The lurking ‘animals’
By I.M. Soni

A cinema-hall is a place for entertainment. People go there to relieve themselves of the tedium of the humdrum life, and to relax their jaded nerves. However, in actual practice entertainment turns into agony. Women are the worst sufferers — in as well as outside the hall because a battalion of eve-teasers opens "fire" on them.

The male mindset is largely responsible for the indignities heaped on women because it looks upon them as flesh dolls or a mere sex apparatus.

A cross-section of the public swarms the place before the show begins. The ticket window attracts a crowd which should form itself into what in a civilised society is called a queue.

Women are seen in clusters near the ticket window. Or the entrance to the hall. These focal points attract men of dishonourable intentions. They use suggestive epithets. This is matched by the shameless grinning of the policemen and visible shrinking of women, targets of verbal obscenities.

Often, women face the mortification of getting caught in a male-made stampede and emerge battered beings. The hooligans at play think that women are crushable commodities.

The GKVOs (gallant knights of the vulgar order) squeeze themselves in between the partly opened door to the hall and press their victims for obtaining physical contact.

Eves are tormented inside the hall, too. The rowdy person is an exhibitionist and has a repertory of ill-manners to boot.

He stretches his legs full-length. His feet touch the female head in the front row and he runs a commentary on the hot scenes. Or he goes out a couple of times during the show. On his way out and in, he brushes his hand against some part of victim’s anatomy.

These excitable creatures let out a throaty obscene comment which resounds in the hall. A collective guffaw echoes in the hall.

When the lights go off, which is often, there is a cacophony of catcalls and whistles. Women are lucky if during lightless spells some wayward hands do not stray to them.

These tailor-made gentlemen who turn women’s entertainment into agony are symbols of our stagnating values. Education and money are no guarantee of a civilised behaviour as a man’s mind is dyed in the colour of his own imagination.

Those who scream, use foul language, or talk in heat, put women to fear and flight.

"The manner of a vulgar man has freedom without ease; the manner of a gentleman has ease without freedom," says Chesterfield.