With due respect for those who lost a loved one in Jiah Khan, the actress who tragically committed suicide, and with empathy for their agony and in no way trivialising the trauma, arresting her boyfriend is difficult to warrant.

Our lives are littered with shards of broken promises, broken hearts, and even broken vows, with newlyweds practically rushing from the dais to divorce in five easy steps. If we were to hold all those who have bruised us and battered us and cheated us and hurt us accountable for the rain in our lives, there would be no free men or women on the streets.

Love is not mutually exclusive. It may get more dramatic headlines but the rage its mockery inspires is no less than that brought about by deception, by financial skulduggery, by the crack of trust and faith in a deal, by a lack of honour in our work ethics and you cannot hold a love gone sour to another standard from other acts of deceit, acts that occur all the time to all of us. Most of us hurt (others) most of the time and so many despicable things have been done to so many but they have got up and walked again, stumbled and risen.

If that was not the case we would be lemming off the cliff of life in our thousands.

Also, despite salivating pronouncements of ugly and puerile excitement from TV anchor heads delighted with the fact that the cops are hounding boyfriend Sooraj Pancholi, things cannot be placed outside their logical perspective when it comes to the law and words reworked out of context. We say, go shoot yourself, get lost, I’ll kill you, the last spoken in love, frustration, humour, any emotion and we do it a hundred times a day.

Get out of my life.

If you don’t call again it will be too soon.

What part of it don’t you understand, we are done.

Yes, we mislead, we play the game and we injure feelings but unless we hold the rope in literal fashion we cannot be culpable of abetting a killing. Human beings are not perfect people; it is in our nature to deceive.

I am not an expert on suicide or the state of mind that leads to it but I imagine that unrequited love is exacerbated by low self-esteem, anger, financial difficulty, a sense of failure and several other factors.

I don’t know Sooraj Pancholi nor do I particularly want to. But even if he is a cad and a womaniser or whatever the current word is, it still does not call for his arrest in an act where he was not present.

You can hold him in contempt but you cannot really lock him up…but…and there is a but…

Can the law extend itself to visit deliberate and ongoing torture where the stronger individual cowers and intimidates and terrorises the weaker, bullies that person into a mode of submission and distress that becomes unbearable…gratuitous violence and signposting death as the only exit, now that opens a new can of worms.

It has to be proven, not by hunch or by doubt or by possibility…but by evidence.