The myth of a virgin Indian | Life blog

We belong to an era where everything happens today, and tomorrow it turns out that nothing had happened yesterday. An era where rules, regulations, laws, ethics exist only in the daylight, in the frame which is seen by others. What happens in the dark, in isolation, is a falsifiable truth, a myth, which can be ignored or refuted. We are how we are seen, not how we actually are. The “real me” is of least relevance to us. The truth does not affect us, as long as it is not known to others around us. We move on and move out from our past or the darkness way too fast.

Having embedded ourselves tightly into the visibility of life, we have diminished the “thinking” component of our existence. We have accepted a life which is seen by others rather than the one which is lived by us. We have made our minds so strong that we can even differentiate between those two parts. And to make things worse we can even justify how both are right and that too at the same point of time. Any wrong action or decision is accepted and then framed to explain how they were right for us with respect to society. We convince ourselves and make ourselves believe that we are good and innocent and we have done no wrong. Hence, in the bright light of day, in the eyes of society, we become what we are seen as — 

The Virgin Indian.

The rapes that are covered by the media become a shame for the nation, but the ones that take place in isolation, in remote corners, go unnoticed, unregistered and hence are said to have not happened.

The domestic violence that takes place inside the houses stays there. No one takes any notice of it. There may be marks, but there is no proof. The acts of forced sex in marriage take place once the lights go off, and once the lights are switched on, it is seen as a happy marriage again.

The acts of corruption are always termed as taking place “under the table” and so above the table, everything is clean and clear. A thief when caught justifies himself, stating “I have not done anything and I am innocent.”

These examples are among many that show that anything which is either not seen by the public or not accepted becomes something that has not even taken place. There is violence, harshness under the cover of night but in the daylight, distant from the past, it’s as if nothing happened. We are seen as pure, pious Virgin Indians.

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We have distanced ourselves from the regret of our own actions and so we have adapted to the blame game theory created by mankind. Here for each and every act which is unfair, is a heinous crime, the blame always shifts to the other person. It’s always someone else who is responsible for a misdeed or crime. We, on the other hand, are clean of any stain. In the circle of blame, life continues and in the end, no one is the source of any wrongdoing; therefore, everyone ends doing nothing.

We see being in a denial as a part of our lives and thus we see ourselves as virgins and have closed our eyes to the truth, to our own actions and our own guilt. Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that we are in a deep sleep, unknowing and unaware of what we are doing and the consequences that our actions can lead to. What we forget is that even as we sleep, we are awake in our dreams.

We need to ask ourselves, should the brightness or darkness change us from being what we are? Are we virgins in the true sense or have we just got up and put on our clothes and are thinking that nothing happened last night? But clothes are what appear to outsiders; we still feel our own nakedness.

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The problem with us is that we have blindfolded ourselves to our thoughts. The question is never what right or what wrong did we do. The question is acceptance. However right or wrong we prove to society or the outer world, we can never lie to ourselves, even in the darkness of the night and brightness of the lights. In front of the mirror, and more so, within our own heart we know that we have lost our virginity a long ago.

We have lost it along with our conscience, in terms of doing certain things as part of the fun, accepting something wrong just because it never mattered too much to us, being a part of something immoral which benefited us and many more such reasons. Deep inside we know how many times we have laid down our ethics, morals, and truth in general and how many times we have believed in our own disbelief.

We are no longer virgins; what we are now is just an answer to our own regrets. To soothe, to pacify and to keep ourselves free of the pain and torture of penitence we keep on reminding ourselves that we are virgins, unsullied. But in the shelter of dark, the actions did take place. Closing our eyes will neither change the truth, nor the consequence.

In the end, we remain the scattered particles of our own guilt, our own conscience. There we are, gathering up the pieces, trying to put them together and hoping that in the broad daylight we can portray ourselves as being the Virgin Indian.

Previously Published in The Huffington Post @ https://www.huffingtonpost.in/aakash-joshi/the-virgin-indian_b_8441370.html

The myth of a virgin Indian | Life blog

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