After the cataclysm comes the desperate, collective hunt for catharsis. And since that will always prove elusive in a real, enduring sense, at least a modicum of sense-making. We’ve been witnessing a near-eruption of sex crimes in public—women being chased by droves of yahoos during New Year-eve revelries, recalling some primordial ‘war loot’ scene, turning Bangalore’s strobe-lit Brigade Road into its own photographic negative; a young woman accosted on a dark bylane by two scooter-borne men, and left reeling afterward like a used plastic bottle; another woman mobbed by ‘students’ on a busy Delhi street…. And we can only guess at the countless many that went unrecorded (and thus escaped being circulated and consumed voyeuristically in video form).