Readers Write In #673: Can we manifest an earth bereft of rapes?

By Neerajaa Raghuraman

Who gives us the right to harm another human being or even touch them without their consent? Be it a 5 year old or 50 year old,every being has the whole grand right to lead a free life as you do, with all due regards.

I strongly feel the glorification and normalisation of alcoholism,smoking and drugs in movies and in the society at large, is definitely contributing to such self-aggrandizing behaviour by certain people.

With more and more of such representations, it is as if life without vices is not possible and sober people and tea-totallers are losing out on something,are being backward,and are not living life in its full glory.

Rather its a definite possibility that they have other important things to do that makes them and people they love really happy. By happiness,I mean joy, and not pleasure;they embrace self-love and not self-obsession.

By engaging in one or the other pleasurable adronogenic activity compulsively,you are forced to face the tapering of such highs,such highs have very bad lows, and during the lows, you have to somehow face reality. Reality sucks for almost everybody succumbing to the matrix and the societal rat-race but more so when you return from a la-la land of false bliss, reality sucks even more. And so you search for the next escape route. And by the law of diminishing marginal utility, you now need more of what you were already engaging in, or a different, more intense,more extreme form of indulgence to fully exile from reality.

When it becomes a routine to succumb to your mind when it asks for pleasures,the mind begins enslave you to its whims. And there comes a point where harming another human being to satiate your mind’s demands becomes okay. Because you have gone a long way to somehow pleasure your mind and things that could do so are getting exhausted one by one,you become like a hungry animal searching for its prey. You go back in evolution.

So, what is the solution?

Man is a social animal, yes; but we should always remember that the society and the rules that we so ceremoniously follow were created by set of similar human beings like us, only for our convenience. Civilisations were created because people could have a blue print of how they might conveniently lead a life with accessibility to food clothing and shelter. And that’s all. All the other feathers added to the cap post the medieval period are mere non-sense. I mean we need not be any rigid about what is being laid in front of us. It’s okay to be how you want to lead your lives, even if its not what the societal blueprint says. Remember its only a blueprint, a guiding principle not a rule book.

Start listening to your heart. What makes you really happy. What makes you smile with content at how life is unfolding. What makes you grateful. What makes you feel you have made a positive difference in other people’s lives.

When you live daily life giving you the joy that the high of a coke gives, with a happiness that has no opposites,every day is party day.

There will be more emphasis on loving inclusive behaviours towards other human beings (in the place of normalised potrayals of public hatred and rage towards others) because you are acting from a place of a filled heart,you accept people with their limitations, you realise that everybody is as conditioned as you are, it is only situations and certain behaviours that are wronged not people as such, everybody does what feels best for them at that point of time and what flows from an already full cup always makes a difference. You have a large heart with which you forgive forget, trust and love, and make this earth a better place to live in. Today better than yesterday. Baby steps.