Actor Ajith Kumar’s recent interview has sparked quite a few conversations on social media. The part that caught my attention, was his take on crowds.
About 30 years ago, when I first joined a college in Madurai after growing up in other places, I experienced a few cultural shocks. Perhaps these weren’t unique to Madurai, but that’s where I first noticed them. One major thing that stood out was the behavior of crowds.
For instance, if you suddenly see people rushing to board a bus, chances are there’s a pickpocket in action.
During one of Madurai's annual festivals, I noticed some young men carrying water bags — not to distribute water, but to spill it on women, often on their chests. Shockingly, this was almost normalized; parents would quietly tolerate it to avoid public embarrassment, walking a little farther behind the crowd. When some women happened to witness this, they would just shoo the boys away instead of confronting them. The crowd, in such cases, became a kind of cover — a shield for misbehavior.
Once, during a college cultural event, one of our professors became furious and dragged a student out from an almost dark auditorium where a program was going on. At first, I thought the professor had lost his temper for no reason. Later, I learned that such crowded, dimly lit environments were often exploited by a few to behave inappropriately.
When I later moved to Chennai, I found similar patterns — people losing their wallets or phones in “artificially” crowded trains, where pickpockets create chaos to operate unnoticed. While society often talks about men misbehaving in crowded buses, I’ve personally witnessed the opposite too — some women can be just as aggressive or abusive in a crowd.
Now, when we look at certain stampede incidents — as seen in a few videos — we notice that while some people had enough space to lie down on the floor, only a few others ended up losing their lives. Perhaps the real tragedy isn’t the stampede itself, but the “culture” that hides within the crowd.
Disclosure:
The following ChatGPT prompt is used in this blog post:
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