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.

Back in my favorite school, Teachers’ Day had two specialties. One was that a few senior students took the roles of teachers by dressing like them, talking like them, and teaching their lessons in classes, while the teachers themselves took the day off from teaching and roamed around the school hanging out and having fun. The other was that students recited something about Teachers’ Day, which inevitably meant a banal biographic sketch of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Not once was the significance of teachers itself brought up. It was possibly taken for granted.

After reaching college and especially since joining a job, I realized how rare it is to find a good teacher or mentor. It isn’t a terrible thing because adults are hoped to be capable of learning from everywhere without the need for dedicated teachers, but that doesn’t make up for their absence. That value particularly in school environments is reminded to me today by wonderful teachers like Kate Nowak and her friends who blog, and my own school teachers who are becoming more net-savvy.

But this is not about likeable teachers, beautiful teachers, good teachers, or popular teachers.

Once in 6^th standard and once in 7^th, two of my teachers came to know that I called them fat. Those remarks caused them pain and humiliation, though my rudeness was innocent and not malicious. Between 9^th standard and the second year of Intermediate I developed an indifference and even condescension for several of my teachers, feeling sure that their teaching methods were inferior to my previous teachers’ and even that I knew more and better than them. I was 18 the last time I made fun of a teacher. After many years I still remember those moments of madness. Most students laughed at the teacher among themselves, but I was the only wretched one who had the gall to make fun of him in a room full of students. He didn’t seem to notice. May be he did but ignored it. I am thankful either way.

I am thankful for all those teachers that I didn’t like, or respect even when I didn’t dislike them. I continue to have my differences about various incidents, test scores, teaching methods, and continue to reminisce about how students make fun of teachers, but I call truce. To walk into classrooms filled with unusually curious and conniving kids day after day, to attempt to take control of them, to care for them, and to teach them so that one day they might reach higher than themselves is noble, courageous and altruistic. Given their own ordinariness and the students’ diverse backgrounds and behaviors they must have strived to be impartial, to rise above their own prejudices, to wish everybody’s greatest possible success, and to work for that possibility.

There are many people who continue to function even when they hate their jobs. But given the thanklessness and low wages, I wonder whether teaching is one of the few professions which its practitioners have to like, in its various dimensions.

Since the day I decided to write, now is the longest period when I think the least about writing. Today I neither dream of becoming a full-time writer, nor write as much as I used to. Friends are always considerate to not point out that I may have gotten over her it. They ask. What are you writing these days? Why aren’t you writing much these days? Well, if that is what you want. If that makes you happy.

I started blogging nearly seven years ago. Back then and for a long time after, all writing was a form of unwinding. My catharsis was the reader’s ennui. For a while I wrote regularly and walked coolly in a sense of underachievement, certainty of knowledge (or ignorance), precocious wisdom and occasional anger, like a misunderstood rock star. I got interested in fiction because I thought I could — or wanted to — write as well as the writers I read. I thought I knew the whats, hows, whys. I was taking courses. Certainty was another keyword. A little later I stumbled upon professional tech-blogging (neither professional nor tech), writing regularly and earning on the side. It started with a sense of discipline, ended with a sense of monotony, and occasionally haunts me with a guilt of content farming. Somewhere in between, I wrote to my mentor that if I quit the day job (which I actually enjoyed) I will have more reasons (like starvation, I suppose) to force myself to write, and I discussed options and other trivial things with close family and friends. I am glad I wasn’t ready to star in love stories with great class differences and glorious endings.

I didn’t ask until much later: to be a writer or to write? I can’t always tell when I am lying to myself. Still I thought I’ll just write. Mail, blog, review, criticize, critique. I continued being verbose in mails and their replies, blogged this and that less and less, and passionately wrote scathing reviews when I didn’t like what I read or watched.

I got picky with the books I read and the movies I watch. I got lucky and stumbled upon blogs by activists, artists, critics, economists, linguists, mathematicians, mavericks, moms, poets, satirists, sociologists, sysadmins, teachers, and writers. They all collectively mellowed me down and filled my mind with questions, uncertainty and ambiquity. Whereas earlier the question was the choice of point of view, fiction being the only way and first person being the pen’s pet, now the questions multiplied and zoomed out. Short fiction or long? Fiction or nonfiction? Writing or other art forms? Why and how?

No longer is it a mission to publish, I told myself. If you want to write, write. Write without the fear of coherence or completion, rhyme or rules, sense or sensitivity. Let the mind look under the bed and above the attic and that damp dark smelly corner that you were afraid to probe because you didn’t want to get caught. I guarantee you a place where the mind is without fear, if you promise to not ask what happens to what you write.

I sold it. I bought it. That is not to say I wrote much after that, or at all. May be a paragraph here, a broken sentence there, and one or two other things whose future I don’t know. When I knew that what I write might not necessarily be publicly posted, my reasons to write changed. A desire to say something now has a higher mortality rate, a craving more often remains private. There is a difference between expressing an opinion (me too) and that opinion meriting publishing and publicity. The biggest contribution has been an embargo on empty and snarky reviews.

Sometime ago, on BBC or was it NPR, I listened to a wonderful panel discussion on the role and the art of criticism. It singularly influenced on what I think of this subject, and to an extent all writing. As incredibly fun and surprisingly satisfying bashing something for what I think is wrong can be, while also smudging the something with someone and the wrong with stupid, I am getting picky there as well. On the occasional instances when I let myself to freely unleash such wrath, the mission as I said is not to publish. They may be left as drafts or private posts. I don’t question that decision.

Last week I deleted a story for the first time. A friend asked why anybody would do such a thing instead of, say, striking it, zipping it, anonymizing it, and leaving it in a hidden folder. He has a point. The reason why I don’t go back to some of my old posts and delete them or at least mutilate them is because they are a reminder of my thoughts and beliefs, however militantly opposed I may be to those today. But this time I judged the story as uninteresting as well as worthless, and the act of cruelty felt liberating, though not on the scale that Mother India may have felt when she killed Bad Birju. My stand on posthumous works remains unaltered.

P.S. My first short story was published six years ago.

Visiting a beach doesn’t feature on my fun-to-do list. I can’t stand it; the noisy crowds shouting over the roaring boat engines, the thick smell of marine life that I could never taste, the sticky atmosphere and the sand that falls off on reaching indoors. But I’ve had my share of experiences on sea shores.

During my college days I once watched the sun rise above the thick curtain of sea at the Besant Nagar beach. I can’t now remember the colors and shapes, though there were many, that came into being along the end where the sun and the sea merged. I can’t remember the sounds of the calm sea and the birds swimming across the sky. I can’t remember anything specific about that morning, except that it felt inexplicably humbling. By nature I stay as far from nature as artificial food flavors in densely populated smoggy cities can take me, and I seldom feel humble.

Four years ago I visited a few beaches in Goa, and stayed for a few days within walking distance of a private beach. I clicked a hundred photos of specimens of the flora and fauna surviving close to the sea, paying little attention to what they looked like. I was so deeply engrossed in finding new things, what seemed to my inexperienced eyes as new, that I was in that state of bliss that one finds in when lost in something that has no known personal significance and is done for no specific reason. Never again have I tried to look at those photos, let alone find out what they represented. I am devoid of such curiosity.

Six months ago I walked along the shore a little away from my group singing on top of my lungs, escaping the waves reaching my feet, and occasionally staring distastefully at the crowds. As the crowds fell out of our sight the concept of privacy leapt to the forefront of my mind. I had been unhappy with man’s increasing craving for privacy as well as security, and suddenly wondered how it applies to the sea. Man has interminally plundered the mighty vast sea, constantly threatening its sense of security and balance if it could be attributed any. And where could the sea ever feel a sense of privacy, with every square inch of coastal land colonized by civilization? The thought itself is nonsensical. At that time I also asked myself why the waves never stop, a doubt that I had never truly considered. Thankfully it didn’t seem more difficult than understanding the ripples and splashes in a busy swimming pool. Sometimes pools spill over the surrounding platforms with a helpless vengeance.

A week ago I visited the sea again. Once during the wee hours. There were few lights flickering afar, and no other human in sight. The restless sea shone in the moonlight, and its whispers were audible at last. First it was the color that caught my attention, an ominous silver that conjured in my mind a phantasmagoria of heinous crimes and natural disasters. As we walked closer I noticed that the sea was receding. This is a phenomenon that I had not paid attention to in school, and as my companions explained it the sea held my breath the way the moon held the sea’s. I remembered the notices that I had read in college mentioning some students visiting the beach by the night and never returning, unlike the sea. I was aware of the damp sand we walked on all over the land that had been impulsively abandoned. I couldn’t smell anything; no complaint. The sea was chaotically noisy, frothing around the corners of its mouth, and no doubt imagining the moon giggling. We didn’t walk as far as the edge, but I never took my eyes off, well aware of my heightened pulse. As I stared into it, I think I pitied the mighty vast sea for its violently devoted frivolity, that it could become so enslaved by a distant little circle for a few hours every day. I wish I had petted it and consoled it, and may be even tried to impart some wisdom. I thought I knew what the sea was going through.