Control yaar

John Fernandez, in the Indian context, the name seems to have come out of a 70s Hindi movie of some nondescript alcoholic servant/taxi driver, who’d sell his soul for another bottle of whiskey. The caricature of such a Christian characters is often depicted with a small bottle of alcohol in his coat, talking in a slurred Hindi, English mixed language. Oh! We Christians with Christian names have never had it easy in here. Since I was a kid, my peer used to wonder and often ask me about what food I eat at home and presume that my dad would be a drunkard with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and rosary in the other. I was considered a motley clown with the skin of a black man, the name of a white man and the life of a…they didn’t really know, just thought it would be different from theirs. Different it was but out of helplessness more than out of religion. Anyway, let’s get back to John Fernandez, this one’s no poor Jesse Samuel; he’s a high profile politician from South Goa. I saw his interview on TV in which he was giving clarifications on the accusation of him having raped a 25 years old Russian girl. His speech was slurred and he fumbled as words rushed out of his mouth like bullets out of a misfiring machine gun. Thank you John Fernandez, now they’ll presume that I’m a sex addict too, crouching to ambush my next victim heh heh heh!! Ah but politicians are loyal to no religion but to each other. You see the brotherhood between politicians, Mr. Shantaram Naik and Mr. Digambar Kamat came out in your support. They way they defended you by counter-attacking the victim saying that she shouldn’t’ve been out late in the night with men, can be aptly interpreted as following:
“When we see beautiful women at night, the normal faculties of our brain cease to function and our bodies are taken over by testosterone. We turn into robots that have been programmed to do only one thing, have intercourse. We are least bothered if the woman is uninterested or even repelled, she has already sealed her fate by being in our vicinity. All women should understand that.”
These are politicians speaking? These are the people we’ve chosen to run our country/parts of it. Now I see why there’s opposition to increasing the number of women MPs, these men would find it difficult to work in the parliament. They might molest somebody in there too.
In our modern city of Chandigarh too, a ride in the local bus any working day would reveal the extent to which school/college going boys, middle aged and old men go to “touch” and “feel” young girls (many of them school-going). It’s gut-wrenching more than heart-wrenching. I’ve been a mute spectator like the hundreds like me that see but are maimed. Who do you go to? The police? They’re the biggest reprobates of them all. How do you fight alone against a group of 10 guys that have ganged up to trouble women? I wish I had a gun but then two wrongs wouldn’t make a right. The popular belief amongst these men is that if you can’t express it the way they do, you’re impotent. They say “it nudges us so we indulge.” Well? Does it mean that I have teeth so I must bite? I have nails to I must claw? I was never taught to be decent so I can’t be. Duh! I also don’t have a brain so don’t expect me to think!! I guess that’s fair enough.
So I keep walking through the dirt and disorder in my room till I trip over the grimy shoes myself. Till it happens to my sister or my partner, I, like a decent Indian man sitting in the bus, not wanting to get into trouble, should put the headphones on, whistle and look out of the window and ignore the events occurring a foot from me in every direction. It’s kinda difficult but I manage, if only with a raised blood pressure. By the way, John Fernandes is obsconding, please check out his photo on the net and be on a lookout. Let’s catch him wherever he is.