No, I don’t get it. Not at all. This whole exercise of blaming men almost always when a woman (more so if she is a celeb) commits suicide; and of accusing them every time a relationship goes sour. Are we being fair to them? Or, are we being guilty of virtually snuffing life out of them? Life is no life after being hounded by police, tried by media and accused by people, is it?

Gautam Vora, boyfriend of the late model Viveka Babajee, is being portrayed as a fugitive and the man who drove her to suicide. Well, allegedly the accused, in short! Not a reasonable thing to do. A month-old-relationship surely cannot be strong and serious enough for a man to commit marriage. A strong infatuation, at the most, it cannot even be termed a relationship. A relationship needs the test of time, intention and bonding. None seems to have existed here. The rich man evidently felt he was being pressurised into marriage and opted out of the relationship. It was a matter of his life and choice as much as we debate the matter of Babajee’s life and choice. How was he supposed to know his ‘girlfriend’ would end her life before he even uttered the words: “It’s over”?
Till a relationship has lived the life of a few months, it is just, what we would call in a clichéd manner, ‘friendship’. Nothing more. Nothing less. Even if it has been heavily lustful. How much do you get to know a person in two months anyway?

We, as a society, have been unfair to a few men earlier as well. We had pointed fingers at Gautam Khanduja when his fiancé, the famous model Nafisa Joseph, had committed suicide in 2004. We (media, police, friends…) had come to nearly terming him a ‘murderer’ when all he had done was called off a relationship. No, I am not saying what both the Gautams did was right. Nor am I claiming they didn’t have ulterior motives. But, before blaming them we must not forget that the girls in question too had failed relationships behind them and, had well, ‘dumped’ their boyfriends. Perhaps they too had ‘motives’ in their impending marriages! Had the previous boyfriends committed suicide, would we have pointed accusatory fingers at these models as aggressively as we do at the men?

Remember air hostess Sucheta Anand whose suicide had grabbed headlines in 2008? Why? Because, after an intimate night, her boyfriend Arjun Menon had texted her: “It’s all over.” Now, what I don’t get here is: A man promises you marriage – ‘only in words’, and you decide to get physically intimate with him (he is not sleeping with you at gunpoint, mind you), then end your life owing to your own weaknesses and he is forced to take the blame! How ridiculous is that! You ended your life because your calculations in life went wrong. Why blame the man?

In May this year a pilot, Varun Agarwal, was arrested because his girlfriend accused him of ‘raping’ her on the pretext of marriage. What fails me is – don’t these women read newspapers and reports of such cases; are they only literate, and not educated? He ‘promised’ marriage and you got ‘intimate’ with him. Excuse me, isn’t such a relationship called consensual? Did he force you into getting physically intimate? To top it, you cry foul because he refused to ‘legalise’ a ‘temple marriage’? In which age are you living, young lady? Why didn’t you get married at a court before crossing your physical boundaries? And if you did, weren’t you in a hurry to get intimate with him? So, why blame him?

I sincerely feel that the law (and I honestly hope I don’t get into a legal hassle for saying this) is not fair to men. Nor is society. None of these women was immature as to not understand that the guys they were dating lived a ‘fast life’. Most of these women were looking for security – financial, physical and social. To grant these - the burden lay squarely on the shoulders of these men. We would be foolish to think that these well-to-do, educated men, even if some of us assume them to be despicable and immoral, did not see through things. They did, and refused to be their tickets to free ‘social life’. Moreover in hindsight, didn’t their decision prove right? They were, after all, about to marry women who didn’t seem emotionally stable – no offence meant to the women though, who had their own misfortunes in their lives to grapple with.

If a woman has the right to walk out of a relationship if it doesn’t suit her, surely a man has too. Just today a Mumbai tabloid carries the story of a woman who, caught red-handed by her husband in an intimate position with her lover, beat him up and ran away with gold. Why isn’t anyone taking up the man’s case?

Democracy, legal security and a right/freedom to live their life their way are all meant for men as well – just the way they are meant for women. They are human beings too. Let’s be fair to them unless and until something gets proven against them. Let us not have the blood of someone’s career (and indirectly, life) on our hands, and conscience.