Ramu Singh Commits Suicide - Nirbhaya Saga Continues

The rapist who assaulted Nirbhaya hanged himself in jail, which is the latest news flashed to me by the social media. I am not shocked because a man who is condemned by society and the media has little chance of survival.

Hm.

So what did he think? He could get away with rape? He may have, and that's a worrying thought. Such men are known to have a history of such crimes in their past. Then they go on to do more.

So whose fault is that? The government (on which we blame everything), the education system (that produces such uncivilised men), the entertainment media (which is complicit in many ways), or, maybe, just maybe, corporatisation. 

Now that I am out of the corporate world I can write boldly about what happens inside those corporations, which is what my novel is all about. India has been changing of late and malls, celebrity culture, and high fashion are the latest in trend. We live in a world where there are no watchdogs. The watchdogs are busy keeping the rich politicians from being lynched, and, the critics and social watchdogs - writers - have deserted newspaper and media offices. They have paid news now. If you are a celebrity your appearance, your clothes, your brand of aftershave cream, length of your beard will be written about, which is paid for by companies selling related products. But if you are poor, well, don't go out after dark and avoid dark lonely street corners.

This is a country that imports cheer girls for its cricket tournaments and thinks nothing of paying foreigners millions to come play the game. All the while, there is a drought going on in vast swathes of land and people are willing to die for a pot of water. I being jobless and abjectly poor don't have the data to show here but the fact that only 0.1 per cent of the land in Maharashtra is irrigated despite it spending Rs 269 trillion since 1950 on irrigation (which is 269 lakh crores). Where did the money go? But I am digressing. Probably - this is a joke - it went into the pockets of criminal men who were given money to dig wells in a certain village. When they came to inspect the wells, they said the wells have been refilled as it bred mosquitoes.

Now imagine this:

Ramu Singh (fictitious person) sees all these girls - straightened hair, high heels, tight jeans, short sleeveless top - walking around in malls and multiplexes with their boyfriends. Now Ramu has heard about what happens in this "high society": free sex, drinking, dancing, in fact everything he can't have. (He doesn't know much of this is the creation of entertainment media.) He feels he is being denied what he should have because he lives in a free country. He becomes maniacal thinking about what those boys and girls would be doing when he is driving his "dibba" of a contract bus. (He doesn't know or care about laws because he is already a law breaker.) So he goes about getting what he lacks by force having as his accomplices similarly deprived men. 

Hell happens afterwards. He is put in jail and the inmates of the jail give him hell, because he is tainted, you see. So he goes and hangs himself.

(This is fiction conceived by a fallow unfertile imagination of this blogger who has a habit of blurting out things of no consequence on his blog.)

John is @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. He blogs here. His Youtube Channel Page. His novel Mr. Bandookwala, M.B.A., Harvard.