Why we can't handle the sheer filth & the fury of 'kacha khisti'

As astoundingly idiotic wrangles go, this has to be right up there with 'But you know, the British did bring the railways to India.' (Abey, Venn diagram ki... Russia, Japan, Mexico didn't have to be British colonies to import and implement railway steam tech.) After the jantar banter subsided last week, we now have Gen X, on different sides of X that marks the spot, fighting over whether Gen Z or millennials have been brought up better.

At the centre of this upbringing debate (sic) is Gen Z's apparent discovery of disgusting abuses and 'sickening' insults, mostly in the form of nasty slogans, memes, and other visuals on placards, especially targeted at elders who deserve unmitigated respect for being, well, elders.

For starters, Gen Z did not discover the choicest gaalis. There have been people from my father's generation - pre-baby boomers born before 1946 - whose language targeted at 'respectable' public figures would have made Odysseus want his ears sealed with wax even when he was sitting at his 4-BHK in Ithaca.


But yes, these Gen Z-ers have done what we Gen X-ers could do only with the landline telephone. No, not make random prank calls and hang up after saying things to strangers that we'd not utter outside the safety of a telephone mouthpiece, but use prevalent technology to spread gandi gandi baat.

The Bengali phrase 'kacha khishti' is almost onomatopoeic in that it packs much more than what it means in English: raw, in the sense of choicest, abuse. While the level of 'rawness' is still seen largely in socioeconomic class terms - the lower the position, the 'lower' the language-over time, unsavoury verbs and nouns, tactically arranged to scandalise and horrify, have gained social street cred for its power to shock and awe - and impress. Language never becomes more alive than in 'kacha khisti'.

Great contemporary writers like the late Nabarun Bhattacharya - Sahitya Akademi Award winner, no less - have made demotic abuses of the non-PG Wodehouse variety take on a literary sheen of its own. But I digress. Spouting a grand concoction of scatological-anatomical-sexual word-images that make the best linguistic Molotov cocktail is just the gentler part of the story.

Being foul-mouthed is seen as a sign of bad upbringing, and hanging with the 'wrong sort'. But you are marked as being downright depraved if your graphic abuse is directed at a personage - dead or alive, Nehru included.

I once heard a 70-yr-old man, who happened to be fond of, among other things, Chaplin's Limelight and Cold War history, speak about Gandhi in language that would make even the other Mohandas - 71-yr-old rightwing commentator TG Mohandas, booked last week for saying on his YouTube channel in the context of NEET protesters, 'Gangrapes will happen. In this case, there won't be any complaints as these are people who like being raped. Some women like being raped, especially leftists, secular, democratic and proletarians.' - almost blanch.

But older generations with a gift of the garbage-gab didn't have much in terms of delivery mechanisms. Gen Z's talented abusers, however, have the reach, thanks to the great social-mainstream media loop. Like pornography, once an adult entertainment genre, hurling filth and fury are now available to anyone with a screen. All that was left for Gen Zabaan were intent and target. And these became 'suddenly' available.

So, witnessing the 'most disgusting' abuses isn't really the issue here, when whataboutery, denial, and other standard methodologies are regularly taken out of the toolkit to defend those accused of rape, hanker for mob justice, or normalise hate speeches. The same cultures that tolerate violence often clutch their pearls harder at expletives.

The roots of this hypersensitivity lie in worship. Profanity was once tied to blasphemy, a direct affront to divine authority. To curse was literally to curse god. As religion ceded ground to secularism, the taboo migrated. Today, swearing is framed as an assault on civility, decency, family values, sanskriti. But the mechanism is the same.

But can there be something even more obnoxious than a respected figure being abused in the most disgusting way? I would think a respected figure giving 'kacha khisti' would be a thing to behold. I wait for that bl*ssed day.