Two days after I wrote my last blog about a snobbish girl littering a railway platform, one of my old trainees from Trivandrum pinged me on Facebook to tell me he loved the blog. I knew he would come up with a similar story from his life, because that has been a norm with him. Anything you do, he would have a similar story. And over the years, although most of the stories seemed improbable and irritating, I had always listened to him as I never wanted to stop being the compassionate listener that I once was to him during his training days. Thus when he started a story, I just sat on this side waiting for him to finish whatever he had to say. Well, this is what he told me.

He was on a railway platform just like me one day. There was hardly 5 minutes for his train to arrive when he saw a girl throw something on the floor. He went ahead and picked it up and out of the blue, bam! – the girl slapped him.

I don’t know if it is the sceptic in me, but I found it a little difficult to believe that story in the first place. I mean, why would anyone slap a guy just because he picked up something from the floor? I don’t know. If she did, it was really bad. If she didn’t, it was just a lame story. But anyway, that is not what this blog is about. So I listened to this and out of lack of words to respond, said “Hmm.” I guess it wasn’t the response he expected or wished for because he started rambling, making me doubt his story further. He went on to say he should have slapped her back. But he couldn’t do it because people would have taken her side. Now if the story was true, I understand that would have been the scenario. I just told him “Hitting her back doesn’t make you any different. If the incident was as you said, and if she assaulted you without any provocation, maybe you should have gone to the police. It is not right that girls can slap anyone without any reason and get away with it. I know there are many practical difficulties involved in it. I am just saying that’s what I would have done in such a situation.”

And then, the 26 year old educated, well-trained, ex-IT employee told me this:

“Maybe I should have tracked her down and raped her!”

I cringed, shivered and wondered – “What do I tell him?” I had trained him when he joined his first job as a fresher from college. I had spent three months of my life telling him the importance of following values and integrity in life. I had tried to mould him in the short span of three months, letting him know how he had to be a good human being first and then a good employee. After all that, he had the audacity to tell me, a lady, that he wouldn’t mind raping a girl to get back at her. That was the means of revenge he found the best. That told me three months of my training was nothing, it couldn’t make a difference to a lifetime of brutality built in one’s mind. All the pride of having transformed thousands of youngsters just ebbed out of me in that fraction of a second. I did the only thing I could. I told him “I don’t like such jokes.”, closed the chat window and kicked him out of my friends’ list. Was there a point in yelling at or lecturing to a person who thinks like that? I didn’t think so. If a badass, cool attitude was what he tried to show off by his statement I have just one thing to say, “Not cool man, so not cool.”

Also published on Medium.