Delhi gang rape and item number culture

The girl has died from her injuries two weeks after the brutual gang rape in Delhi. RIP

I, and as with most indians, think the culprits should be hanged. But I also blame the increasing influence of item numbers in Indian cinema that excite men with fantasies. An item number is a special song added to a movie to get more publicity and most of these item songs involve a lady dressed sexy dancing with a bunch of men and implying flifty messages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_numbers

This is the Indian equivalent of “violent videogames cause mass shootings”.

Blame item numbers, westernization, women wearing “revealing clothing”…everybody but the man doing the raping and the killing. Just absolutely disgusting.

^+1. Absolutely agree with Palantir’s comment. I find it disgusting when someone tries to “rationalize” such a horrendous act. There is no excuse for the men who did this. No reasoning except their own depraved mentality. Anything less than a death sentence for them would be unacceptable. May the girl rest in peace.

obviously you have to rationalize it.most things have a reason.

don’t buy the item number reason.the rest of india is also exposed to bollywood to a large extent.it’s very much a delhi thing.

rape in india is complicated .there are the rural people whose main problem is being illiterate etc.

there are the urban rapes commited by migrants from rural area’s who feel emasculated because of the change around them.and then there are urban indian women who are liberated enough to have live in relationships.clash of cultures.

also the brutality in this rape makes it an anamoly.the use of rods etc etc have parallels with this case-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta.japan was undergoing great social change too.

none of the above are reasons.i just think that it’s far too complicated for us.leave it to the social scientists.

im all for capital punishment-some people don’t deserve to walk on earth.but if you’re going to bring it for rape then it’s a matter of time before you bring it for murder and then you’re entering a grey area.

our society will become more liberated.it’s inevitable.i wonder how we’ll react to the adverse sex ratio somewhere in 2030 though.again conversly sex ratio in urban areas are going up.too complicated.

good news is that there seems to be a larger middle class that are aware of various social issues

Item numbers? Are you retarded? I blame it on India having a sexually repressed, backwards, paternalistic, f’ing stone age culture by and large where you can get away with pretty much any crime so long as the victim isnt poltiically connected. The only good news is that parts of the country are finally starting to leave the stoneage. These non-stone-age people are the ones making sure that this story doesn’t go unreported, which is how India usually likes to treat these things.

This shit has been going on forever in India and goes unnoticed usually because journalists don’t like reporting bad news in India, families don’t like the public shame associated with it, and the Indian government would rather just ignore it than get out of their cushy chairs. Litererally these Indian politicians and bureaucrats sit in cushy chairs giving dictation like it is 1920. Then they take four hour lunch breaks. So pretty much everybody was incentivized to bury the girl, the story, and pretend like it never happened. Some blood money might exchange hands quietly, but that’s it.

Just 10 years ago nobody would have noticed or said anything about it. Back then hardly anyone had the internet in India. No Internet meant that as soon as its not in the newspapers it’s out of mind. Newspapers deal almost exclusively in good news in India, so rapes like this would not have been reported. the editor of Mint told me as much once, bad news doesn’t sell in India. It’s quite the opposite of e Us in this regard where we obsess, probably to a fault, over bad news. In India, people want to hear about a bull market, how rich the richest rich guy is,what GDP numbers are, that Pakistan sucks. Nobody wants to hear the shit news about India. In fact if you mention it you are attacked. Just as these protestors are.

So a decade ago the chick would have been silenced and presumed a slut. Well, now the world is taking notice of India and that means India needs some growing up. The Internet saved India from itself. Personally, I think this is progress. I’m really excited that people in India are getting pissed about this and actually demanding their government do something for a change other than demand baksheesh and pretend like there aren’t any problems. India will be the country it wants to be, says that it is destined to be, when its citizens and leaders grow up and takes responsability for stuff like this and do something about it.

I also think we’re gonna see a lot of stories like this. India is backwards as Hell. Good people are hard at work here to try and change that, but a lot of shit is gonna have to see light in the media before anything changes here. Foreign journalists were afraid to be critical of India before, kinda treating India with kid gloves. But now that it is a country full of prosperous people, this is gonna change. I’m still waiting for the ground shaking anti corrpuption event to come and rock this place. But when you see the kind of paternalism that they have here you start to understand why the feminists got so pissed off in the 60s. It’s shameful, and I say this as a cardo carrying sexist male.

P.s. Statistically speaking, 9 out of 10 Delhites enjoy gang rape.

I am not trying to rationalise the issue. It’s one of the worst rape cases I have heard but the truth is there are many more such cases in India or elsewhere in the world. The issue is complicated but there should be more decency and respect to women shown in media, which is how the people behave after watching what they have seen.

Chickentikka, you are right that India is still very sexually repressed and backward but is the general audience, not as educated as you are, really ready for sexy scenes? I am afraid not and asking for more. What attracted Sunny Leone to come to Bollywood?

Ask the ladies, how they feel female is portrayed in India Cinema? Commodities for sale

ChickenTikka, I was highly impressed with your post until I read the P.S. I mean, damn! Where’d you get that ratio from?

Stereotyping from one of the best

The comment about 9 out of 10 delihites enjoying game rape is a well known off color joke. It’s not meant seriously. Think about it:

“Statistically speaking, 9 out of of 10 people enjoy gang rape.”

I think the India will progress only when large section of the society will get educated and informed. Only then can an effective democracy function and things can be set right. Currently the people in power have no incentive to ensure that ppl who indulge in these crimes are brought to book. They know that these issues do not affect the electorate who voted them to power, which are mainly uninformed rural folk.

The middle class in india hardly has any power when it comes the affecting the results of an election. So we see issues like cash transfers, reservation, opposition to foreign investment and other populist measures hog the limelight in our parliament, unlike say infrastructure development, education etc. which might actually help the country in the long run.

To give an insight, sometime back an Indian news channel interviewed a road side hawker near Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. (As a background this was the area where large anti corruption protests had taken place, mostly organised through the social media similar to the protests taking place currently) So he was asked whom will he vote for in the next election. He replied that he will vote for Mulayam Singh Yadav (not a particularly clean figure). When asked his reason for doing so he said “He is a Yadav and I am a Yadav too”. (Yadav is a caste) If this is the thinking of the uneducated in our cities who actually see mass protests in front of their eyes, one can only imagine what would be the process by which leaders are elected in the villages.

So only when the benifits of education and internet percolate deep into the indian society will we see any change in the current scenario. Hopefully another 20 years.

Blaming this on item numbers is one of the less intelligent things I’ve heard in awhile.

and that after the misunderstood mayan apocalypse…tsk tsk tsk

I can usually laugh at some pretty sick jokes, but this one… pushes it. Trying to remain polite ‘cause I respect ChickenTikka quite a bit from his other posts. Never mind. I’m interested in knowing other AF veterans’ views on this thread. I like the way they can analytically discuss a matter. Care to drop in your two cents, BS, numi, and all?

Quick question about castes in India. Are there physical differences among people from each caste (e.g., skin tone, height, face features) so you can determine someone’s caste based on his looks, or is it based on someone’s family / place of birth?

Like Tikka I’m happy that this is getting people pissed off, pretty much everyday in TOI you can read about woman, girl, or toddler raped, gang raped, or my favorite, “stripped naked and paraded”, while Indian society collectively pretends it doesn’t happen. In that regard this can be seen as a tipping point, much like Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Libya.

OTOH I’m afraid this attitude of treating women like s–t is only going to set India up for western style femmenazism. Over the last few years, as CT noted, as india’s wealth has increased, gaining more respect from capitalist elements in the West, the hardcore liberal feminist types have gotten very critical of India.

It’s not really that easy to tell based purely on physical appearance. Usually, language, customs, economic status, last name are more indicative. Sometimes you can, most fair-skinned people are usually higher in caste, but high caste individuals can be darker skinned too.

I don’t think caste can be fully determined by skin color. However, I believe if you are a certain skin color, that precludes you from being a member of certain castes that mostly have the other skin color. (Someone, please correct me if this is wrong).

Anyway… people have been raping other people forever. The Mongols did not have Bollywood movies, but they basically raped everyone. Incidents like this happen when society is absent or fails to do its job, not when society-created elements, like dance-inspired fantasy, manifest.

The only reliable way to guess ones caste is through their last names. maybe upper castes have a higher proportion of fairer skinned people but i think thats more a function of which part of the country one comes from. for example almost every one in south india has a darker skintone.

caste was basically your profession.

brahmin-priests,educated top of the pile

kshatriyas-warrioirs

vaishyas-traders

shudras-servants

untouchables

each of those will probably have about 100 subdivisions.for example someone with a certain surname might be a sweetmaker and that’s it that would have been his destiny.

the system has been dismantled completely and it’s illegal and anyone playing the caste card is just a lazy bastard.however because a large portion of this country is still under-literate(lot of people drop out of school at grade 9 etc to supplement the family income) the caste system is exploited for votes etc.

it’s changing though.for the first time we have 2-3 leaders who might get elected at central level who have a clear vision of where this country should go.

i think we came to international attention a decade too early and that’s why people struggle to understand how this place can be the future.

to your original question-there might mave been.not anymore.you can tell which part of india they’re from based on their looks,skin tone etc but not their caste.and that’s also guesswork because the tamil’s are generally the darkest (apparently might even have negroid blood) and some of them are pretty fair

back on topic-it’s unbeilevably sad what happened and may she RIP.hopefully something good will come out of this and we’ll see meaningful change