A few words of caution...
Remember the Iraq war? The war that was falsely co-related to WMD's and cost so much in lives and is turning our kids futures a little darker than it needs to be? Remember how that war came to be?
There was a mass hysteria in the US for retaliation and not many stopped to think of the consequences. To top things off there was the "You are not patriotic if you don't support this war" rhetoric?
That always reminded me of my previous company where a bunch of middle managers would say "Let's do what is right for the company. Let's do blah blah and blah..."
The relatively new (read <3 years experience) engineers would look at each other and go "but that is stupid. if you do blah blah and blah it is not the right thing for the company!" but some older wiser folks would advice us to "let it play out". Eventually things will come to light that said ideas are not good for the company. As a collective though, the young ones got to keep their jobs and not be thrown out for calling the "emperor naked" and the older wiser ones had enough headcount to get their stuff done. The whole thing was a wasted exercise and would sometimes take up months of your time chasing wild geese!
Most of those folks who prefaced their sentences with "let's do what is right for the company.." would end up in the management fast track and be out of sight within a year or two flying to far away places on company dime doing more things that were right for the company! In a culture like that, lot of folks who could not in good conscience "let it play out" would leave, a lot of good effort would be wasted and the worse case was monetary gain not realized for the entire employee base!
Same thing happens to a country and what do we have? Lives lost in the hundreds of thousands, a future generation ending up with heavy debt, a wave of next generation terrorists created and a world destabilized for years to come.
I now see my friends in India going through this spiral with the Delhi Rape Case. Physical, chemical, biological castrations are being suggested as potential deterrants to future rapists. Do not see how that will stop a castrated and possibly more frustrated individual from shoving some other object into some poor woman. Maybe you should ask for a Lobotomy instead of a castration if you want to hold down that line of logic?
If someone doesn't speak up, India might end up enacting laws that would not be much different from the Taliban run Afganistan and we all know how women fared and are still faring in Taliban controlled areas. They will be raped in their own homes with no way to let the outside world know and with no one to come castrate their menfolk who made or interpreted the law to suit their needs against the better interest of women!
The public hangings and stonings and castrations are going to be a bandaid or a cast in the sense that the damage is done and it is a punishment after the fact. Hailing such calls for castration as a sign of victory is not much different from what happened when we went to war with Iraq. Years later you will realize that while most rapists continue to go undetected, some poor kid who hands a girl a love letter will be wrongfully convicted and castrated! We will create an even more sexually repressed class of men and one shudders at the thought of that prospect. We have our legistlators watching porn in their phones while being in the Assembly! So enough said..
Just look at the TSA for crying out loud. One guy tries to set his shoe on fire and now millions of people around the world end up removing their shoes, belts, get x-rayed repeatedly and harassed in the name of security while their chances of getting killed on the ground by a drunk driver or deranged gunman with a semiautomatic are much higher than being blown up in a plane with shoes and you still hear of cases where folks smuggle things through just to prove that the TSA are stupid!
Most laws are only as good as the infrastructure that is set up to implement them and the common sense that goes into the laws. As a daddy of two girls it is not easy to sleep knowing there are folks like this out there. I remember very vividly getting flamed badly for a blog post where I had questioned the safety of India, because my parents cautioned me about a place near Delhi called Nithari where some guy killed and ate people "silence of the lambs" style almost ten years ago and also because I happened to be an NRI at the time.
Now everyone seems to be telling me that "this type of stuff happens only in Delhi". This is not Delhi specific. It happens everywhere! Delhi, Philadelphia, Karachi, Beijing.. everywhere and there are different stats coming from all these places which have different laws and social norms and cultures.
Please think this through before passing laws that will eventually not do anything to stop such crimes, be abused more likely than be enforced properly and have a long term net negative impact!
Do these laws really reduce the occurance of rape? If yes, by all means go ahead. If not, do what it takes to prevent rape. Punishing at that point doesn't do much.
There should be an educational excercise for young adults and children. If the school system is not going to provide that, as responsible parents, we can do a sit down with our kids and have a conversation with them when they are ready for it.
This is not different from the Sandy hook conversation we had to have in our house. It was tough but it had to happen. Going to tell you guys of an actual conversation that happened just a week after Sandy Hook incident.
Jr. wanted to go attend a Christmas party at a friends place as some of her other friends were going. Personally didn't know the girl or her parents and Jr. had never mentioned her as a close friend in previous conversations. She also mentioned that her friends dad knows Obama personally.... because her friend has shown pictures of her dad with Obama! So I made a casual joke saying "I cannot allow you to go unless I know two things. Do her parents own a gun and does she know where that gun is? If the answer is yes, then definitely you are not going!"
She threw her hands out in frustration and made a sincere face and said (brace yourself for this)
"Her mom is innocent. She can't have a gun. She is Chinese! Chinese and Indian people don't have guns Appa! You of all people should know that!"
In one sentence she pretty much zapped me! So I asked her nicely "how do you know that?" and the response (brace brace brace) "We talked about this in school and asked our friends who has guns in the house and only non Indian and non Chinese people have guns in the house!"
It took me a good 30 minutes to explain to her that :
a. Not all Indian and Chinese households are gun free
b. the biggest college massacre in US school gun violence history at Virginia was carried out by an Asian kid
c. Not all "non Indian and non Chinese" households have guns
d. Innocence has nothing to do with gun ownership
These were no easy conversations with a girl who just turned 10 with her very smart 7 year old sister lapping up all this information .. so she can use it in her school survey!
Coming back to laws, just remember one thing! We live in a world were most of the rules were made by a powerful minority! Every now and then, the tides turn on that powerful minority when the powerless majority gets a say. Be it the French revolution or India's independence or the Arab spring the same thing happens over and over again.
We also live in a world were most of the rules were made by men and they have done well to protect their interest across the globe. Most solutions to problems that women face never go far enough to address the solution if the solution involves changes that men have to undergo! Most of the solutions center around how women have to change themselves or conform to a different guideline.
Unless that changes and more women join the legislative and administrative ranks, the right laws that protect women will never see the light of day. It is also a crying shame that those women that do make it to those positions in India are siding with the men once they see power!
Please take some time to think about real solutions that will enable a woman in India to be as free in every way as a man who walks by her side.
My previous concerns of raising two girls with certian cultural and social norms is now paling in comparision to new concerns about the world we live in!
Go have that conversation. Have that discussion with your friends and don't let the anger and rage drive your actions.
On the gun control side, the solution was to put an armed policeman in every school to protect the kids from bad guys who might come shooting. Just think about it! On the men side it is to castrate, stone and hang rape accused!
Today one of my friends pointed me to a comment on a youtube comment that "none of these problems will happen if women wear a hijab and we have sharia law in India!"
Hence the post in-spite of saying "No social minded posts!"
