[Reader-list] Why Indian Men Are Still Boys

[Chandni Parekh]

To read the full story:

http://psychologynews.posterous.com/why-indian-men-are-still-boys

Excerpts from a Tehelka article by Nisha Susan:

Evidence is, the urban Indian male hasn’t really changed. He is cocooned as
he has always been in a sort of prolonged infantilism – a hatchery protected
by doting mothers, fathers, sisters, girlfriends, and society itself.

Changed rules, changed expectations and zero preparedness. He paints a
picture of utter pathos. “If I am supposed to cook, why can’t I cry? We men
are constantly guessing. Am I supposed to pay for dinner or not? We have
nothing to go on — you just patch something your girlfriend told you with
something you saw on Star World and hope to get by!”

THERE seems to be a simple equation between parents and the drought of
responsible, responsive Indian men. In the homes of People Like Us, young
boys do not automatically learn to cook or even to be grateful to those who
cook for them. They are rarely taught to anticipate other people’s needs.

Young Indian men routinely brutalise incoming juniors in colleges and
justify it as tradition or socialising. Stripping, beatings, ritual
humiliation, the eating of shit and licking of toilets, sodomy – everyone
has a story. Worryingly, these stories are told with a grin.

When an Indian man goes away from home (if at all he does) he is almost
entirely unprepared to look after himself. Indian university towns such as
Pune, for instance, are full of well-heeled young teenage boys housed with
cook-cum-major-domos to clean up after them. Young women in Indian metros
often refuse to visit their male contemporaries’ homes, sure that there will
be no towels, no furniture and no food.

>From the moment they can walk, Indian men are taught to provide but not
feel. Taught to command, not empathise. Taught to expect subservience not
companionship. Taught, most damagingly, to repudiate their emotions. Their
inner life. Their capacity for variety.