How much does it take to be …Provoked?

"This blog is about how while there are no grey areas around physical abuse, the area of verbal abuse today tends to be floating amongst the ambiguous hues of grey – especially given the apparently innocuous boundaries between parliamentary and un-parliamentary elements in everyday language. Especially, given a time and age when a previously known as a “bad” word is today a part & parcel of daily use."

It’s said that a picture says a thousand words. As I look around my circle of friends and life [I always feel acquaintances are too mild for friends of friends], I keep trying to see if the dots all add up – in terms of relationships, connections and sometimes bizarre theories – and if my impression of it all adds up to reality.

Now, my friends are all mostly the same age as me – some still living up their singleton phase, some just married and some experiencing mum-hood. I would picture them all having similar issues that come with this lifecycle stage – established careers, adjusting to “long term” scenarios, more face time with families, etc – typically associated with singledom changing into duality or just dwindling away – all with some common thread.

Which is why I was surprized to hear this story of an acquaintance of a friend, let’s call her Ms Y. She was vivacious, newly married, extroverted, doing well at her job and adjusting well to a life in a new city. It was a love marriage [now an increasing phenomenon in India, unlike in the west where anything else is unheard of] and the unfortunately, the couple were having issues of adjusting and living together. We understood that recently words, lingering far into the area of abuses, were being exchanged and in the typical value sense of Chinese whispers, we heard that once or twice blows had gotten into the argument. The range of reactions evoked at this story doing the rounds was surprising – from almost indifference and the slamming of the mountain of the molehill syndrome to anger and feminist flags being raised.

Clearly, in this age of increased awareness of women’s rights, a wife beater, dominating chauvinist or the chronic emotional fuck-wittage-er is not someone any modern girl would put up with. Similarly, verbal abuse, as much as physical or emotional abuse, is not acceptable. We all know the black and whites of it. But what happens between the normal and extreme, those grey areas where it is difficult to put it down to a character flaw. Today, women all over use a certain amount of slang, hitherto considered abuses, as a part and parcel of everyday language with their circle of friends, both men and women.

So, when you hear your everyday vocabulary back during a fight, is it any longer considered to be an abuse or something like saying “damn” or maybe “shut-up”. In these newly defined connotations of what is an abuse and what isn’t, where do we draw the lines? In the grey areas of mild provocation [or one’s interpretation of it] like a push or a shove or a slap back for a slap, where do we draw the lines?

What would amount to domestic violence and what is just a domestic squabble? The huge breadth and width of different reactions that we had to the situation of Ms Y certainly showed we weren’t any clearer. Since it is not a Cramer Vs Cramer type or Provoked type of “definite” violence, where does it fall? How much does it take now to get justifiably provoked and more importantly, where does this leave the many women of today who can’t tell the greys from the black & whites?