In June last year, a man named Renukaswamy, who worked in a medical shop, was found dead miles away from home in a drain in Bangalore. It later emerged that he was a fan of Kannada actor Darshan and had sent an indecent message to another actor, Pavithra Gowda, believed to have been in a relationship with Darshan at the time. The prosecution’s case is that Darshan’s henchmen abducted Renukaswamy, beat him up, tortured him, including with electric shocks, and in the process killed him before disposing of the body. Darshan and Gowda themselves had beaten up the man in their custody, it is alleged. A few weeks ago, Pavithra Gowda’s fresh bail plea was rejected. Around the same time, the Supreme Court had cancelled Darshan’s bail, putting him back in custody.
The police do accept Renukaswamy had a history of sending lewd messages to women. If what the prosecution maintains is true, then Renukaswamy died from a reaction to his trolling. He would never have imagined that a message from his phone could result in a violent and painful death.
Most trolls, online or off, do not realize how dangerous their actions are. People who are slighted or infuriated can act in ways that are out of proportion to the offence.
People seem to carry a parallel life in their minds, where they react to injustice against them with imagined acts of violence. These fantasies are rarely proportional to the actual harm suffered. There is an episode of Black Mirror where a man designs a complex scheme to lure people into trolling a writer, and then sets out to kill them through robotic insects because he despises trolls. Watching it, I couldn’t help but feel the writer was probably living out a fantasy.
Most people do not act on their fantasies of revenge; such visions exist only in their own minds, perhaps to relish in private. However, some people do act them out. And it is in the nature of revenge to be disproportionate to the crime.
People seek vengeance all the time. Normally, vengeance in everyday life is minor and goes undetected. It may occur in offices, colonies or neighbourhoods—not as criminal acts, but as subtle injuries or professional sabotage that are still out of proportion to their triggers.
Nearly everyone has been harmed by someone at some point. Often, people know the perpetrator and fantasize about spectacular revenge. Both men and women are capable of a lot of mental violence. But it is a reasonable guess that most of them never act on it, because action requires time and effort. People have complex plots, but execution is another matter. Also, vengeance that is successful and anonymous is almost impossible, even for the powerful.
Like most people, I have never managed a respectable revenge, even though I have satisfying ideas. I know exactly what to do, but the execution is too elaborate for me to suffer. A few weeks ago, a guy picked a fight with me in a parking bay because he thought my car had touched his when I was reversing. He was so dramatic that I started laughing. He walked away meekly. I thought that was the end of it. But I realized later that he had returned to the spot and key-scratched my car. He was a man who could act on an impulse of vengeance. He had to wait patiently to ensure I was a safe distance away, go to my car, hold the key discreetly, take a risk and damage my car. But he was foolish. There were at least three security cameras in the area.
But then, have you ever gone in search of camera footage? It looks easy only in films. There was a bank in the vicinity with cameras, the building itself had a camera that would have captured him, and a liquor shop where the man went, had an interior camera. I knew what to do, but it seemed boring. Maybe I should let it go, I thought, it is a small act in the immenseness of the universe. Perhaps that restraint was not maturity, perhaps all of maturity itself is laziness. It occurred to me that vengeance is a famous aspect of human nature but most people have never experienced it.
So I thought let me set out to fix him. The building’s camera in the common area, I was told, didn’t work. The thing about security cameras is that most of them don’t work. I went to the bank; they made me wait for 10 minutes because it is a bank and then told me that for them to show the footage, I would need to file a police complaint. At this point, I was already bored. It was not worth my time. Still, I went to the cops, hoping that they would dissuade me from pursuing the matter, which was what they did.
I have undertaken more complicated investigations in pursuit of stories or in search of authentic Malabar parottas on my diet-cheat days; I can even run for no reason for an hour, but to act against a petty man seemed so onerous that I gave up within the first hour of trying.
I make characters do such elaborate things as part of my plots in novels and film, but in real life, these actions take too much effort. For instance, it is not easy to enter someone’s house and wait on the sofa to ambush him.
I figure that in every aspect of life, there is planning, which is enjoyable, and doing, which only a few can do. I used to know someone who loved making plans to study and spent hours colour-coding days and subjects, but never got down to studying till a day before the exam. And I know people who love making fitness plans but never wake up for them. But they do act on other plans in other facets of life. Some people act out their darkest thoughts; they can even plan and kill. Most of us, though, only fantasize.
(My latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’)