Nirbhaya verdict & Grand Masti: Is sex a tragedy or comedy?

On the last Friday the 13th, India welcomed the death sentence given to four men for gangraping and brutally assaulting a young woman in a moving bus in New Delhi in the night of December 16. On the same day, a movie called

, which perhaps set up an unprecedented low in vulgarism, was opened to a thunderous welcome!

Which one is the real India then? Do we differentiate the sexual tragedy from the sexual comedy so easily? I saw someone posting on the Facebook that a man started passing lewd comment at a woman after both came out of the theatre hall screening Grand Masti. When the woman shouted in protest, the man asked her why was she angry with the remark when she was enjoying the same obscenity being shown on the big screen?

Convenient conscience?

The producer of the film, elated over its grand opening, said they had their intentions clear and said the film was well received by the youngsters and the audience was carrying a sex urge back home after seeing the movie. Sex urge to threaten lives of more Nirbhayas on desolate streets? And then, when the urge goes down, we will take up the candles to take out long procession and protest the failure of the police and the courts to deliver justice?

We celebrate a death sentence for a rape and then go & watch cheap sex comedy

This Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story shows the true character of a society which is more responsible, than those four convicts, for the horrific torture and death of a helpless woman. Can the entire society be hanged? The society which one of my friend described as "a bunch of sex-starved cadavers and smells of fecal bacteria".

Those women in Grand Masti happily make themselves sex objects...

We are hearing a lot of noise from women, whether commoners, activists, officials or celebrities, who are happy that the four convicts have been given the maximum punishment. But they are strangely silent when those actresses in the cheap film junk their bodies and with it, the minimum respect of the entire womenfolk in the name of liberty and progress, and provoke and lure the animal instincts in men.

... yet when something goes wrong on the streets, the entire nation cries foul

These men, who after witnessing the grand fun called sex on the screen, try to emulate the same to get a taste and target any common woman returning home or going to the private tuition, who is responsible for the disaster?

Chikni Chameli Katrina Kaif's provocative dance with a song which says 'bhookhe sheron se khelungi main' might earn her accolades, but when a photojournalist gets dragged by the real-life bhookhe sheron (hungry tigers), she has no ability to fend off the danger.

As a society, why it is that we are only up to projecting rape as a law and order issue and not something more grave? Hypocrisy knows no limit for us.

For those who say that movies can't be mixed with reality, they either understand that things are beyond our control now and we can only light up candles as a hopeless protest, or they don't want to understand at all. Cinema is the most trusted mirror of a society and never hides to reflect the latter's thoughts and behaviour. In the name of modernity and success, we have craftily mastered ways to express our obsession with primeval desire and lend it a legal status. Behind the artificial facade of civility, there is always the unhealthy obsession that could turn fatal any moment.

Bollywood, considered one of India's many big identities, let her conscience down just as the judiciary revived the hopes of her battered soul. The tamasha, played out by the paradoxes of the day, was a difficult thing to digest but one fears this is how we have shaped our national character, full of double standards.

The Nirbhayas just make up the number of casualties of a complete social breakdown. Those four convicts are victims of a double-faced social conscience. The victims will be gone for sure now and the victims' victim has already gone. What has remained as truly Indian is the Grand Masti and we love to live by it.