Please change yourselves, because neither you own us — no one does, not even governments, corporations or the UN — nor do you have any right to prevent evolution from occurring by preventing us from stepping outside your illogical boxes and exploring the world for ourselves.
Change yourselves, because it’s not that we who’re being tested by your standards to conform to ways. It’s you who is wearing the shoes of a salesman, and we as customers are deciding for ourselves which of your practices to take and which not to, and what to make for ourselves by the knowledge we’ve gained, and what not to take at all — only to be tested by Time and Life to see which practices survive and which don’t.
Yes, we are not your institution’s ambassadors, your race’s culture icons, your family’s value posters or your nation’s idols. We are just individuals, each with our own individuality, and that’s just how we like it to be and have a human right to be. Let this be hence well known that not only can you not command us, you can also not disown us, for the question only comes when you own us, and like I said, we are owned by none and none at all!
So that throne of authority that you so proudly sit on, kick its vanity out, because to us they’re nothing more than stools to rest old, tired posteriors on and nothing else, not one bit more.
STOP MORAL POLICING, because if you don’t it won’t be too soon ere the day comes when we will have to stop you. And it’s not just the yester-generations this message goes out to. It’s a request for all, even those young fanboys who have these practices.
To end it all, a few lines from our own history, which may serve well to conclude this post. Of the two closest cousins in the great ape family, Homo neanderthalensis happened to be slightly superior in their capabilities than their cousins, the Homo sapiens. Only thing however was that the neanderthals happened to be very deterministic in their lives, not doing anything beyond what they were prescribed by their societies, leading to them staying in groups that seldom moved and explored. The sapiens however happened to explore and get killed a lot, courtesy their curiosity and rebellious nature.
The results of the differences I believe are quite visible all around us wherever you see. The rest I leave for you, my reader, to figure out whether you want to be the one who forces certain rules, practices, and dogmas on anyone and everyone, to protect their ways; or whether you want to be the liberal, open-minded, exploratory beast that knows no dogma and is guided by curiosity, and is wise enough to live happily and let others be! The decision is yours.
But do remember which beast (and their fates) you thus chose to be.