Frankensteins of our making…
Let us all agree that we are a populace with questionable mental health. We hear and read of mass shootings and other acts of violence around us and I won’t go into the statistical detail of it all. A Google search will pretty much be explanatory. I am here to address the humanitarian aspect of it.
If you care to read a little bit about it you will realize that most mass shooters plan their attack weeks in advance before executing it. They show several stressors in their daily life and a myriad of concerning behaviors before they go all out to seek vengeance for some real or perceived injustice. Many victims are purposeful targets while a similar number are one of happenstance.
Personally I feel, a lot of your behavioral patterns and resilience is determined by your individual experiences during your growing up years. How you were parented? Did you have a diffusing mechanism or a fall and spring back mechanism at home? Who all made up your friend circle? Were your school mates rational and kind? Did you feel included and heard? What sort of mentorship did you receive? If you lacked parental support at home, did your teachers try and fill some part of the void? Were your fears and doubts addressed by your elders? Or were you just thrown around like a soccer ball turn by turn being uncared by your own family and shunned by friends, peers and teachers who should have had your back?
Not justifying the act of violence, but it surely makes me wonder what leads someone to commit a crime so ghastly. It is something I have always thought about. Gun violence and ill regulated gun control is a topic for another day to be addressed by people who understand the system better. Apart from ease of access, what is it that instigates someone to pick up a weapon in the first place? What makes them impervious to the consequences?
A lack of education being a contributing factor in most people profiled and impulsive shootings aside, there is a superimposed cause of lack of compassion together with the bullishness of their peers that enables the perpetrator to reach that dreaded tipping point. Do we ever bother to approach the ones suffering from poor mental health with empathy and genuine concern?
This phenomenon isn’t that rampant in India. One reason could be a better family bonding. There are instances of gun violence but those are seldom mass shootings. Also the gun regulations are extremely strict. However one striking incidence was that of Phoolan Mallah or the Bandit Queen as she was called. It was an eye opener to how wrong and unjust we are and were as a society.
Phoolan born in 1963, in a small village in Uttar Pradesh, India was abused sexually by members of an other community, married at the age of 11 only to be a victim of marital rape, disowned by her family, abused by law enforcers and then gang raped for weeks until she almost ended up dead. She finally was forced to pick up a rifle and shoot dead 22 men publicly to avenge her rape. She had metamorphosed into a bandit and for a long time could not be caught by even law enforcement agencies. She finally surrendered after the court and the law enforcers negotiated a deal with her agreeing to pardon her and her accomplices with a few years of prison time and no death sentence. She was revered by people of her community as a Goddess and earned the name Phoolan Devi.
She would go on to become a Member of Parliament trying in the process to uplift women in her community until her story was put to an abrupt end when she was shot dead by one of her yesteryear rivals in 2001. Her story was one of a survivor of repeated abuse, a social deviant as well as of extreme resilience, grit and determination.
However one perceives it, it was a wake up call for the whole nation. When a crime goes unpunished, it goes on to produce a domino effect to bring in it’s wake more such crimes either in retaliation or through reinforcement and encouragement of wrong behavior. If she were shown compassion instead by anyone in her family or social circle or at least the ones supposed to uphold the law, maybe we would have seen a different trajectory for Phoolan Mallah. That it was a bunch of bandits that showed her compassion and took her in should make us all question our collective conscience.
The moral is you could push people to extremes and laud courage and resilience but it is moronic and to your own undoing to ignore the fact that everybody has their tipping point. So next time you see that disturbed individual, choose to be kind instead. Next time you feel like bullying someone and pushing them over the edge, think twice. Somewhere we are responsible as a society for these Frankensteins of our own making.
