Angry young men

Weakening family bonds and the isolation created by social networking sites make youngsters place a low premium on life.

A FEW weeks ago, a horrifying incident occurred in Mumbai. Some 30 young men a good many in their teens attacked a 19-year-old with such savagery, using, among other things, a big stone to smash his head in. What made it even more shocking was that it happened in broad daylight, in front of a large number of people. No one came to help. They stood there, and watched the young man die. Not long before this, another youngster had been beaten to death in the city.

In Delhi, there have been several cases of men being attacked, and often killed, by groups of people who are not habitual criminals or members of any gang. A similar incident occurred in Chennai as well, where a young man was beaten to death on a crowded road.

In virtually all these cases, the provocation has been astonishingly slight; the Mumbai teen had apparently remonstrated with some of his friends for making objectionable comments about a girl he knew. They returned with more people and beat him to death. In other cases, too, the provocation, if one can call it so, was equally mild objection to eve-teasing, or the scraping of one car against another. The result has often been the extinguishing of a young life.

Arguments between people who may or may not be friends are nothing new. There has always been the odd case of physical violence too in such instances. But the intent to kill is a sinister element seen more and more these days in brawls and arguments.

Even schoolboys are increasingly getting involved in cases of killing. Recently, in Delhi, a boy was killed by his schoolmates with the help of one or two people from outside. The reason was a remark made by the victim about one of them.

Violence among schoolboys

In a mind-numbing case in Haryana, a group of schoolboys killed another for getting better marks than they did in class examinations; the victim belonged to a lower caste. The low premium placed on life by the young is so frightening and difficult to comprehend. Does it come from television programmes? If it does, all one can say is that television programmes with violence as an element have been around for decades. Why should it suddenly begin to affect the young now? If one points to films, the argument is even less tenable; there have been films showing violence virtually since commercial cinema was established in the country. Why should they begin to make young men think that death, murder and brutal attacks are some kind of a solution to what they see as an issue, and that too trivial in the extreme?

Inevitably, one's thoughts then turn to the families of these young aggressors. What sort of a family life have they had? It does not seem possible for such levels of murderous hatred to grow in a boy living in a family linked by love and affection. The answer may lie not in the absence of love and care so much as in its nature; if that love and care is something more perfunctory and abstracted, subsumed by the parents' preoccupation with their personal anxieties about work, social commitments and economic problems, then one need not be surprised about a youngster reaching out to relationships that are stronger like the ones he finds with friends who come from similar families.

When the bond between boys grow in a manner that excludes family ties and relationships, it can be seen how a setting like the one so graphically described by William Golding in Lord of the Flies begins to take over the perceptions of the boys. In Golding's book, the boys are younger, but the chilling world they create is no different from the one that youngsters create in the urban wastelands that our cities have become, fuelled by apathy and indifference at home, or by overindulgence, which is the same thing turned inside out.

It is easy to imagine these youngsters creating that horrific world jeering at those who are frightened or sick when they see blood, or when they hit someone, because one has to prove oneself above that. And, yes, there are television programmes and films to provide iconic figures such as Gabbar Singh or Rambo to whom blood and death are nothing exceptional. In the absence of a strong, caring family today, all that these youngsters have are the icons and their own collective imaginations.

That is one explanation, but obviously a very simplistic one blame the parents. True, parents lead lives that are much more stressful than in earlier times; one or both are usually in professions or jobs that involve competition, and work pressure together with stress at the home, financial and social fronts make them more apathetic towards children. Often the very way they live is stressful in the extreme; small flats mean family members have a problem finding a little space for themselves, leading the younger ones, the boys, to go out more often and for longer periods.

Social networking

Where space is not as great a problem, as it is for the lower-middle-class families, there is another new element the Internet and social networking sites. No one is suggesting that Facebook breeds murderers, but the isolation within the family that social networking sites demand is as much a factor in weakening family bonds as staying outside with friends. These factors lead to the emergence of values that supersede the values that a family can provide.

Urban proximity does not breed closer relations of the kind neighbours develop. Often neighbours are the ones who cause brawls that lead to death. Add to that the ways of the police and legal procedures, one will begin to understand why passersby tend not to get involved in the violence they witness. The fear of becoming witnesses, of being called day after day by the police, and then having to appear in court every day as the case drags on for years no one wants to be a part of that, however unfortunate that is.

But somewhere one has to break this isolation down. Somewhere one must try to breach barriers of ill-will and distrust and come together as neighbours and fellow inhabitants of a city. Not long after the Mumbai teen was beaten to death, his brother appeared on television. His English was hesitant and broken, but what he said in the end is perhaps the most eloquent statement on such urban tragedies: I am only a single man. Without your support I am nothing.