Just a Kiss?

Kiss Of Love protest in Kozikhode

So, the other day at 9 in the morning i found myself to be packed among 25 other completely random people who just like me couldn't find a seat for themselves. Pushing against the crowd and patiently absorbing the looks of disgust my fellow passengers were giving me i found myself a place beside a pole which i could lean against and stand for the next one hour. Making myself comfortable on my Newfoundland i pulled out my cellphone and started off with my daily bus routine which is plugging in my ear-pods and surfing the news.

So as soon as i opened the Times of India app, This picture of a couple engaged in a passionate lip-lock amid a crowd of angry protesters popped out. "This looks interesting" I said to myself. 'Kiss of love campaign reaches Hyderabad' read the caption. For those of you who aren't aware of this whole 'Kiss of Love' movement allow me to enlighten you. For those of you who do, well, you can skip the next 8 lines.

So, the 'Kiss Of Love'campaign started out in what is popularly known as ''God's own country" i.e Kerela when a Facebook page with the same name asked it's followers to participate in a protest against moral policing. Soon enough the page got more than 120,000 likes and with non-violent marches and protests happening in almost all major kerelan cities a new movement was born. Within a span of a few months the movement reached major metros in the country like Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and even Hyderabad. Students and youth across the country were participating actively to protest against the acts of moral policing the whole country had been witnessing for the past few
decades.

Kiss Of Love movement being promoted on a T.V show

Being born and having lived in India for well..almost 20 years now, I can say that the culture in my country is a very conservative one. Daughters aren't allowed to venture out of the safety of their homes after 7 pm, they cant go hang out with any of their boy-classmates or boys-who-are-friends, if a girl is spotted talking to a boy she incurs the wrath of her parents, her grandparents, her uncles, her aunts and everyone else who is one generation above her in the family tree. Girls are told not to talk or hang out with boys because such acts can 'defame' their household and the more she does things like these the more difficult it becomes for them to find her an eligible suitor and etc etc.

My belief is that this conservative ideology harbored by almost every Indian parent takes its roots from their desire to protect their daughters from the eyes of evil men, people who equate members of the fairer sex to a piece of meat. Now this is a feeling which almost everyone understands and can relate to. Hell no one would want their daughters or sisters or moms be exposed to the prying eyes of men whose hormones have taken over them.

And those who protest say that they want to end this fad of moral policing in India. I.e when a group of self-appointed dharmic-stalwarts take it upon themselves to ward of evil from the society in their own barbaric and twisted ways. Their most frequently used technique being beating the hell out of the boy before getting him married to his date. They say 'It is unallowable in our culture for a boy and girl who aren't married to be doing these sort of things!'

A right wing activist in a heated argument

Those people from the RSS and other saffron groups who are very active in moral policing have one unified opinion. "What will our children think?". When we are out with our kids, enjoying a lovely sunday evening stroll in the park and suddenly my son/daughter comes up to me and says 'Look mom! Those people are doing something there!' pointing towards a couple lost in their own world, what will i say to them?

Even though i'm a 19 year old kid who has watched practically every TV series from Breaking bad and Game of Thrones to House of Cards and Walking Dead, i agree with the right-wing people on this one. What message do such acts give to the kids? Now, some may argue that there's no point hiding these things from our kids as they will come to know about it someday and some might even say 'When children come across violence everyday what is wrong with a harmless kiss?'

Well, a kiss might not do anyone physical harm but when things like these occur in public, they make shameless acts appear common, They raise the bar for what can be considered as shameless or adult-rated. And this 'does' cause a lot of harm in the society. I remember back when I was a child and if any intimate love-scene or whatever came up on TV the channel would be switched immediatly now it's perfectly fine for the whole family to got to the theater and watch Katrina Kaif wearing almost nothing, dancing shamelessy to 'Chikni Chameli'. What was adult-rated yesterday is pg-15 today, what was pg-15 is now rated E for everyone. Every single year the standards for shamelessness have been coming down. Tommorow maybe they will have fully naked women in films meant for 12 year old kids.

'So what?' some might ask. 'Were all Humans, we all have desires!' they might say. Well that sir, is a topic for another blogpost some other day. What I mean to say is If two people love each other there's nothing wrong with it. But they need to set a few standards and restrict acts of intimacy to the privacy of their homes or whichever place they feel no-one will watch them.

This Kiss Of Love campaign has got one part right, the usage of violence against unarmed and innocent people is untolerable but when it becomes 'ok' for people to engage in liplocks freely will we not be living in a strange world?

The Great Deception

A few days ago  a friend asked me ‘Why is it that every second thing you share on facebook is about people  dying in Palestine or how bad the governments are around the world?’. A light hearted quirk indeed it was, as evidenced by my timeline which has more stuff by 9gag on it than anything else.

But then again, I’m jobless here, and trying to do something with my life during vacation. So I decided to take it a bit seriously. Brace yourselves and be warned for this is going to be a long one.

The most dangerous disease people could ever get afflicted with is Ignorance. When people make decisions without knowing and understanding the facts and blindly take in what the news and media dishes out for them. This is the reason why I think the world is where it is. A vast majority of the human population is either too dumb to analyze on their own if what the news channels or politicians say is right or maybe they simply choose to ignore whatever according to them can get less than 10 likes on Facebook.

There is also this peculiar herd mentality of the like-oriented audience on Facebook, the urge to stay away from whatever that isn’t trendy or looks odd. Everybody loves to like and share stuff put out by pages like 9gag or any other page dedicated to the cause of filling the internet with nonsense . We  live in an age wherin  almost all  of the information that mankind has been able to assimilate and understand over the course hundreds of centuries is available(except that which the NSA doesn’t want you to know)  only a few well placed clicks or touches away and all people do is watch pictures of puppies or stalk random people they meet online.

In this age of hyper-connectivity, where information travels at the speed of light people are being misled in huge numbers. They need to understand that not all of the media and news outlets are the harbingers of truth they assume them to be. The media has the power to manipulate people’s opinions and make them think whatever the guy without a  name carrying a big suitcase who was in the editor’s office yesterday wants you to think. I don’t mean to refer to all of journalism in this light and everyone knows that there are a lot of journalists out there risking their lives trying to bring out the truth. But sadly, there is a section with such lust for money that they can stoop to the lowest of depths of human character and feel nothing as they horrendously mutilate the truth in order to deceive the many while satisfying the wishes of the few . Some, on the other hand choose to pick only that side of the story which gives them a higher TRP . Others, like indian  news channels have mastered the ability to make even the most trivial piece of news look apocalyptic in nature!. Whatever maybe the case, if people don’t take the time to read, research and enlighten themselves then they are as good as a flock of sheep which can be made to go anywhere the shepherd wants it to.

 There is a lot of hypocrisy within the media especially the entire western media which was on fire with the news of how three Israeli teens were abducted and killed by the ‘Muslim terror group’ Hamas(a charge which wasn’t even proved). And when the president of Israel quite blatantly declares it to the world that they infact want to ‘maximize civilian casualties and kill as many Palestinians as they can ’ where does the criticism disappear to?  On one hand you have a group which took responsibility for killing around 3000 Americans on September 11 and they were quite aptly labeled as terrorists , no complaints there. But isn’t America responsible for the killings of around 200,000 Iraqis and Afghanis and for the illegal invasion of around 6 countries in the last one decade?  And they still call themselves  ‘Peace-makers’ ? No one calling them names?

A famous quote by Malcolm X comes to mind which goes :

 “If you’re not careful enough then the newspapers will have you confused between the oppressed and the ones doing the oppressing”.

Many a places I have found this to be true. And if some are to be believed, this is the work of the ‘Illuminati’ or the ‘new-world order guys’ who are perpetrating this ‘Great Deception’ in order to take over the world(Sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown novel doesn't it?). Whether these secret societies exist or not someone who will always be guilty for deceiving you is you yourself. Or simply put, we put ourselves in deception almost daily.Every single time we turn a blind eye to the wrong-doings of those in power and do not raise our voices to question them we are equally guilty. For any democracy to be successful the people who run it as well as  their policies, agendas and plans must be subjected to as much scrutiny as a candidate attempting the JEE. And this can never happen when the youth of this country uses the internet to stalk random girls they meet or play criminal case all day. 

When the government here can come up with gimmicks such as appointing someone whose resume says that the highest they have studied upto is 12th grade as the Education ministeryou know few things are bound to go horribly wrong..  In many other parts of the country people with little or no education at all who are greedy scumbags first, politicians next and leaders in the very least have been elected to ‘lead’ millions of people out of the dark age we are living in and into the age of ‘progress and development’.  How they got there though is perhaps a discussion for another time. 

The point I’m trying to make is that with leaders like these we shouldn’t be surprised if our titanic hits a giant stone pillar in the middle of the Bay of Bengal in broad daylight and sinks into oblivion. If we really want to see any change in this country then we must keep our eyes open and keep the govenrment in constant check. This however can happen only when the majority among us take upon itself the arduous task of 'Getting to know things'. Which can, quite honestly, be a pain in all the wrong parts of the body.

  But as Albus Dumbledore puts it

 “ Many a times Harry, We are forced  to choose between what is right and what is easy”.  

The only way in which 90% of the worlds problems can be removed is by teaching people how to get their facts right and how they should not be believing blindly what they hear on the news.

“Ignorance is the root cause of all evil”

And this is exactly why I share whatever I share on Facebook. In the vain hope that some teenager in some part of the country will get to know something about the world around him while taking a break from stalking the new girl he noticed in the college canteen the other day.

#indian
#jaihind