Valentine's Day Violence

This is an editorial I wrote for my college newspaper.
Not great, but then thats what my blog is for, isnt it? Publishing all kinds of shit I write?

On Valentine’s day this year, there were twenty one people who didn’t find the day of love, true to its name. In a repeat performance of last year’s Virginia Tech disaster, though not as bad, a former student at Illinois University opened fire in a lecture hall, killing five students and wounding 16 others. There have been three other major school shootings since Cho Seung-Hui fatally shot 32 people in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Tech in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Although the history of violence in schools and educational institutions in America dates back to 1927, only two occasions – the Virginia Tech Incident and another 1999 Colorado school episode have resulted in any significant change in the liberal gun laws. While policies haven’t been drastically changed, many experts say that the gun culture and the shootings are both direct impacts of the violence projected in American TV, movies and video games.

In India, for the most part, we seem to view these events as outsiders and hardly ever get ruffled by them. The USA has always been different; these things don’t happen here, we think. But we continue to expose our children to the same violent movies and video games that American children enjoy. Indeed, with the continued westernization of every aspect of the Indian way of life, it would not have been long before violence among children too, came into the limelight. On December 11, 2007, the country was shocked by Abhishek Tyagi’s violent death at the hands of his 14 year old classmate, Akash Yadav. The boy was shot with a gun that had been sneaked into the school by hiding it in a sock. The question that is most important here is not how the gun could so easily have been brought to school, but what made Akash think he can solve bully problems using violence.

Since December there have been several more cases of violence in schools with one student in Madhya Pradesh succumbing to injuries inflicted on him by a senior. The most recent attack occurred on Feb 12th, when an eighth-grader stabbed an 11th-grader in the shoulder and chest at a government school in New Delhi. While these incidents may have been the result of individual tensions and problems, this trend of resorting to violence cannot be overlooked.

Without waiting for more such acts to occur or any more to be killed, the government, in a landmark decision has decided to act. Disciplinary committees of Central government schools have been assigned a pro-active role to check instances of violence among students, the HRD ministry announced on 11th of this month. Whether like many other government decisions this will be implemented or not, is yet to be seen. However, the change needs to start at home. Most psychologists believe that the violence streaming through all the media we are exposed to, has an effect of desensitising all of us, more importantly children, to the horror of actual violent behaviour.

Most Bollywood and Hollywood action heroes don and use guns without thinking twice. Is this what we want our children to learn from? Although only three Indians (as compared to 83 Americans) out of ten thousand bear guns, we are slowly but steadily getting closer. Even though, the greatest perpetrator of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi is the Father of our Nation, India has hardly been a non-violent country. We have a history of violence and bloodshed dating from even before Independence. Perhaps now, that history has begun to affect our children as well. And before it results in an Indian version of the Virginia Tech Shoot-out, we must ponder on how to set a better example to the next generation.