I cannot help shuddering. It goes beyond keeping children away from all this. What worries me equally is that a lot of gamers are older men, men in their 20s and 30s and even older. Men who have more access to women in offices or on the streets than say, teens.

But then one day this crazy thing happened. This wonderful catalogue of these beautiful fairy tale pictures suddenly went sour. On the night of the Grammy’s, Rihanna was found weeping and screaming hysterically in her car. She had been badly beaten up. Chris Brown, her perfect boyfriend had beaten her up. Cinderella had been beaten down to cinders by her Prince Charming and the world was stunned. Suddenly there was too much of reality in the gossips rags.

I do not know whether to laugh or hit the wall in frustration when I read the specific circumstances where women think it’s ok to be beaten up. The most commonly cited offense is ‘being disrespectful to in-laws,’ followed by ‘neglect of house or children.’ The least stated reason is refusal to have sex. I guess the last is a silver lining of sorts?

I am sometimes told that the story starts a long time ago, on the banks of the Ganga, when the sultry summer sun bore down acutely on the curling tips of drying leaves and when the still silence on earth was interrupted only occasionally by flies buzzing lazily around dried cow dung, when ‘the great sages [...]