A video from a Shillong street during New Year celebrations has gone viral for an unusual reason. A foreign tourist is seen dancing freely, and a loose circle of men stand around her without touching her, crowding her, or interrupting her unbridled joy. No one turns the moment into something else. The internet responded with wonder. Headlines followed, praise poured in.
What is striking, though, is not what happened but what didn’t.
No one groped her. No one filmed her intrusively. No one treated her presence as an invitation. That absence of harm, restraint mistaken for heroism, is what turned an ordinary moment into national news.
A person dancing with many around her should not require applause, nor provoke astonishment. Yet the video from Meghalaya landed like a minor miracle. That reaction says less about the men and more about how deeply conditioned we are to expect the opposite — interference, intrusion, entitlement — especially when a woman takes up space in public.
Much of the praise has focused on the men in the crowd, with language that frames the moment as one of “protection”. But protection from what, exactly? From dangers that did not exist until we normalised them elsewhere? Framing restraint as protection recentres male authority over public space, even when no authority was asked for or required. Calling this behaviour protective subtly reinforces the idea that women require guardianship simply to exist outside. In reality, what the crowd displayed was far simpler: they left her alone, and yet they gave her company.
That distinction matters. Respect is not an act of courage or a performance. It should be the baseline. When restraint is elevated into virtue, it reveals how low the bar has sunk.
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Normal shouldn’t be a compliment
The speed and scale of the video’s virality can be owed as much to collective relief as to admiration of how rare such unpoliced freedom has become. Viewers reacted with relief that nothing untoward happened. Women applauded the rare, unpoliced freedom the woman enjoyed in a public space. Men were praised for doing what should never have been optional. The gratitude was genuine, but it was also telling. It reflected years of exhaustion, where safety has become something to be thankful for rather than entitled to.
And when the media rushed to package the clip as a feel-good story, it inadvertently reinforced the very problem it sought to counter. When basic decency is framed as extraordinary, it confirms the assumption that public spaces are naturally hostile and that civility is an exception worthy of headlines.
There is another risk, too, in how quickly the story was regionalised. Shillong, and by extension the Northeast, was held up as morally distinct — better behaved, more respectful. While the appreciation may be well-intentioned, it flattens complexity. It turns a city into a symbol, a corrective for the rest of the country, rather than asking why such behaviour is not expected everywhere. Exceptionalising respect allows others to evade responsibility. If decency belongs to a place, it doesn’t have to belong to us.
Perhaps the most radical thing about the video is how unremarkable it should have been. A woman dancing alone, without explanation, without supervision, without consequence, is still rare enough in India to feel transgressive. Female joy in public continues to attract scrutiny, interpretation, and policing. That is why the video lingered. It briefly showed what normal could look like.
The conversation, then, should not be about celebrating men for behaving themselves or acting as guardians. We must interrogate why such moments feel newsworthy at all. Why our expectations of public behaviour are so low that clearing them becomes cause for collective amazement.
If there is a lesson here, it is not that the men in the clip did something special. It is that the rest of us have become accustomed to something deeply and systemically broken. Viral clips of men showing restraint should not be the goal. It should be a country where videos like this are boring, where no one feels compelled to comment, share, or applaud, because nothing unusual happened.
Normal should not be a compliment. It should be a demand, a standard.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)