Hyderabad, September 27: Late in the evening last Sunday, engineering student Sekhar invited Divya, his junior at college, to his flat to celebrate his move to Mumbai. Sometime during the evening, he battered her to death on the floor of his flat. He was enraged that she had turned her affections to another boy.
In another such incident two days later, engineering student Praveen slashed the throat of Srisha, a student of his college, who he had been stalking for some two years. She is battling for life in hospital.
That very day, a young man pushed his lover down a 40 feet waterfall near Bhadrachalam to kill her. When he found she was still alive at the foot of the waterfall,, he trudged all the way down and strangulated her to death with her chunni. They had been having a love affair for two years and she had begun pestering him to marry her.
These are just three incidents among the many similar one that have been occurring around the state in the last few years. What do they collectively indicate? Is this a generation of rage? Are our youth so accustomed to entitlement that they are unable to handle rejection? This is the first Telugu generation that is getting acculturated in the graces of dating, premarital relationships, and unarranged marriages. Does this mall-hopping, jive-talking generation know the differences between a date, a girl-friend, a love and a wife?
To throw light on this shocking phenomenon in AP, Express invited a counselling psychologist, a film-maker, a doctor and three young college students to present their view of it. Their conclusion. All society is to blame.
You are responsible. And so am I
The morning I read of the shocking killing of Divya by her friend Sekhar, my neighbor asked me in the lift, ‘Aren’t films exerting a bad influence on today’s youngsters?’ My short answer to him was Yes. One hundred per cent. Youngsters do learn a lot of their attitudes from the films we make. Such as how to express emotions like love. Respect for the law. Respect for elders.
But the question I’d like to ask my neighbor is: Are films alone responsible? Cinema is one of the many factors we need to consider when we look at traumatic events like Divya’s death. We need to remember that films show good things as well. Why do we forget that the villain in our films always meets a bad end? That the hero sacrifices himself for his sister? Why not imbibe those values from films? Why do we pick up only the bad things from films and ignore the good? Why just films, look at our society. We scoff at our values. We ignore our traditions.
We ridicule responsibility: Leaders and followers.
Parents and teachers. Men and women.
You and me. All of us. All of society is responsible for the killing of Divya.
Forget films, society today does not inspire a young man to develop character. In fact, it is only grooming the beast in us. Youngsters are given the notion that they can get away with anything.
How many of these stalkers, assailants, murderers of hapless girls met the justice they really deserve? When justice is not done, it is tantamount to condoning injustice.
It amounts to encouraging our young men to harbor disrespect for women and develop an inability to control anger and a misplaced sense of heroism.
Where is Manohar today? The man who butchered his classmate in the open classroom is being fed by our society. What happened to the killers of Ayesha Meera? Pratyusha? The list goes on and on. Why has no one been punished in any of these cases? Where is our sense of justice? At least in the case of Swapnika of Warangal, the killers were shot dead and some sort of instant justice was meted out. But in all of the other cases, no justice of any kind has been delivered.
In being tardy, in being negligent, isn’t society only telling our youth that society will always give you a second chance? There is talk of capital punishment for rapists. I beg to differ with that. Castrate them. That would be both justice and deterrent.
And one final word for all those who believe that film-makers ought to be more responsible.
I agree that they have to be. But have you watched TV lately? You have to take the trouble to go to a theatre to watch a movie but TV brings it home. Glorification of crime by the media is even more dangerous.
Krishna Vamsi made a film, Rakhi, with attacks on girls as the central theme.
He is planning another movie on the same subject.
By Krishna Vamsi
In films, the guy always gets the girl
By I would totally blame the depiction of violence in movies, and to some extent, the visual media for the kind of attacks on girls that we are witnessing in the state.
The undeniable fact is that movies tend to influence youngsters significantly, be it in matters of dress, mannerisms or violent ways of seeking revenge.
Why couldn’t Sekhar recognize the fact that Divya had a will of her own? That he was not right for her? That her interests lay elsewhere? I’d look for echoes of this malformed psyche in movies. Unlike in the past when heroines too had a clearly defined role in our films, we don’t find the same in today’s films. On the contrary, in quite a few movies, one sees the heroine initially spurning the hero for whatever reason. But the movie invariably ends with the same girl accepting the hero as her partner. But no film shows a heroine sticking to her initial opinion and the hero respecting her views and choosing a different path in his life. I think this is where today’s boys are losing their minds — like in the movies they expect the girl to accept their love at some point, and when that does not happen, they are resorting to violent methods to take revenge.
Having said that, the role of parents too should be called into question. Boys who indulge in such mindless acts would have shown similar tendencies at home during their adolescence — putting undue pressure on parents to get what they want. That is when parents should realize that there is a psychological problem with their son and seek professional advice. But most parents don’t do that and the result is that boys learn to deal with people outside the family in the same way, whether it be a girl friend or a colleague. Likewise, girls also require mentoring on how they should conduct themselves, particularly in a society where it is becoming increasingly fashionable to have a boyfriend and go out with him on dates, unmindful of where the relationship may finally end up.
Children pick up whatever they see in their surroundings, more so from powerful media like movies. They are in a confused state of mind by the time they become teenagers, more so when it comes to aspects relating to sex. That is when they require guidance and this should essentially come from parents. Unfortunately, this is not happening – the gap between parents and children is actually growing — and the results are there for everyone to see.
By L Narendranath
You and I can do it too
It’s not only love-spurned people like Sekhar who are capable of feeling overpowering rage. It’s important to remember that you and I are capable of it too.
In analyzing the case of Divya and Sekhar and others like it, we need to look at two elements. One is the sense of entitlement that today’s youngsters are growing up with, never having been denied anything.
The other is the element of power that characterizes these relationships. An entire generation has grown up always getting a desired object and without learning that there can be limits. This sets them up for an incapability to handle rejection.
From that position, rage is very likely to be triggered and lead to an incident like we have seen this week.
I have seen that in most such cases of girls being murdered by suspicious boyfriends or by stalkers, parents often come to know of her relationship or harassment after the girl loses her life. Also, such an act of extreme violence as we have seen in the Divya-Sekhar case would very likely have been preceded by violent behavior in the past as well. In no case could it have been the first instance of violence as these relationships are essentially based on power and control.
Also parents and society at large induce tolerance of abusive relationships in women.
They push women to be submissive and men to be dominating. While childhood is the defining period when a child’s psychology is formed, their relationships are typically a copy of their relationships with their parents. Having been a victim of violence or having witnessed indifference to violence within the family or outside desensitizes a youngster to violence.
Along with such induced behavior patterns, exposure to Hollywood movies feeds a dispassionate attitude to violence in youth today. Indian cinema on the other hand gives romance a rather obsessive nature.
For instance, actors and actresses are shown forgetting even to eat when in love.
Regional cinema in fact portrays man-woman relationships in terms of power, resulting in a desensitization towards women.
Reel life is meant to be a break from real life, but it is actually breaking into real life.
Acid throwing, rape or even killing with a baseball bat for that matter, is an example of a power equation where the guy wants to show the victim that even if he cannot get her, he has control over her life and can change it forever. Unexplained anger, coercion or threats, abusive behavior, isolation and intimidation, trying to establish control, using male privilege, economic abuse or even denying abuse later on and blaming are signs to be careful about. While all of this happens under the parents’ nose, it is the parents who need to be accepting of their children, showing them support and getting them to talk about their relationships and about what’s going on in their minds.
The relationship with parents and between one’s parents defines the nature of relationships of the child with his/her partner and in general as well. However, this does not always mean that a person will only replicate the abusive relationship. He or she may also take a complete aversion to it and consciously decide to have relationships based on equality. However, people who are into power equations generally want it in all relationships but it is mostly likely to work out only in case of partners as colleagues, parents, friends and siblings would not put up with it.
Diana Monteiro is director of the Hyderabad Academy of Psychology
———–Agencies