A week or so ago, 100 of Chennai’s most notorious criminals were partying — cutting cakes with machetes and lighting candles with flamethrowers kind of thing. Sadly for them, the cops gate-crashed. Gang leader Binu, whose birthday it was, escaped but has since surrendered and is now behind bars. This Binu has several assaults and murders to his credit, besides pedestrian stuff like burglaries, smuggling and so on.
But what I like most is how the police and the papers refer to Binu affectionately as a “rowdy”. The dictionary definition of a ‘rowdy’ is a noisy and disorderly person. And I truly wish that’s all Binu was, unless, of course, they mean that he is rather messy and noisy while hacking off people’s heads. But wait, the noise then would be coming from the victims, no?
After surrendering, Binu has made a touching video where he tells his fans, “I am not as big a rowdy as you think.” It’s not immediately clear if he is apologising that he hasn’t lived up to expectations or merely being modest, but he clearly realises that he owes something to his fans.
We are like this only. We become fans of all kinds of people. Gangsters, lawyers, actors, politicians, actors who become politicians. We follow them on social media and in real life, and we become unnaturally fond of them. So a hired assassin is fondly called Attack Pandi as if he were a particularly naughty schoolboy. Remember serial killer Gowri Shankar who made headlines in the ’80s? He kidnapped and murdered six girls and we called him Auto Shankar, as if he was a friendly neighbourhood tuk-tuk driver. And we steadily and frivolously referred to the man who masterminded the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi as ‘One-eyed Jack’, a dashing buccaneer no less.
Just as gangsters are ‘rowdies’, violent thieves who mug women on streets and nick their gold chains are ‘chain snatchers’, like competitors in a weight-lifting event. And hoodlums who molest and flash women are, of course, ‘eve-teasers’. And when men urinate on city walls, we shake our heads tolerantly and say they are “committing nuisance in public”. Nuisance? Really? A nuisance is a fly buzzing around your head, a man urinating on the street is a filthy low-life who should be fined heavily.
But we are a polite country and we don’t like to upset people by saying it like it is. Sadly, I am not a polite person. And I am firmly of the opinion that the sort of mealy-mouthed euphemisms we deal in is largely because we are a hypocritical society. We like to think that we are a mostly non-violent and spiritual people, happy to chant and meditate, and then our daughter forces us to hack her to death by marrying someone from the wrong caste — terribly irresponsible of her.
In Lucknow University, know what chancellors are worried about? Romance. They threatened disciplinary action against students who came to the campus on February 14 because if, heaven forbid, someone had exchanged a card or kiss, the university could have crumbled and morality collapsed in a heap. What isn’t threatening anyone’s morals is the multi-crore cheating mafia in Uttar Pradesh. Don’t bother mentioning it. They will shake their heads and say, “Uff, this Kopycat Kumar! How much guts he has.”
I am reading the memoir of a former Railway officer and he makes an interesting observation. Apparently, station masters or signal officers could be as late as they wanted to work — provided the reason for it was a ‘ puja’ . So he had colleagues who strolled in to work as late as noon but got away scot-free because they were super-religious blokes who had been up since dawn busily gathering flowers and pouring unctuous waters on idols. Come to think of it, I understand this. You don’t have to actually be there waving green flags or changing tracks or whatever as long as you can tell God to do it for you and ensure there aren’t any accidents.
Sadly, I could not invoke any holy spirits to write this piece for me and had to type it out myself. I tried telling my editor I wanted an off today, but she threatened to set a rowdy on me. So here you are.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.
