The best thing about travelling in a local train is that you’ll always find yourself among a sea of unknown faces.No one knows you. No one gives a damn if you had a bad hair day or you just got promoted and if you are a daily traveler,you definitely belong to a class of people who unwillingly travel in jam packed trains because the only thing that is floating in front of their eyes is the ‘late’ mark on the attendance register. Things get even worse if you are a woman traveling in a ladies compartment. As a male, the only unprejudiced reason I can come up with would be that each and every woman has some sense of insecurity or claustrophobia in-built in her which creates trouble for others for no reason. Combine that with a hundred women with their thousands of insecurities in a packed compartment and what you get is chaos. Fortunately this issues are rare in gents compartment and it gives me a great relief when I can easily swim through a sea of passengers to light at my station without creating a ruckus.
When I look into my phone contacts I find contact number of guys whom I don’t even know and whom I probably won’t even remember a few years from now. Their names appear on my phone-book only because they travel with me everyday at the same time,in the same train and in the same compartment. I don’t think this kind of unusual train-friends concept exists anywhere else on this planet.My train-friends group consisted of a few middle aged office going men, about three people nearing their retirement and a new entry guy who hailed from North India looking to make a future in this bright city. I was teased as the only adult who was already 24 and was still studying in a B-school instead of earning. It sometimes felt weird when people use to stare at me while I read the brown shaded Economic Times and the others held their usual Times of India in their hand.
One fine day,the headlines of newspaper flashed the verdict of the highly publicized Delhi gang-rape case. It said that one of the convicts who was under-age at the time of committing the crime was sentenced to just three years in a remand home. The use of the word ‘just’ in the newspaper column indicated that even the media fraternity was not satisfied with the verdict and so was the whole country. Everyone was demanding death sentence for all the convicts. One of the senior traveler in my group Mr. Gupta said “Now,even our judiciary can’t be trusted. How can they let off a devil with such a soft punishment”. The other senior guys showed their support by nodding their heads and this became a hot topic of discussion. One of them expressed his views by declaring that a person committing such a heinous crime must be declared a maniac and should be publicly beheaded without considering his age. One of the middle aged guy even joked that the part of the body which commits the crime should be chopped off immediately to curb crimes. Everyone had a good laugh at it while I just kept listening to their conversation. After a while Mr. Gupta looked at me and said ” What do you think,beta. Haven’t you read the news?”.
It was as if I was waiting for my opportunity to speak amongst the so-called law makers that I raised my voice a little bit,looked at the senior guys and asked “What could be the lowermost age for a guy to commit a heinous crime such as rape.17….15…13…12..?” The law makers who were initially having a candid conversation now looked shell shocked. The jinx was broken. I went against the public opinion and somehow no one could oppose me. Maybe they got confused by my question or maybe because most of them had a son who was almost a 12 year old. I had unknowingly started a conflict within their minds. Mr. Gupta said “But upto a certain age limit we must know that a guy is ..”. Suddenly I cut in between “Ok, so now we are talking about age limits. In a country where we do not even provide proper sex education to our children, we expect our kids to understand the difference between consensual sex and rape. Yet whenever a juvenile is convicted of rape, we just blindly demand death sentence and to whom, an uneducated teenager. How does that make us different from a ‘khap’ panchayat. “
Everyone around me was staring at me as if I was a ghost. I declared that my station has arrived and I alighted at my station. I do not know what they must be thinking. I wish they think of me as a hero Mumbai deserves. But not the hero Mumbai needs right now. I am a silent guardian. A watchful protector. The Devil’s Advocate.
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- Gang rape dents Mumbai’s ‘safe city’ image (thehindu.com)
- PODCAST: The Devil’s Advocates – Episode 8 NOW AVAILABLE! (jlmartindesigns.wordpress.com)
- As Mumbai gang-rape shocks the nation, justice still awaited in Delhi rape case (ndtv.com)
What cooks up in my mind!! 