No, I don't think there is an end to these godawful rapes anywhere in sight. (Monday April 22 headlines: “Three more minors raped in Delhi, protests snowball” and “Brutality in MP village, 4-yr-old raped.”) No, I don't think the protests against the police and politicians will change anything. Because I think the real problem is simultaneously wider, deeper, and infinitely more intractable than the police can ever hope to address, even if they were so inclined.

In the Mumbai suburb of Santacruz on Wednesday April 3, 43 homes were destroyed. These were apparently illegal.

In the rather more distant Mumbai suburb of Mumbra on Thursday April 4, an entire residential building, seven floors tall, was destroyed. The building was apparently illegal.

At lunch, N is slumped on the table, her food untouched, her face slack, completely unresponsive. From across the room, I watch her friends, some of them also ill, unsuccessfully coaxing her to eat. After a while, I walk over.

“She’s not eating,” one says. “She can’t even sit straight!” Sure enough, when I try to speak to her, her head lolls back and her body crumples against mine, to the point that if I step back she will fall off her stool. Nothing registers. This is N’s second episode like this in two days, and this time the resident doctor is seriously worried. Better take her to the emergency room, he advises.

It’s just a nondescript shed. But if there’s a more telling descriptor of my city’s essence, of a certain schizophrenia that runs in the veins of some of us who call this place home, I have yet to find it. Tucked on a quiet lane between Elphinstone College and the National Gallery of Modern Art, the shed is smack in the middle of the buzzing downtown precinct where most tourists in Bombay—yes, I call the city Bombay—mill about. Yet it’s a good bet most of them haven’t even heard of it.

If you go, put your eye to a hole that’s at about chest level. Let your vision adjust to the darkness. You’ll notice a button. A coat. A uniform. A man in that uniform. Behind him, a second man in uniform, wearing one of those colonial-era pith hats. Two larger-than-life statues are housed in this unassuming little shed, dusty and cobwebbed.

Leave aside the death-penalty critics, possibly his family too. Is there anyone in India who is both aware of the ghastly gang rape in Delhi in December, and who didn’t want its main accused (yes, and each of his partners in rape) to pay with his life?

I’d say, no. “Try the guy, sure, but make sure he gets the death penalty; then hang him, preferably in public”: arguably, that was the sum total of the sentiment about Ram Singh since he was first arrested for that crime.

My government decides to execute a man who was condemned to death some years ago. My government has a fuzzy impression that perhaps his family should be informed. So my government writes a letter to them—they live in a town in Kashmir—seals it and hands it to its own postal service to deliver.

Wonder of wonders, it is delivered. Just over 48 hours after he is executed.

Another day, another movie protested/banned/censored/take your pick. India is the world’s largest producer of feature films, their stars some of our biggest icons, their songs instant hits that are sung by youth all over the country. Yet India is also home to an inordinate number of people who take offense at scenes in films and want them cut. So vocal are they—clearly more vocal than free-speech advocates—and often so ready to threaten violence, that they usually get their way.

The most recent case is the Tamil film Vishwaroopam (Image of the World), apparently some kind of thriller about terrorism (no, I have not seen it). Some Muslim groups have protested, saying it has portrayed Muslims poorly and thus “hurt their sentiments.”

Dec. 29, 2012: the day the Delhi gang-rape victim died, nearly two weeks after she was attacked. The same day, too, that Rahul Gandhi "broke his silence on the ghastly incident": "My heart goes out … We as a nation must reflect … deep-felt condolences … thoughts and prayers with the family."

Nothing wrong with those words. But consider that those two weeks had seen a groundswell of public outrage building and eventually exploding on Delhi's streets, an upsurge that had echoes all over the country and would cascade into the New Year. There was frustration at the failure of police to make our streets safe for women, resentment of public attitudes that make such crimes conceivable, anger at the working of justice that makes punishment for rape a shamefully rare event, and much more.

There is no aspect of this sad, sordid episode that does not grate. Not even what happened after her death. She was gang-raped on a Delhi bus on Dec. 16, and died in Singapore nearly two weeks later. One report speaks of the police “rushing” the family “to get the cremation done before sunrise” and that they “asked the victim’s neighbors to stay away from her house.” Two thousand policemen were in place to add teeth to these requests. By themselves, these might, just might, have been seen as reasonable measures. But in a two-week spell during which nearly every government move has been graceless and ham-handed, this was just more of the same. The prime minister’s reading of a prepared statement on the attack ended with a “Theek hai?” (“That OK?”) to technicians, promptly and widely ridiculed as evidence of his glaring disconnect from popular sentiment. The police apparently saw fit to brutalize people, women included, protesting this ghastly crime—thereby only compounding the impression of their contempt for ordinary citizens. Some higher-up made the decision to fly the young woman to Singapore for treatment, setting off more angry speculation: Are our hospitals not good enough? Was this more political than medical? Should the criminals now be flown to Saudi Arabia for punishment? And the home minister probably took the wooden spoon for his stupid—no other word fits—equation of protesters to Maoists. And now her cremation was handled clumsily? Tell us something new, please.

But if the ham-handedness was bad, the details of what happened to the woman were monstrous. As a reminder of what can happen to women who simply want to go out on the town, they bear repeating in every gruesome detail. She and a male friend caught an evening film at a South Delhi mall. Wanting to head home afterward, they climbed into a bus that stopped for them. According to media reports, six men on the bus, including a minor, began taunting and then assaulting them with an iron rod. They beat the male friend into submission, then took the woman to the back of the bus. There, they beat her. They bit her. They raped her. They shoved the rod into her. They did that last with such venomous force that they pulled out her intestines—one of the men even noticed a “ropelike object” spilling from her body. They carried on this appalling assault for nearly an hour, as the bus reportedly went on a joyride across the city, careening without pause through at least a few police blockades designed to detect and prevent terror. At a highway intersection near the airport, perhaps finally tiring of their blood sport, they reportedly threw the couple—unconscious, stripped of their belongings and clothes—into the freezing Delhi night. That’s where a passerby eventually found them and called the police.

You might think this was an exceptionally revolting incident. One of Malcolm Gladwell’s “outliers,” if you will. Yet if that’s true—and I’m not sure it is—there’s also this simpler truth: for many Indian women, molestation and worse are everyday realities, the stuff of daily news reports. It is no exaggeration to say that. It is no exaggeration to know that blindfolded you could stick a pin in a map of India and likely stumble on a recent report of a rape there. (For example, as I write this my symbolic pin pierced Barmer, Rajasthan, where three men gang-raped a 13-year-old 10 days after the Delhi crime.) Put it all together and the magnitude of this menace is every bit as frightening as what happened on that bus. And this is why the ultimate lesson this episode holds for us Indians is about what makes too many men think they can get away with perpetrating these horrors on women. Beyond anger and grief, this is about our attitudes toward women. About the urgent need to rethink them. Much as recent American massacres are stimulating debates on gun control, this Indian abomination must set off this process of introspection. Or she will have died not just horribly, but entirely in vain.

In the US, it’s a horrific massacre with guns. In India, it’s a nightmarish rape and beating of a young couple in a bus. In my years in these two countries I’ve called home, no crimes cause as great a surge of outrage, followed by anguished introspection, as ones like these do.

There’s outrage, but there’s no end to these atrocities. There may never be. In a two-week stretch last July, we saw an Indian assault on a woman and an American gun massacre. In a two-day stretch last week, we saw … an American gun massacre and an Indian assault on a woman.

On Twitter on Dec. 6, some folks were trying hard to make the tag #ShauryaDiwas trend. “Day of Valor” is what that means in Hindi, and it is a reference to Dec. 6, 1992, when a vast crowd tore down a mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya. I have no doubt that the tag did trend, because there are a whole lot of Indians who actually feel it was an act of bravery. They are proud that it happened. Proud at their redeemed “self-respect.” Proud of the destruction. Proud of that crowd.

Example: the late Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray told the press at the time, “If my [party activists] had brought down the mosque, then I could only be proud of them.” Example: various leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had led the political movement around the mosque, were in Ayodhya that day, watching its destruction. Several, including a future chief minister of the state of Rajasthan, Vijayaraje Scindia, “were laughing in great delight.”

My wife teaches French to tenth-grade students at a private school here in Mumbai. During one recent class, she asked these mostly upper-middle-class kids to complete the sentence “J'admire …” with the name of the historical figure they most admired.

To say she was disturbed by the results would be to understate her reaction. Of 25 students in the class, 9 picked Adolf Hitler, making him easily the highest vote-getter in this particular exercise; a certain Mohandas Gandhi was the choice of precisely one student. Discussing the idea of courage with other students once, my wife was startled by the contempt they had for Gandhi. “He was a coward!” they said. And as far back as 2002, the Times of India reported a survey that found that 17 percent of students in elite Indian colleges “favored Adolf Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have.”

In August 2001, a politician in Thane, the sprawling city northeast of Mumbai, died in the Singhania hospital there. His name was Anand Dighe. He must have been some kind of popular figure in Thane, because when the city got news of his death, a crowd of his supporters "spontaneously" expressed the "grief."

What form did this expression take?

Well, they looted and burned a garment store nearby. They siphoned out the fuel from several parked ambulances, then overturned them and set them on fire, along with 30 cars and three buses. They beat up several journalists, though two particularly intrepid ones escaped the thrashing by feigning death. (This is true.) As if all this wasn’t nauseating enough, they attacked the hospital and went after its nurses. No, it’s worse still. They went after its patients. One, suffering from renal failure, had been in the ICU bed next to Dighe. He had to rouse himself and run for his life through the hospital, hiding with the terrified nurses behind locked doors. “I had given up hope,” his son told the press later. “I thought I would lose my father.”

In crisp khakis, the cop stands at the head of a raggedy line of about 20 of us aspirants. Each one reaches him, he scribbles something on their form, he waves them on to one of two cars beyond him. The line moves quickly, so I'm standing beside him before I've had time to ponder exactly what he's doing, and then I get my answer.

He asks my name, checks it, and writes "passed" on my form, and that's it. I'm stepping past him, waiting for the car. "That one", says someone else, and I walk over to the open driver's door, conscious that the cop's paying me no mind. He's already focused on writing "passed" on the guy behind me’s form.

In the passenger seat, there's a man, buttoned-down shirt and furrowed brow. He hisses, "Don't touch that!" as I reach to move the seat belt so I can sit down. So I sit, and he hisses, "Don't touch that!" as I put my hands on the steering wheel. So I leave the wheel alone and he hisses, "Don't touch that!" as I reach for the gear shift. So I rest my hands in my lap and he hisses, "Don't touch those!" as my feet move, of their own volition, as any driver's feet would, move towards the pedals.

The astonishing thing is, there’s so much to hold the lady accountable for. What did she do to punish party colleagues who led mobs in massacring Sikhs after Indira Gandhi was assassinated? Will her party ever get over its obsession with her family—or is it just the name? Or are we forever to be blighted with dynasty? When do we get the truth about the Bofors gun scam of the 1980s, which named the then–prime minister, her husband?

There’s more, too, about Sonia Gandhi, chief of India’s Congress party. Yet come election time, her political opponents prefer to whack quite different horses. Like now, when the state of Gujarat is gearing up to vote in December. Its chief minister had Gandhi in his sights at an election rally the other day. Over three years, pronounced Narendra Modi, her trips to foreign lands for medical reasons cost taxpayers 18.8 billion rupees ($360 million at current exchange rates).