We don't really look at a woman as a human being, but rather as her physical identity. Even in murder, we fail to see the human being. The sexual lenses are always on. Sri Ramakrishna Paramhans, the great saint, used to say that the ordinary person is driven by two objectives — kanchan (money) and kamini (lucrative girl). Sex is not so much a need of the body, it's a need of the mind. Unless this thinking changes, we'll have to live through the pain of seeing more such incidents.
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Acharya Prashant: We don't really look at woman as human being. We look at her as her physical identity. We have lenses of sex and gender. It is the womanness that matters more to us, and matters not in any innocuous sense — matters in a rather disturbing sense.
Even in murder, we fail to see the human being. The sexual lenses are always on, and it is quite pathetic what that tells about the seer, the looker. It is the female body. It is the female body that catches our attention, not the loss of a precious human life.
And because the gaze is so sexual, it no longer remains a surprise. Gruesome acts are so frequent in our country. No crime happens in isolation. The very social gaze is sexual. It's not that one particular wild individual just dropped in from somewhere and committed the crime. No! The general society is the breeding ground.
What you call as the common man, that is the normal social person, provides the ecology, the environment in which wider, deeper, and very violent sexual crimes then manifest. It has to be remembered that the perpetrator of the crime is a part of the larger society. Though when there are protests, we want to believe that the larger society is blameless and all the blame has to fall on one single individual or a few of them.
