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.

To the Editor:

There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think. That time is coming to an end. During the decades of the Cold War, in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, it was the serious writers who were expelled from literature; now, in America, it is literature that has been expelled as a serious influence on how life is perceived. The predominant uses to which literature is now put in the culture pages of the enlightened newspapers and in university English departments are so destructively at odds with the aims of imaginative writing, as well as the rewards that literature affords an open-minded reader, that it would be better if literature were no longer put to any public use.

Your paper’s cultural journalism – the more of it there is, the worse it gets. As soon as one enters into the ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism of cultural journalism, the essence of the artifact is lost. Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in “the arts”, and everything it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet? Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the literary imagination, cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical issues: “Does the writer have the right to blah-blah-blah?” It is hypersensitive to the invasion of privacy perpetrated by literature over the millennia, while maniacally dedicated to exposing in print, unfictionalized, whose privacy has been invaded and how. One is struck by the regard cultural journalists have for the barriers of privacy when it comes to the novel.

Hemingway’s early stories are set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so your journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they’re easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than fiction. The integrity of the journalist’s informant is never questioned – only the integrity of the writer. The writer works alone for years on end, stakes his or her everything on the writing, pores over every sentence sixty-two times, and yet is without any sort of overriding literary consciousness, understanding, or goal. Everything the writer builds, meticulously, phrase by phrase and detail by detail is a ruse and a lie. The writer is without any literary motive. Any interest in depicting reality is nil. The writer’s guiding motives are always personal and generally low.

And this knowledge comes as a comfort, for it turns out not only are these writers not superior to the rest of us, as they pretend to be – they are worse than the rest of us. Those terrible geniuses!

The way in which serious fiction escapes paraphrase and description – hence requiring thought – is a nuisance to your cultural journalist. Only its imagined sources are to be taken seriously, only that fiction, the lazy journalist’s fiction. The original nature of the imagination in those early Hemingway stories (an imagination that in a handful of pages transformed the short story and American prose) is comprehensible to your cultural journalist, whose own writing turns our honest English words into nonsense. If you told a journalist, “Look inward at the story only,” he wouldn’t have a thing to say. Imagination? There is no imagination. Literature? There is no literature. All the exquisite parts – even the not so exquisite parts – disappear, and there are only those people whose feelings are hurt because of what Hemingway did to them. Did Hemingway have the right …? Does any author have the right …? Sensationalist cultural journalism masquerading as a responsible newspaper’s devotion to “the arts”.

If I had something like Stalin’s power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I’d forbid all public discussions of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals. I’d forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college, and university in the country. I’d outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare to speak one another. I’d leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own. I’d do this for as many centuries as are required to detoxify the society of your poisonous nonsense.

– Amy Bellette/E. I. Lonoff

The above letter has been stripped out of context from Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost without permission.

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

While fretting over some stupid business since a fortnight, I grossly neglected significant issues of national importance. The current one apparently is made up of headlines with Modi and Tharoor’s names and a voluptuous model’s pin-ups. I am yet to catch up with that, but an acquaintance this afternoon summarized briefly the current concluding issue about apnI deSkI bETIkI shAdI.

As the acquaintance so subtly put it, “<long beep>, isko IndiasE nikAldenA hain”. People joined both sides and a lukewarm debate ensued, and even though I never benefited from her forehand strokes I took to her defence. I have offended some people during the debate, and as always it gave me immense pleasure.

Here is a biased MOM briefly describing a few points discussed:

1. She’s what she is because of India.
A. Is it? Because India apparently paid for her success and fortune, at least after she won the 2003 Wimbledon Championships Girl’s Doubles title? Keep it aside for a moment. Take yourself, a person who somehow found a decent job. Your company pays your salary, which is most of the money or fortune you make, which is the means of your (and maybe your family’s) prosperity. It also occasionally pays for your “career development”. Are you what you are because of your company, and even if you were does it give your company to dictate your choices? What she and “India” have is mostly a business relationship, which has so far been acceptable for both parties.

2. Couldn’t she find one deserving man from all of India?
A. People in love, people who get married, etc. don’t do an exhaustive search of the universal set. They come across a person, hopefully find that person interesting (depending on factors like money, looks, sensitivity, sense of humor, intelligence, cup sizes, penile lengths and other strengths), tell themselves and anybody who listens to them that they have found the person they have been looking for, and get together. It doesn’t mean that they have done an exhaustive search, which is unrealistic and something most people wouldn’t want to do. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the population is undeserving, and for that matter the word “deserving” here is meaningless on the grounds that it is undefinable or at least remains undefined. It also doesn’t mean that they have found the person they have been looking for, but I’m digressing.

3. It’s okay with anybody except a Pakistani.
A. Oh! you are the one to decide who all it is “okay” with for someone you haven’t met nor have any interest beyond her short skirts and navel rings? And imagine injecting that clause “except a Pakistani” into a villain’s dialogue in a movie of national integration. How have you felt then? It may be nothing more than a movie, and you are nothing more than an Indian Pakistani-hating stereotype. I read a definition this morning. One-shot case study, n.: The scientific equivalent of the four-leaf clover, from which it is concluded that all clovers possess four leaves and are sometimes green.

4. It is not her individual preference because she’s a celebrity.
A. On the contrary, being a celebrity gives a person more strength to exercise individual preference, at the cost of some sacrifices. What is the use of gaining that power if one doesn’t exercise it? Celebrity or not, which hole a person lives in and which hole a person plugs his or her tools into is nobody’s business except the person’s and the hole’s owner’s. On the other hand, a celebrity running over pedestrians may be an individual preference but as it violates the pedestrians’ preference it is to be condemned, at least discouraged.

5. India needs a sports icon. What if she gets pressurised from his side to start playing for Pakistan?
A. a) I don’t understand the need for sports icons, and recommend you to read this counterpoint. b) See image below and also try the exercise by yourself. I’m glad that wiki is at least ranked 7th among the search suggestions, and I hope you see the point about the nature of people’s interest in that sports icon. I speculate that more Indians may have downloaded her wallpapers than have watched her Tennis matches.

6. If she were from Pakistan and he from India, the Pakistanis would have massacred both families.
A. I read a definition this morning, and I already mentioned it above. Also, somebody doing something irrational doesn’t mean that you should join them. Nevertheless, I understand the temptation.

7. India gives so many benefits to its citizens.
A. Pray tell, what exactly are those benefits? And how do they compare with other countries? There is nothing wrong for a person to move to a country which appears more beneficial. It is not very different from people shifting houses.

8. Tell me anything but my conscience just cannot accept it.
A. You will get over it. You may continue to live irrationally, but a lot of people including yours truly live that way, and die largely of natural causes.

9. What about the woman who got cheated and divorced?
A. One valid question, for the whole issue doesn’t seem to me of national importance but more of an alleged fraud. You tell me. I know nothing about the case. If she got cheated, it appears that it isn’t the celebrity in question but her husband who may have cheated her. If there has been a divorce, I am guessing there was some settlement. Whatever, I sincerely hope that the fat lady got justice.

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I have never been the voracious reader that I present myself as. I began reading very late in life and I remain a slow reader. In the best months I may read four books, but in most months I manage one. I am not in the numbers game. I simply wish to read more than I do. There are so many great books that I have not read and will never be able to read. Those books which I have always wanted to read, which I sincerely promise myself to read some day, and which I postpone knowing well their exalted position in the history of literature and in my own wishlist, I collect and keep them aside as classics. Today I am brimming with new hope. I made one of my best discoveries of the new year — audiobooks.

I have never been very particular about preserving the sanctity of a book in its traditional form. It is reassuring that they continue to exist, whether as hardcovers or paperbacks or e-books or audiobooks or multimedia or future superformats. The forms and formats will come and go based on their ergonomic and economic viability. I hope for not much more than to find them agreeable.

I have largely survived on paperbacks and e-books while ignoring audiobooks until last year citing numerous excuses that I can instantly cook. Exactly a year ago I got my hands on a pre-release of the audio version of the recent Who is Mark Twain? It sat there in one of the folders of my PC ignoring me with greater snobbery than I am capable of. The atmosphere changed this year. I have already listened to Who is Mark Twain?, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and Walden. I am now listening to James Joyce’ Dubliners. There are many more in the pipeline.

Listening isn’t the same as reading. Nothing comes close to the pleasure of sitting on a toilet and leafing through a splendid story in the dead of the night. Perhaps due to my inexperience, when listening to audiobooks I can’t very well see the words dancing on a page nor observe the linguistic experiments. Still, I prefer that to not reading at all. And while commuting they are better than reading itself. Reading is strenuous when traveling by train, and is not enough to escape from the inanities waiting in adjacent berths. Listening to audiobooks, on the other hand, presents a pretty picture of voluntary deafness and youthful snobbishness.

I may unintentionally be violating copyrights, as I haven’t yet figured out how to verify copyright status of books, especially audiobooks, inside India. I mostly download the audiobooks from LibriVox. It is a beautiful sister site of the ambitious Internet Archive. If you are its user, consider dropping some change in their jar.

If you’ve never tried an audiobook, do.

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