Instances of moral policing in Bombay and Allahabad have come to light various a section of people have rounded up young couples while on their trysts in parks. In the latter case, video grabs showed even the police giving spot punishments to the 'guilty'(?).
Isn't this an instance of blatant infringement of an individual's personal freedom?
Moral policing gets to be highhandedness when it exceeds the limits of propriety, decency and the decorum. To those people who pose as vigilantes, I'd like to remind them of what Jesus Christ had said, "Let the one who hasn't sinned cast the first stone." And I'd like to ask them the following questions:-
(a) Who has given you the right to correct others?
(b) Would you like to be told 'not to do this or not to do that' by anyone that doesn't warm up
to your ideas?
(c) Why're you taking the law into your hands, which is a punishable offence by itself?
You might, then, ask as to what should be done to those people who misbehave in public places and do things that are not supposed to be done. Well, there are clear cut laws that are enshrined, that will take care of transgressions of any kind.
After past experiences, there's an element of fear on the occasion of Valentine's Day being celebrated. Though, I'm of the personal opinion that love can't be celebrated over a single day - it has to endure, that's what true love is all about, ain't it? - if a set of people want to do so, who gives me permission to obstruct or ridicule them? And by doing so, ain't I being a spoilsport? In a similar vein, I must quote my mom when some time back I'd enthusiastically made a long distance call to wish her a 'Happy Mother's Day.' Her retort was characteristically simple but unanswerable........"Son, do you mean to say that you only remember me on this one day?" I was left mumbling for an answer then and continue to do so, even now.
It's a practice in the west, during the 1970s with the advent of the hippie cult and the associated 'free living', many youngsters used to leave their homes rupturing the fabric of family ties forever. A few years into this life of 'unrestricted freedom', many of them must have realised their folly and yearned to get back to the family where they belonged. The Mother's day and the Father's day were the mechanisms to rekindle that fond thought.
India was never confronted with such a situation and many thought and continue to think that celebrating The Valentine's Day, The Father's Day or the Mother's Day is tantamount to a blind aping of the west as our culture was totally different, deeply rooted in well meaning traditions and customs!
....But with the proliferation of the nuclear families and living together, things are changing here, too...
But everyone has his/her own outlook towards things and that freedom needs to be provided/protected. There's no other way........the moral policing, therefore, needs to stop, here and now!
Tailpiece.
And this is what is enshrined in the immortal 'Gitanjali' of Rabindranath Tagore and I quote......
"Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls
When words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms
towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forever by thee
into ever widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake!
Isn't this an instance of blatant infringement of an individual's personal freedom?
Moral policing gets to be highhandedness when it exceeds the limits of propriety, decency and the decorum. To those people who pose as vigilantes, I'd like to remind them of what Jesus Christ had said, "Let the one who hasn't sinned cast the first stone." And I'd like to ask them the following questions:-
(a) Who has given you the right to correct others?
(b) Would you like to be told 'not to do this or not to do that' by anyone that doesn't warm up
to your ideas?
(c) Why're you taking the law into your hands, which is a punishable offence by itself?
You might, then, ask as to what should be done to those people who misbehave in public places and do things that are not supposed to be done. Well, there are clear cut laws that are enshrined, that will take care of transgressions of any kind.
After past experiences, there's an element of fear on the occasion of Valentine's Day being celebrated. Though, I'm of the personal opinion that love can't be celebrated over a single day - it has to endure, that's what true love is all about, ain't it? - if a set of people want to do so, who gives me permission to obstruct or ridicule them? And by doing so, ain't I being a spoilsport? In a similar vein, I must quote my mom when some time back I'd enthusiastically made a long distance call to wish her a 'Happy Mother's Day.' Her retort was characteristically simple but unanswerable........"Son, do you mean to say that you only remember me on this one day?" I was left mumbling for an answer then and continue to do so, even now.
It's a practice in the west, during the 1970s with the advent of the hippie cult and the associated 'free living', many youngsters used to leave their homes rupturing the fabric of family ties forever. A few years into this life of 'unrestricted freedom', many of them must have realised their folly and yearned to get back to the family where they belonged. The Mother's day and the Father's day were the mechanisms to rekindle that fond thought.
India was never confronted with such a situation and many thought and continue to think that celebrating The Valentine's Day, The Father's Day or the Mother's Day is tantamount to a blind aping of the west as our culture was totally different, deeply rooted in well meaning traditions and customs!
....But with the proliferation of the nuclear families and living together, things are changing here, too...
But everyone has his/her own outlook towards things and that freedom needs to be provided/protected. There's no other way........the moral policing, therefore, needs to stop, here and now!
Tailpiece.
And this is what is enshrined in the immortal 'Gitanjali' of Rabindranath Tagore and I quote......
"Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls
When words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms
towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forever by thee
into ever widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake!
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