(December 2015)
The ongoing fights and animosity against writers, artists, actors, scholars and scientists in India on TV and in the newspapers, and in the social networking avenues such as Facebook and Twitter evoke memories of street fights in India. In the 1980s when I lived with my parents and brothers in Hunsur (a small town near Mysore), I would often wake up with a start in the mornings to the loud noises of quarreling women from a neighboring community of agriculturists (Vokkaligas). At that time, as perhaps still now, there was a scarcity of public water supply to the houses, although we were living in the lush Kaveri river belt. Due to this perennial water problem, a daily practice for the women of different vataras (quarters) of the town was to congregate in front of the outdoor water-taps of the locality to collect the meager rations of water that was periodically released by the town council. This was also the time for the women to discuss household issues, which invariably brought out personal camaraderie as well as animosity in full public display. It was the time when the most basal vocabulary of the local Kannada dialect was inflicted on one another to express the prevailing animus. It was quite an experience, as a boy, to hear the unending stream of swear words, often containing the most bizarre sexual innuendos, by these women. The whole spectacle would always end as abruptly as it had started, when the water stopped flowing in the taps and the women repaired to their houses to continue their daily chores, only to start all over again the next day.
The current situation in India, where any utterance against the government about the lack of tolerance and increasing oppression, is considered anti-national, and is often the center of the most raging controversies, the target of barrage of insults and obscenities directed towards the person and his family, and threats to his/her life. This situation, however, can be worse than the street fights of yore. The new fights are played out less on the streets but more on the cyber-gullies and the 4G-alleys of India. Similar to the street fights, the new cyberfights always start and end abruptly with new controversies, the issues hardly having received sufficient rational points of view on both sides. A starker difference is that the new fights are not limited to single streets, rather they spread far and wide across the globe, thanks to the global reach of the internet.
Eclectic Musings by Ranga Sitaram 