Salman Khan’s rape analogy that has drawn lots of flak from all quarters has made me go a little weak at my knees in expressing my opinions about a stand. I am rather safe, if written off as a confused man rather than an ill-intentioned defender of a Mr Wrong, which the actor is presumed to be for his utterances.
let me make things clear first for my own protection- from being on the receiving side of heavily opinionated assaults from the elites and the aggressive. First, I am not a Salman Khan fan at all-hence please, no misogynistic angle while reading my piece. Secondly, I hate the people who slight the opposite sex in whatever way for whatever reasons, and that I may join any ‘Hang the Rapists’ rally if called to do so in the middle of the night at the strangest of places in the country with all my heart in place.
It is the analysis of the actor’s bucolic rape analogy that I find mystifying; more so, the conscious misinterpretation of the intention of the speaker. The inadvertent simile was definitely an unconscious slip of the tongue, or at least, it was a lack of consciousness, or refinement-you may say he needs to polish his tongue before he speaks, but Sir and Madam, I feel he was not being insensitive to the most malignant of social issues that rape is.
True, any role model should measure his words before he speaks, lest his words should send wrong signals in the society that is laden with people with a concealed propensity to sadism. Similarly, any hyper-reactions by the elites, propelled by the rocket fires of the media barrel to malign someone in order to sell news, may be equally insinuating to the dangerously naïve.
As his comments were not premeditated, he certainly was not abusing a cause or supporting the heinous crime; no doubt, the analogy was bad in taste. But to dig out his past history, to recount the tales of his enormous escapades, accidents and other unrelated bad phase in his life, from which he certainly has learnt lessons and has moved on, is only to sound erudite and articulate.
To use the comments of Dr Siddharth Mukherjee, a noted oncologist and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, “The Emperor of All Maladies” as an analogy in the context here, would be a little far-fetched though, but it certainly is not entirely a quote in isolation. Mukherjee, after winning the prize, famously said of cancer, “A positive attitude doesn’t cure cancer any more than a negative one causes it.” Medically true, but then we all know hope and positivity too have a role to play in the human body to boost the effect of the medicines one takes.
Some similes and analogies are utterly bad, but they have their origins in slangs; they are rustic, they are pagan, and they are in use, but if one is not training his subconscious or watching his mind while speaking, one may get into trouble. I believe WB Yeats’ poem ‘leda and the Swan’ should be discontinued from college and university syllabus- it is a poem in which Yeats retells a story from Greek mythology, the God Zeus rapes the girl leda by assuming the form of a swan.
Watch the graphic details in the poem, which we had found embarrassing in the literature class, but it is a great symbolic poem that describes a moment that represents a change of era in Yeats’ historical models of gyres, but any ways, wrong minds may get the wrong ideas in these wrong times!
As we hope Salman, having perhaps learnt a lesson from his recent trouble, would surely mend his use of tongue meticulously henceforth; one also hopes that it is also high time for his critics to give him yet another chance at overhauling his image by minding his diction and action. Come on, he is a hero, but he is human.