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It’s official! India has added one more dubious distinction to its “shining” cap. In a study conducted by National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) where they compiled data from 22 countries which included Australia, Argentina, Austria, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, England and Wales, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, Thailand and Srilanka, India has been declared as the ‘murder capital’ of the world!

According to the NCRB report, in 2007 – 08, there were 32,719 incidents of murder recorded in India, which is three times more than its neighbor Pakistan and double the figures in the United States.

Did it catch us by surprise? I don’t think so. The media is peppered with news of gruesome murders every single day. Grover, Aarushi cases are still fresh in our minds. Many other cases go unnoticed. As per the study, India witnessed an average of 90 murders per day! This means that as every hour passes, around four people are murdered in India! A very high number by any standards!

According to NCRB, “most of the murders take place due to passion, sudden provocation, crime related and family disputes”.

Through this portal, my friends have highlighted many such social concerns which are bothering people not just in India, but across the world. They have tried to explain the reason behind these abominable and deplorable acts. One of the main points which I could see highlighted was the depraved human mind- a mind that always craves to gratify the desires of the flesh, that puts ‘self’ above everything and everyone else.

Just look at the Grover case for example. Jerome Mathew who was a commissioned officer in the Indian Navy, kills Grover when he finds the latter in his girlfriend’s flat. The cruelty at which the remaining acts were done by the pair is beyond anybody’s imagination. Before packing the remains of Grover in three bags, the pair even took some time to have sex beside the dead body of the victim!

Hmmm…

Whilst I agree with the reasons mentioned by the NCRB report, I would also like to add a point which the media is playing to fuel these acts.

If we look at the TV commercials – it has come to point that a scantily clad woman can sell anything. Quality of the product, nor the branding does not matter anymore. But it does matter as to how seductive the lady in the commercial is! Our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favourite soft drink and candy bar!

Look at the cartoons that we see. Before going into any of the new sophisticated cartoons that are shown, let us look at TOM & JERRY which is appealing even to us elders as well. In fact, Tom & Jerry do the ‘nanny’ job in many of our houses! Now a seemingly strange question, but perhaps worth contemplating, “Was Jerry, Jerome’s nanny?” Now look at how Jerry the mouse handles the situations. If Tom does something mischievous, how does he get level with him? It could be a pan or a tennis racquet or a baseball bat or a golf club which would be used to hammer the head of the cat to a ‘poster’.

What does the cartoon teach our toddlers? If there is a problem, hit your opponent hard with whatever thing you can get hold of. In short, we (rather Tom and Jerry) teach them “aggression”. The only thing the toddler does not know is that if he does the same to his siblings or friends, their victims will not be able to retain their original shape, just like the cat does, in the cartoon.

Geo had written a detailed article about modern video games and its effects.

I remember the Nintendo video games (hand held) when they were initially introduced.
- A man in the boat has to collect all the bottles which Popeye throws at him from the ship
- A guy has to collect all the eggs that the hen laid at different levels of a house.

Those games lost their punch soon. The manufacturers introduced games where you could shoot your opponent and kill him. These instead lost their steam when more creative games came in - ones where you could dismember the body of your opponent once you have killed him.

They have gone through classical and operant conditioning right at this very young age. I really liked the way Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has put it in his book “Stop teaching our kids to kill”. Below are some of the excerpts from his book:

People don’t naturally kill. It is a learned skill. And they learn it from abuse and violence in the home and, most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the movies, and interactive video games. Killing requires training because there is a built-in aversion to killing one’s own kind.

We all know that you can’t have an argument or a discussion with a frightened or angry human being. Vasoconstriction, the narrowing of the blood vessels, has literally closed down the forebrain–that great gob of gray matter that makes you a human being and distinguishes you from a dog. When those neurons close down, the midbrain takes over and your thought processes and reflexes are indistinguishable from your dog’s. If you’ve worked with animals, you have some understanding in the realm of midbrain responses.

Within the midbrain there is a powerful, God-given resistance to killing your own kind. Every species, with a few exceptions, has a hardwired resistance to killing its own kind in territorial and mating battles. When animals with antlers and horns fight one another, they head butt in a harmless fashion. But when they fight any other species, they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranhas will turn their fangs on anything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes will bite anything, but they wrestle one another. Almost every species has this hardwired resistance to killing its own kind.

When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have a child of three, four, or five watch a “splatter” movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child’s eyes. And this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Sure, they are told: “Hey, it’s all for fun. Look, this isn’t real, it’s just TV.” And they nod their little heads and say, “okay.” But they can’t tell the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children’s lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That’s what it is like at that level of psychological development. That’s what the media is doing to them.

What do these do to our children? Military training starts at home at the age of eighteen MONTHS instead of eighteen years when they are not old enough to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

Friends, we can see a clear link between media and violence. The present day media is providing the ideal fodder to the depraved human minds, to find self gratification in areas which are totally forbidden by God.

What is the solution? I believe that as humans we all have the inclination in us to get level with people who have offended us, or deprived us of justice etc., One of the great theologians in the first century said as follows:

• In fact, I don’t understand why I act the way I do. I don’t do what I know is right. I do the things I hate.
• Although I don’t do what I know is right, I agree that the Law is good.
• So I am not the one doing these evil things. The sin that lives in me is what does them.
• I know that my selfish desires won’t let me do anything that is good. Even when I want to do right, I cannot.
• Instead of doing what I know is right, I do wrong.
• And so, if I don’t do what I know is right, I am no longer the one doing these evil things. The sin that lives in me is what does them.
• The Law has shown me that something in me keeps me from doing what I know is right.
• With my whole heart I agree with the Law of God.
• But in every part of me I discover something fighting against my mind, and it makes me a prisoner of sin that controls everything I do.

Finally, perplexed he says:

• What a miserable person I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is doomed to die?

He finds the answer: Thank God! Jesus Christ will rescue me.

Yes, I have experienced it in my own life. I believe that only Jesus can save us from the sinful nature. No amount of physical training or education or good deeds can give us a new nature. Only God who created us can save us from this depraved state.

Tags: aggression, fore brain, Jerome Mathew, Jesus, Maria Susairaj, media, mid brain, murder, murder capital, nanny, National Crime Record, Neeraj Grover, nintendo, paul, romans, television boycott, Tom & Jerry, trash on TV, TV boycott, vasoconstriction, violent games

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Addictions, Articles, Gigi, New Findings, Purpose of Life, Society, Spiritual, Trends, Weapons, Youth Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.