808, 807, 806, 805- Yes, you

-
 For the longest time,  I had thought that people who comment anonymously are people who are simply choosing to conceal their identity.  It's not like they are weak. But some time ago, there was someone or some people who posted something nasty and then said, "I know you will post something on anonymous commenters or someone like me so I won't come back." It's a little difficult to not consider that person chicken. And just so I understand, if you have commented anonymously and yet you are afraid of a backlash, what exactly did you accomplish?

When I was in college,  we had a symposium where Shabana Azmi, Kiran Bedi, and Flavia Agnes were the guest speakers. At the end of the lectures on rights to free speech and all that, the house was open for questions. The college had arranged for us to write our questions, without signing our names if we so wished, and have these conveyed to the judges. Then Shabana Azmi took the mike and said, "If you want to seriously get answers about rights and freedom, have the guts to stand up and ask the question. " Of course, not everyone who witheld was weak. They were just shy. I did not think earlier that the gutless commented anonymously. I have, after all, received some very generous anonymous comments also. But good or bad, somewhere I think there is a fear of being caught out. What are you so afraid of? Especially the snide, nasty commenters...what really are you so afraid of? You couldn't hide your resentment or your lack of courtesy or your viciousness. You only hid your name and thought that it masked your identity. And then scurried off pitifully.   That's why I have closed comments on the blog.  I am aware that the fake email ids will get made and all that to write and respond to this post.  But that's okay. I will do my bit to make it difficult for the cowards to speak up.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei...
Read more