The Omnipotent Indian Male

I read a news report about a pregnant Mumbai housewife who had a miraculous escape. While returning from a visit to her gynecologist, a cement mixer truck struck her a glancing blow and knocked her into a drainage ditch. To her horror, the truck followed her into the ditch, but came to a stop just inches above her prone body.

A remarkable story, to be sure, but what interested me more was the reaction of the truck driver and cleaner. Without even bothering to find out if the woman they had knocked out was still alive, or in need of urgent assistance, they promptly fled the scene. Their only concern was to escape from the law.

What is tragic and shameful, in the Indian context, is that this cowardice was hardly an exceptional circumstance, but absolutely predictable and expected from the Indian male. Whenever he finds himself in a dangerous situation, his instinctive reaction is to save himself. The concept of women and children first is totally alien to him. That is why, in a stampede situation at a temple or a cinema hall on fire, the maximum casualties are usually among the women and children. They are the ones who get trampled underfoot by panicked men, whose only thought is to save themselves. It's the same when a ferry capsizes. This is - and should be viewed as - a shameful state of affairs, but the Indian male feels no shame. He regards it as the natural order of things.

This peculiar attitude is the result of centuries of conditioning. Almost since the dawn of Indian civilization, it has been drilled into the psyche of Indian men that they belong to the superior sex. Pockets of urban India may now be very gradually veering towards the notion of gender equality, but for the vast majority of the Indian population, the age old concept of the man as the sole breadwinner; and lord and master is widely prevalent.