By Maya Palit
According to Uma Mageswari, a Singapore-based woman, a man began filming her in a metro car on Saturday evening.
He thought he was being secretive by holding the phone up close to him but did a miserable job and it was obvious from the reflection behind him. When Uma confronted him (after recording him being creepy) he panicked and gave her a bunch of excuses, but the strangest one was what she refers to in her Facebook post: “His last feeble attempt of an apology was that ‘I was like his sister’.” It’s anyone’s guess what he meant — that they both appear to have Indian heritage, or that they both have phones and ended up recording each other — the possibilities are endless.
But the incident didn’t stop there, because lots of the comments on her post were ridiculous or disturbing, from people foul-mouthing Indians in general (“What do you expect from men from the rapist country,” goes one salient question) to women asking suspiciously about the clothes she was wearing at the time.
While this was an obvious case of recording someone without their consent, another video, that has apparently been going viral on social media shows a woman in New Maya Nagar, Ludhiana, being dragged into the street and beaten up by her in-laws. In the past, we’ve contemplated the ethics of sharing these kinds of videos, depicting assault or violence, but the question of whether this video of a public thrashing can be effective or should be floating around on the Internet at all is still a tricky one to answer. And in this case as in several others, we’re told there was a ‘compromise’ between the woman and her family, which is why the police didn’t do anything about it.