DISCLAIMER: I am not an expert on any of the subjects discussed in this post.
NOTE: Many hyperlinks in this post refer PDF documents.

I am impressed by the amount of information the National Crime Records Bureau is sharing online. It recently released the annual report Crime in India 2010. Main documents Compendium2010 and Statistics2010 together contain about 650 pages. In the future I hope NCRB becomes more user-friendly, in formatting its report and more importantly in giving granular access to drill down every other way. I also hope we will have our own National Crime Victimization Survey (if we don’t already), with at least this level of information sharing. It is useful.

When the latest report was released, various news media outlets dutifully poured outrage and spread FUD. One such attempt that was most circulated among my circles was TOI’s take that rapes are rising fastest among major crimes. My fact-finding showed a different picture, so I wanted to clarify a few things that I wish the reporter (Subodh Varma, TNN) had.

Incidents of rape in the country have increased by a staggering 792% over the past nearly 40 years.

This nugget came from the 2nd page of Snapshots-5310. It is an absolute increase in the number of cases reported.

…compared to all cognizable crimes…

What do you think are cognizable crimes? Definition in Compendium2010 (p15): “A cognizable offence or case is defined as the one which an officer in-charge of a police station may investigate without the order of a magistrate and affect arrest without warrant. The police has a direct responsibility to take immediate action on the receipt of a complaint or of credible information in such crimes, visit the scene of the crime, investigate the facts, apprehend the offender and arraign him before a court of law having jurisdiction over the matter.”

Experts believe that while some of this jaw-dropping rise could be explained by increased reporting as awareness has grown among victims and families, the scale of increase undoubtedly reflects increasing violence against women in society.

The age-old classic trick of inferring an undoubted reflection by referring to non-existent people and data. The experts weren’t specified, so I failed to get any information from them. NCRB statistics don’t throw light on all factors. To be fair that is probably not their job. A few factors that matter:

• Gender: Increasingly there are studies on the genders of rape victims. But the current definition as per IPC probably does not have that complexity, so let me ignore this for a moment. However I request knowledgeable people to clarify the latest definition, outraged ones to make noise about the obsolete definition, and lawmakers to take note.
• Population: India has seen a notable growth in population since 1971. It also has been dealing with serious problems and significant plans related to a balanced sex ratio. So considering women population makes more sense to me (for the moment), even though crime incidence rates are usually calculated as number of reported cases per 100,000 population even for rape cases.
• Records: As mentioned in its Message, NCRB prepares the annual report based on the data sent by “State Governments and UT Administrations and Heads of various law enforcement agencies” within a deadline. I don’t know how the data submitted after this deadline is adjusted for in the next report, and what incentives the local police stations have in prompt submissions. I am guessing that records keeping and submissions are not “automatic”. If these two aspects have improved since 1971, which is a good thing and not an unreasonable possibility, they will have resulted in larger numbers with time. I request knowledgeable people to clarify about records keeping and submissions over the years, outraged ones to make noise about their quality, and bureaucrats to take note.
• Victims per Case: Table-5.3 in Statistics2010 (p395) implies that it is possible that a case can have more than one victim. Considering the number of victims instead of cases makes more sense to me, especially after reading about the infamous Vachathi case.
• Reporting Rates: Think about the last accident you witnessed and the last time you lost some cash, and you will have a basic idea why not all crimes get reported. Crimes of rape and sexual assault are infinitely more complex, and many studies across countries claim that they are one of the most under reported (unreported) crimes. Various sources online suggest that reporting rates have increased over the decades, but I couldn’t find reliable data showing trends over a period in any countries. I request knowledgeable people to point me to any studies, outraged ones to make noise about the need for greater awareness and better victimization studies, and sponsors to take note.

To make indubitable references on how much more or less dangerous a society has become for women, we need actual data along with expert opinions. (That is not to say we should stop asking for the situation to improve.) Taking only population and sex ratio into consideration, I have the below table*:

* The population and sex ratio figures are from respective documents shared by Census India and its 2011 dashboard. Reported Rapes are from NCRB’s 1953-2010.

This eight-fold increase is

no longer an eight-fold increase. To show how sensitive ratios can be, let me illustrate with an example using one more factor. Suppose that the reporting rate was x% in 1971 and y% in 2010-11. Then the adjusted incidence rates would become 942/x in 1971 and 3791/y in 2010-11. Now that’s an (4.02x/y)–fold increase. If the reporting rate increased from 10% in 1971 to 30% in 2010-11, that would be a 1.34-fold increase. If the reporting rate increased from 5% in 1971 to 20% in 2010-11, that would be negligible increase. Mind you, this is hypothetical and I am considering just one additional factor.

Moving on.

Maintaining a trend which has existed for several years, almost 97% of the rapes were committed by persons known to the victim with about 7% committed by family members and 35% by neighbours.

I could find no data or even a passing inference to such a trend in the NCRB report. The TOI reporter or his experts may have. The figures about “committing” and the definition of “family members” are imaginative. One paragraph in Compendium2010 (p83), however, contains the following two sentences: “Offenders were known to the victims in as many as 21,566 (97.3%) cases. Parents/close family members were involved in 1.3% (288 out of 21,566) of these cases, neighbours were involved in 36.2% cases (7,816 out of 21,566) and relatives were involved in 6.2% (1,344 out of 21,566) cases.”

Back to how dangerous our society is to women.

Rape is not the one danger to women and India is not one society. There are other violent crimes, including deaths from dowry and sati; other crimes against women, including harassment and importation. Their incidences vary across states, cities, villages, demographic categories. We need more awareness in all aspects of these issues among everybody, including men.

For actions and activism to be effective, we need as clear and complete a picture as possible. Not hyperbole. We are not using all available data, and we don’t have as much data as needed. We should. This is as good a time as any other to make noise about these things.

A RAINN would be good too.

P.S. People might be interested in this UNODC document related to sexual violence. Remember that the incidence rates there are calculated per 100,000 population and not 100,000 females.

I am drawn to themes of crime, especially law and order and justice. Almost half of what I read is crime fiction. I like books and movies with police procedurals at least as much as suspense and detective fiction. I occasionally spend hours reading about true crime cases and investigations. I realized that I even prefer games with these themes (especially in a noir setting) far more than, say, war games.

The charm of the Police is easy to fall for. Whereas a soldier may be a national hero to one country and a national enemy to another, and therefore his or her roles and acts inherently ambiguous, a policeman on the other hand is a social character with clear goals. The Police face a problem that can be attempted to be controlled but not eliminated from a non-dystopian society. (I subscribe to the views I found resonant in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.)

I like and think about these themes more than I intend to discuss about right here and right now. Instead I will get verbose about various ways in which the Police are difficult to like in the Indian society.

పొలీసాడు గడప తొక్కాడు. A policeman entered the house.

That is how my mom described the worst damage from a major fire accident in our house some months ago. It is a sentence that occasionally rings in my mind with deep sadness. I am not sure if my parents got some శాంతి done to counter that evil, though I won’t be surprised.

On 15^th August, 2011, when I and my dad were in a shop that made and fit frames, a policeman entered the shop. The setting was fraught with tension because on national holidays, according to some labor law, owners of all non-emergency enterprises should disallow workers from working. The shop owner knew it, and was conducting business with the shutters half pulled down. The policeman knew it, I guess because it’s a big day for him in terms of wages as well as catching law-breakers. But the policeman came with a portrait to get it framed. His opening remarks were about some senior policeman who never pays for anything, and how he himself was not like that and thus deserved a decent discount. The shop owner spoke his mind, including not so subtle hints that the Police are always fleecing small businessmen even on Independence Day, and the policeman got more aggressive and started cursing.

There are a few other memories as an adult. Like when a friend’s house was burgled (twice), the investigating policeman suggested that an FIR would be useless because burglaries get little priority compared to cases involving violence. Of course, cases without FIRs get no priority. Or like when the investigating policeman of a murder case I was acquainted with gave a press statement in which he said that the victim was a vegetarian and the accused/suspect was a non-vegetarian. That apparently was a crucial psychological profiling in the case. Or like when a policeman once visited me in a hospital to take an FIR about the accident where no second party was involved, and collect some mandatory payment, without a receipt, of course. Every time I got pulled over by a traffic cop – at least 4 times – my only instinct was to pay the fine and flee as quickly as possible, trying not to look him in the eye. It was as if even their presence could reduce my lifespan, apart from the ignominy of standing a few feet away from them.

It is a norm for the Police to charge some fees during verification as part of a passport application, just like the postmen do. In college days, most moms used to warn us never to go to the police station all alone for this verification and to never haggle with them (unlike while buying vegetables and groceries). I know many people who consider visiting a police station to be unfortunate and dangerous.

In one of the schools that I studied in, about half the students in my class were children of policemen. We were very young, so I never heard any police stories (except that one fellow’s father worked in some intelligence department), but there were stories about one father belting a child and another father kicking a child from behind and another father locking up a child in the bathroom. These were very few and spread over five years, but they still created an impression that police parents are in general stricter, almost cruel. Unlike doctors’ children becoming doctors, CAs’ children becoming CAs, everybody else becoming engineers, nobody became a policeman. Nobody does.

Probably my first memory about the Police was from when I was seven years old. I and my brother were sitting at the entrance of a jewelry shop while my parents were shopping inside. A police jeep stopped outside the shop, and from it a man and an old woman got down. The jeep went ahead to park somewhere on the roadside. The man, wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers, sat beside me while the woman went inside the shop. The man started small talk, with questions about our names, classes, and then my dad’s job (మీ నాయనేం చేస్తాడు?). My dad wasn’t a policeman. The man talked about how the Police are the most respected, pointing how even their mothers got attention from total strangers. Even at such a small age I could see that what he said was totally not right.

These are a sample from nearly twenty years of memories. But in all my life there isn’t a single instance where the Police could be seen in a positive light. If there was any, my mind successfully suppressed it. The only applicable adjectives are cheap, corrupt, cruel, fearsome. The Police are the boogeymen for children and adults alike.

Indian Police have a major image management issue. This is also true about politicians, bureaucrats, increasingly people in judiciary, and probably all public sector fields. But I think the contrast is clearer when the Police are considered. Such an image will create problems in their recruitment and day-to-day operations.

I don’t track the movies I watch as diligently as I track the books I read. It possibly means that I don’t care as much about what I watch, about how I spend that aspect of my time, watching being more passive than reading. That is alarming. IMDB, Bigflix and a scrap book suggest the number in 2010 to be in the whereabouts of 100. Despite the large number, very few of them were thoughtless tripe picked only because they were there. Below are a few memorable ones, and not all are strictly movies.

PIFF 2010: 16 movies. I wrote about three of them. I realized while reviewing old notes that nearly half of them had a rape victim and more than half of them dealt with the abuse of important female character(s). Among those that I haven’t written about I call out the Romanian satire The Happiest Girl in the World. Only few movies were very ordinary and disappointing, but the overall experience was below that of PIFF 2009 for reasons beyond PIFF. What I like the most about PIFF (or any film festival), unlike the regular theatre-going, is the privilege to escape a national anthem, to watch a movie without the intervention of a censor board, and at times be a part of an audience and not just a fun-loving crowd. PIFF 2011 starts today.

Internet Movies: Early in 2010 I took the fancy of watching movies available legally on the Internet. Internet Archive, Openflix and Youtube Movies are good websites for such an endeavor. I watched a few decent movies this way before switching to Bigflix, which turned out be one of the best decisions I made last year.

Ingmar Bergman: I picked Bergman as the auteur to follow in 2010. Including the silence trilogy and Wild Strawberries I watched 7 of his movies, limited there by Bigflix’s collection. It is easy to become fond of his work. I hope to go to a Bergmanfest one day.

Sidney Lumet: Now is a good time to cheer for my favorite director. I became a fan of Lumet after watching 12 Angry Men and Network and then reading Making Movies. In 2010 I watched his Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Verdict. He also gave enlightening commentaries in all these DVDs, something that’s rare with directors. Given his prolific output I have a lot more to look forward to in the coming years.

Historical Significance: I touched upon ancient film history by watching Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Fritz Lang’s M and Metropolis. I can imagine how excellent those movies must have been in their times. Even today they aren’t boring though we’ve seen many things like those, inspired by those, better than those. I was especially impressed by M, both the movie and the titular character.

Boston Legal: I watched only the first season of this TV series (Bigflix limitations). It is hard to believe that it had to be cancelled. While the common reasons for its popularity are the cranky characters and the outrageous court scenes, I hold it special for showcasing the best portrayal of platonic love.

South Park: Season 14 wasn’t the best. I remain a fan for its ability to remind me of my hypocrisy and push my boundaries of humor.

TED Talks: After Google and Wikipedia, in 2010 TED outranked IMDB among my list of favorite websites. I must have watched more TED Talks than movies in 2010. Many of them twice. Several inspired me, some into action. Few changed the way I think.

Random Recommendations: These are many other movies that I remember vividly from 2010, and am thankful for watching them: Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg, Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Martin Scorsese’ Shutter Island, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan. I ended 2010 by rewatching Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, a movie that played a very important role in my life. A partial full list is here.

This year’s Google Zeitgeist carried its own surprises like it does every year. I digged a little deeper and found that Google Trends paints a very different picture of 2010. I could see the differences in the global page itself, but here I focus on India.

The “fastest rising” are debatable because they are not well-defined, but if “most popular” is more or less proportional to the volume of searches then I’m very suspicious. I am not sure what Google means when it says, “Our Year-End Zeitgeist is just a small sampling of the queries and search trends that we found interesting this year.” It will be interesting to know why Google found something interesting and something else not interesting.

In the below four tables, note that the Google Trends rankings I gave are mostly true to their order, but not universally accurate given my unscientific approach (random queries and sizing up as against Google’s access to its databases). I will let the data do the rest of the talking.

Most popular

Next 10: mobile, movies, yahoomail, gmail, yahoo, nokia, software, news, cricket, porn

Most popular movies

Next 10: rajneeti, dabangg

Most popular brands

Next 10: reliance, wikipedia, microsoft, vodafone, dell, honda, twitter, lg, maruti, micromax

Most popular how to

Rank	Google Zeitgeist 2010	Google Trends
1	get pregnant	download
2	kiss	change
3	impress (a girl)	get pregnant
4	improve spoken english	hack
5	reduce weight	learn
6	gain weight	love
7	tie a tie	copy
8	create a website	impress
9	make money	kiss
10	meditate	print

Next 10: win, buy, reduce weight, earn, lose weight, prevent, clean, make love, maintain, dance

My introduction to Veturi began with the ETV programme ఝుమ్మంది నాదం years ago. I was so overwhelmed with his repertoire that whenever I heard an interesting song – సరళమైనవి, లోతైనవి, చిలిపివి, గమ్మత్తైనవి, అద్భుతమైన భూతులున్నవి  – whose writer I didn’t know, I attributed it to him. I still do and I might continue to for songs written long after his death. It might be because even though he may have not written those songs, it seemed that he could easily have written them with his other hand while attending another mind-numbing awards ceremony.

After his recent death, I listened to a number of his songs hoping to transcribe another of those. I finally settled with ఝుమ్మంది నాదం itself. The music director with the first sound of percussion sends a wave through the legs, and by the time it climbs up the body the lyricist with his first word sets the heart aflutter.

I don’t understand the lyrics completely, but that never hindered my pulse from rising and my mind from dancing beside Jaya Prada and Chandra Mohan. I don’t think the picturization could capture as jubilantly as the words did the resonance of the atmospheric phenomena with the emotions inside the mute protagonist’s heart. ఎల తేటి రొద probably means the sounds in a tender coconut; I don’t know what లెస in కలిత కవిత లెస and విరుపు in నీ మేని విరుపు exactly mean.

చిత్రం: కె విశ్వనాథ్ గారి సిరి సిరి మువ్వ (1977)
రాసినది: వేటూరి సుందరరామ మూర్తి
కూర్చినది: కె వి మహదెవన్
పాడినది: ఎస్ పి బాలసుబ్రహ్మణ్యం, పి సుశీల

ఝుమ్మంది నాదం సయ్యంది పాదం
తనువూగింది ఈ వేళ
చెలరేగింది ఒక రాసలీల

యెదలోని సొదలా ఎల తేటి రొదలా
కదిలేటి నదిలా కలల వరదలా
చలిత లలిత పద కలిత కవిత లెస
సరిగమ పలికించగా
స్వరమధురిమ లొలికించగా
సిరిసిరి మువ్వలు పులకించగా

నటరాజ ప్రేయసి నటనాల ఊర్వసి
నటియించు నీవని తెలిసి
ఆకాశమై పొంగె ఆవేశం
కైలాసమే వంగె నీకోసం

మెరుపుంది నాలో; అది నీ మేని విరుపు
ఉరుముంది నాలో; అది నీ మువ్వ పిలుపు
చినుకు చినుకులో చిందు లయలతో
కురిసింది తొలకరి జల్లు
విరిసింది అందాల హరివిల్లు
ఈ పొంగులే ఏడు రంగులుగా

chitram: ke viSwanAth gAri siri siri muvva (1977)
rAsinadi: vETUri sundararAma mUrti
kUrchinadi: ke vi mahadevan
pADinadi: es pi bAlasubrahmaNyam, pi suSIla

jhummandi nAdam sayyandi pAdam
tanuvUgindi I vELa
chelarEgindi oka rAsalIla

yedalOni sodalA ela tETi rodalA
kadilETi nadilA kalala varadalA
chalita lalita pada kalita kavita lesa
sarigama palikinchagA
svaramadhurima lolikinchagA
sirisiri muvvalu pulakinchagA

naTarAja prEyasi naTanAla Urvasi
naTiyinchu nIvani telisi
aakASamai ponge AvESam
kailAsamE vange nIkOsam

merupundi nAlO; adi nI mEni virupu
urumundi nAlO; adi nI muvva pilupu
chinuku chinukulO chindu layalatO
kurisindi tolakari jallu
virisindi andAla harivillu
I pongulE EDu rangulugA