Summer is back in Delhi. Temperatures escalate to 40+ degrees. The dust everywhere fills your nostrils and eyes and the constantly flowing sweat on your forehead drips into your eyes making the whole city seem like a simmering fata morgana. In terms of climate, Delhi is a hard place to live in. Instead of seasons, the annual cycle is marked with ordeals following each other. The chilling winds of the Himalaya will be changed to the all-pervasive sands of Rajasthan. Delhi gets the worst of both worlds. Come May, the city with all its people turns into a pressure cooker on a hot flame, ready to explode any second.
The other day I was standing on the main strip of Nizamuddin East waiting for a rickshaw to appear. Opposite to me was another white man in a suit and a suitcase waiting for a rickshaw. The look on his face communicated he'd been waiting there in the heat for a tad too long for his liking and was in a hurry somewhere. A rickshaw pulled over, the man offered a price, the rickshaw driver stepped on the pedal, the man quickly clung to the rickshaw desperately trying to offer a higher price, but the rickshaw driver kept shaking his head and drove away. This was the final straw. With his entire body shaking in anger and frustration, the man fired at the driver: "FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKER I HOPE YOUR FUCKING FAMILY DIES!!!!" It was his fortune that the driver most likely did not understand English well enough to pick up what he was saying. Had he spoken in Hindi, there would've been a chance the driver would've gotten out of his rickshaw and the man would've made it to tomorrow's headlines.
Mohammad Irfan, a tea vendor in Delhi's Seelampur was not so lucky. On May 16 the Hindustan Times reported a sadly typical incident in Delhi: a customer had demanded Irfan a cup of tea on credit. After he had refused, an argument had broken out, which eventually escalated in the customer leaving the shop, only to return with a friend, armed with bottles and knives. The men's solution to the row was that the 32-year chaiwallah was stabbed to death. The assaulters were arrested.
The incident above is your usual page 3 material of local newspapers. It seems that especially during the summer months, incidents like these become more and more common. Killing people over trivial reasons and petty disputes seems to have become a strange trend in Delhi's crime rates. The scenario seems to follow the same pattern every time, a small argument breaks out, the situation escalates, one of the counterparts becomes blinded by rage and assaults the other, usually armed with improvised weapons like bottles or rocks. The result can be read on page three of Hindustan Times or Times of India the next day.
An article from January 2012 in the Daily Pioneer quotes the Delhi police, who estimated that ca.17% of all the murders in the city are due to sudden provocation or disputes over petty issues. The fairly recent rise in random acts of violence has left the law enforcement puzzled. A 2009 article on the Guardian quotes psychologists, according to whom the people of Delhi are driven on the edge by the surrounding chaos of the city. The heat, the noise, the pollution and the commotion seem to be especially taxing for the migrants who are flooding to the city from small villages around the country. Unaccustomed to the stress of the urban setting, some find no way to vent and end up running amok. The journey from a small village to downtown Delhi is essentially like travelling through time. After stepping out of the train in the Nizamuddin railway station, where many of the migrants enter the city, the shock, combined with the constantly accumulating stress, can drive a villager to monstrous deeds.
Both the articles casually mention recent cases of killing at will.The list of incidents seems endless, each one more ludicrous than the other:
- a man was beaten to death with iron rods for complaining about the goat his neighbours had tethered outside his house;
- a chef was fatally stabbed for refusing to serve poppadoms to diners in his restaurant.
- a man killed his sister-in-law for not washing his clothes;
- a security guard murdered a colleague for failing to turn up on time to take over from him
- the owner of a roadside food stall was murdered by a customer for accidentally
splashing water on his clothes.
- a young man being stabbed to death by four others at his mobile phone store after he refused to lend them a screw-driver
- a young man lost his life because he had protested against a bike that had brushed past him.
- a teenaged schoolboy killed by ‘friends’ over borrowed money,
- an elderly mother battered to death by her iron rod-wielding son for he had been refused a mobile phone,
- a young man murdered because he had knocked chicken tikka masala off the paper plate of his assailant
when he opened the door of his car.
- Two men asked a man for a bidi which he refused to give them. Enraged, they killed him.
- A young mother killed her own baby by throwing him out of the window as a result from a dispute with the mother-in-law
- In a petty dispute over breaking of a stone plate, a 25-year-old boy was shot
and his cousins beaten up by a family
- A young man had thrown a party at a north Delhi hotel. It was in full swing when two of his friends stepped up to the DJ booth and demanded he play their choice of music. When he refused, the pair left, only to return a couple of hours later to shoot him dead.
The Guardian article also quotes Dr.Rajat Mitra, a psychologist who has worked with the Delhi police. He speculates that one of the reasons for the seemingly random violence may indeed be the shock that small-town people who are forced to move to the city experience.
"In the village you are supposed to go to the elders to resolve a dispute, but you don't have a system like that in the city. What you do instead is resolve it on your own. You are carrying a village mentality into the cities and there is no introduction to people to how to live in a city."
He further goes to mention that Delhi people generally have no trust in law enforcement, which also contributes to a general sense of hopelessness and lawlessness. Delhiites, everyone I've spoken to, seem to be united by a general distrust of the local police. One other factor mentioned was easy access to guns combined with young men on a power trip.
A similar theory is offered by Hema Raghavan, a sociologist from Jawaharlal Nehru University:
"There is an influx of people coming to the city from varied backgrounds and rural set-ups. Although we cannot single out instances wherein the perpetrator has belonged to a village, committed a crime in the city and gotten away, there is a possibility that the bridging of the gap has ensured that such people have access to money and weapons. Since most of them are illiterate and get taken up with the trappings of urban life, they become wanton to committing crime. It is actually their frustration that manifests itself as a brutal crime."
Rapid changes in the socioeconomic backbone of India has led to even more rapid urbanization. This has led to painful decisions that people from rural areas have had to make. In search of work, they have started pouring into the cities. Its seems that the wider psychological effects of this remain yet to be studied.
Pedal
to the medal gotta get ahead gotta run another red light in the dead
of the night
Lettin
the light from my cellphone distract my eyes
Sexual
text messaging on my mind
Fingers
are busy but now I'm lookin in the mirror
cause
the people behind me they're givin me the middle finger
I'll
kill em if they pull up any closer to my bumper
Short
tempered mother-
Shut
your mouth!
Drinkin'
my coffee now I'm dumpin it out
He's
honkin' his horn like he wanna throw down
He
thinks I'm mortal, oh he wanna go now? Well I'm ready.
