On Policing… and on Moral Policing.
Policing in India is a non-planned and non-developmental expenditure, lamented a very senior Indian Police Service Officer when recently I was interacting with him.
Today evening I decided to watch a controversial Egyptian movie "Hena Maysara"… the movie had generated a lot of debates due to some explicit scenes on lesbianism. Some conservative civil groups have asked the government to ban this movie.
Even though I have studied Arabic for two years… I am yet to reach a position where I can understand the dialogues of a movie. Yet, in last few weeks I have seen a lot of Arabic films. I can pick up a few dialogues here and there… and am able to understand the broad narrative of the movie, which suffices while seeing it.
Hena Maysara narrates a promising story, the execution, however, is shabby… there are few very strong moments in the film… they, however, do not make the entire film. It is a movie of two lovers who live in a slum… they are separated due to poverty and circumstances… the girl gives birth to a boy, who is donated to a couple due to the stigma of being an unmarried mother.
The three people chart their own destinies… their stories are told in a non linear fashion… the hero becomes a terrorist, the heroine becomes a prostitute… and the son becomes a street urchin, he falls in love with a girl and they have a kid of their own. However their destinies are tied… in the climax, they are in each other's vicinity and yet oblivious to each others existence… and then the son kills three other street urchins to save his girlfriend… the last shot shows an expression on his face that resembles the expression of his father… when he was helplessly sucked into the vortex of underworld.
Another wonderful experiment which the director does with this movie… is to base this story in the backdrop of Gulf War 1 and 2… from 1990 to the present day. These are strong similes… and show director's fertile mind… yet somehow the execution is flawed. The final shot is both negative and positive… it is about a young boy being sucked into the world of crime and also of a young man protecting his lover from the ruthless world, something his father failed to do.
The much controversial lesbian scene is merely of two minutes… and yet it has raised a lot of brouhaha. So much so, that a very powerful movie was being debunked and banned… this is the extreme form of moral policing. In Egypt, by and by, this trend is growing… every week I see another girl, leaving her earlier carefree way, and adorning Hijab… things are changing at a furious pace… somebody who came to Egypt five year ago told me that the number of girls who wore Hijabs at that point of time was merely one out of four… whereas today it is about nine out of ten.
The proponents of Hijab profess by its virtue… and as to how it would save the women from dishonour... but on ground, there is absolutely no change… day in and day out I see eve-teasing happening on the roads… people fail to understand that the lowest common denominator between the urge to behave in a pervert manner and the amount of clothing on women's body- is zero… so no amount of "graceful" dress would be able to stop a pervert from salivating over the sight of girls… he would find pointers to drool over... even in a women covered by a body cloak. Eventually what matters is women empowerment, social consciousness and sensitivity of law enforcement agencies on the issue.
This brings me to similar situation in India… yesterday I checked out M F Hussain's so called obscene paintings on Hindu deities… and after seeing them… I wondered what is obscene about them. There are people who will disagree with me… but before they choose to do so, I would ask them to see these images before reaching any conclusion. We are witnessing worse form of moral policing in the name of Valentine's Day, Fashion Shows… and what not. What do we want to make India… another Taliban?
This brings me to the opening statement of this blog.
When I was buying my ticket at 11 pm… there sat a girl on the ticket window. Inside the hall I saw a group of three girls seeing the movie, all alone. When I came out at 1 am… almost half the market was open… people were moving around. And then inadvertently I compared all this to India… our capital city Delhi…which closes down at 8 pm… where no girl can roam freely after 10 pm, even with a family. Why is it so? I asked.
It is because the poor law and order situation in India… which is a natural corollary of poor policing. We are a country that believes that good policing is a luxury and spending in the strengthening of policing as an activity is profligacy. Our policy makers think that it would be more sensible to spend the amount that is to be spent on up gradation of policing…on developmental works. On the face of it, the argument sounds fine… but it does something terrible.
The markets that can remain open well past after midnight close down at 8 pm… thus eating away the revenue that could have been generated from that space. The cinema halls have their last show at 10 pm… unlike Egypt that has its last show at 1 am. The nightlife is absolutely minimal… thereby negating means of employment that can be generated due to a night life… and a big chunk of labour force (that is women) is not able to find gainful employment due to this lack of law and order… if we were to calculate the revenue losses and opportunity losses… I think we will find that we can upgrade our police force ten folds, and still break even.
Law and order is a sine-qua-non of development… without it no development will ever take place…and therefore I think its time to move the expenditure on policing from the non-planned and non-developmental head to developmental and priority head.
One movie… one evening and two realizations… not a bad deal at all.
Today evening I decided to watch a controversial Egyptian movie "Hena Maysara"… the movie had generated a lot of debates due to some explicit scenes on lesbianism. Some conservative civil groups have asked the government to ban this movie.
Even though I have studied Arabic for two years… I am yet to reach a position where I can understand the dialogues of a movie. Yet, in last few weeks I have seen a lot of Arabic films. I can pick up a few dialogues here and there… and am able to understand the broad narrative of the movie, which suffices while seeing it.
Hena Maysara narrates a promising story, the execution, however, is shabby… there are few very strong moments in the film… they, however, do not make the entire film. It is a movie of two lovers who live in a slum… they are separated due to poverty and circumstances… the girl gives birth to a boy, who is donated to a couple due to the stigma of being an unmarried mother.
The three people chart their own destinies… their stories are told in a non linear fashion… the hero becomes a terrorist, the heroine becomes a prostitute… and the son becomes a street urchin, he falls in love with a girl and they have a kid of their own. However their destinies are tied… in the climax, they are in each other's vicinity and yet oblivious to each others existence… and then the son kills three other street urchins to save his girlfriend… the last shot shows an expression on his face that resembles the expression of his father… when he was helplessly sucked into the vortex of underworld.
Another wonderful experiment which the director does with this movie… is to base this story in the backdrop of Gulf War 1 and 2… from 1990 to the present day. These are strong similes… and show director's fertile mind… yet somehow the execution is flawed. The final shot is both negative and positive… it is about a young boy being sucked into the world of crime and also of a young man protecting his lover from the ruthless world, something his father failed to do.
The much controversial lesbian scene is merely of two minutes… and yet it has raised a lot of brouhaha. So much so, that a very powerful movie was being debunked and banned… this is the extreme form of moral policing. In Egypt, by and by, this trend is growing… every week I see another girl, leaving her earlier carefree way, and adorning Hijab… things are changing at a furious pace… somebody who came to Egypt five year ago told me that the number of girls who wore Hijabs at that point of time was merely one out of four… whereas today it is about nine out of ten.
The proponents of Hijab profess by its virtue… and as to how it would save the women from dishonour... but on ground, there is absolutely no change… day in and day out I see eve-teasing happening on the roads… people fail to understand that the lowest common denominator between the urge to behave in a pervert manner and the amount of clothing on women's body- is zero… so no amount of "graceful" dress would be able to stop a pervert from salivating over the sight of girls… he would find pointers to drool over... even in a women covered by a body cloak. Eventually what matters is women empowerment, social consciousness and sensitivity of law enforcement agencies on the issue.
This brings me to similar situation in India… yesterday I checked out M F Hussain's so called obscene paintings on Hindu deities… and after seeing them… I wondered what is obscene about them. There are people who will disagree with me… but before they choose to do so, I would ask them to see these images before reaching any conclusion. We are witnessing worse form of moral policing in the name of Valentine's Day, Fashion Shows… and what not. What do we want to make India… another Taliban?
This brings me to the opening statement of this blog.
When I was buying my ticket at 11 pm… there sat a girl on the ticket window. Inside the hall I saw a group of three girls seeing the movie, all alone. When I came out at 1 am… almost half the market was open… people were moving around. And then inadvertently I compared all this to India… our capital city Delhi…which closes down at 8 pm… where no girl can roam freely after 10 pm, even with a family. Why is it so? I asked.
It is because the poor law and order situation in India… which is a natural corollary of poor policing. We are a country that believes that good policing is a luxury and spending in the strengthening of policing as an activity is profligacy. Our policy makers think that it would be more sensible to spend the amount that is to be spent on up gradation of policing…on developmental works. On the face of it, the argument sounds fine… but it does something terrible.
The markets that can remain open well past after midnight close down at 8 pm… thus eating away the revenue that could have been generated from that space. The cinema halls have their last show at 10 pm… unlike Egypt that has its last show at 1 am. The nightlife is absolutely minimal… thereby negating means of employment that can be generated due to a night life… and a big chunk of labour force (that is women) is not able to find gainful employment due to this lack of law and order… if we were to calculate the revenue losses and opportunity losses… I think we will find that we can upgrade our police force ten folds, and still break even.
Law and order is a sine-qua-non of development… without it no development will ever take place…and therefore I think its time to move the expenditure on policing from the non-planned and non-developmental head to developmental and priority head.
One movie… one evening and two realizations… not a bad deal at all.
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