So another year ends. The Mayans said that the world would end on Dec 21st. It didn’t. I don’t even know if that is a good thing.
Apple introduced the Ipad mini and Samsung came in with a host of new phones to deplete bank balances across the world. And yet, people couldn’t mass a device that would prevent rape.
I don’t remember if the things that I am gonna list out happened this year or the year before. Sometimes its just good to lose track of time, to flow not knowing each day from the last. Sometimes we should just club 2 years together so that we can think of some positives and not allow the negatives to dominate percentage points. But then technology has not given us the liberty of compressing time – Yet.
Quite clearly it was the year of lows. The Indian public woke up to the overwhelming reality of the sheer impotence of our ruling class. This realization was on the whole party agnostic. Each man in his character white kurtas and designer churidars stood naked in their pot bellies and wrinkled skins for the world to see. Half humans by growth if not by birth, these men in official cars and colonial bungalows and dubious pasts, almost destroyed an entire civilization.
I say almost because they didn’t quite succeed. Not for lack of trying, but because the civilization is too vast for them to destroy forever.
This was also the year that balance sheets and business objectives lost meaning. As they well might when you are faced with a civilization on balance.
Ma Durga and Ma Lakshmi were worshipped in their many avatars. We touched the feet of mothers and blessed our sisters. We made love to our lovers and kissed our daughters, and then when their back was turned, we violated them in a way that destroyed them again and again. We blamed rape on party politics, on short skirts, on tight jeans, on women’s education, on caste schisms , but never on Men’s animalistic tendencies.
Today we celebrate the spirit of the youth and the fight that Nirbhaya put up in 2012. And yet, I am scared that on scratching the surface, we will find a society deeply troubled because of its masochistic past.
Women are second class citizens and third class people. They are objects of pleasure and revenge and nothing else. Has it got something to do with our biology? Seriously, consider this, the very act of conceiving life is so violent.
Even there, it’s the women who are at a receiving end.
Would it have been different women had the little thing that forced its way in? I don’t know….
Throughout history, when we lost everything else, this was the one way we showed our anger…vented our frustrations. Violence is a deep reality of the mail psyche. We may cover it up with education and good thoughts. We may act all genteel and sophisticated, but just below the veneer, just beneath the surface, we are nothing but darkness and sharp teeth.
Its scary being a man in a world dominated by men.
We have to stop blaming women.
Throughout history and mythology, every epic of every hue has said ….Woman is the cause of destruction….
Lets analyze this a little. Draupadi caused the Mahabharata..common refrain…couldn’t be further from the truth. She was stripped in spite of her husbands being there…much like the poor dalit girl is stripped and paraded by the upper castes. Her predecessor, Amba was abducted as if she were a toy and then rejected when the patriarchal society had no use for her. Helen was blamed for the destruction of Troy. Till now, people say that Helen, in spite of being married to Meneleus, had an immoral affair with Paris. Nobody commented, that Maneleus was old and Paris was good looking. Nobody talked about the numerous concubines that Maneleus slept with and the fact that Helen fell in love with Paris.
Nobody said, that this was the silliest reason to destroy a civilization.
And yet that’s what happened.
The entire concept of Sati. There is enough historical evidence to show that much of this was forced. Yet it happened. It didn’t happen because of any great love the woman felt for the man…maybe she did or she didn’t. It happened because throughout the evolution of history, we subjugated them….purposely kept them weak, so we could be stronger.
Sati happened because the other men wanted the dead man’s property. Sati doesn’t find legitimacy in our scriptures. To the best of my knowledge that is.
They could have found an easier way of doing it. But no, men all over, Brahmins and others, decided that roasting a woman alive would give it all a nice little twist. So much so, through the ages, we created an environment when even women of all ages actually approved and venerated the act of Sati.
Think…Indians of all hue and ages…can you really think of something more repulsive?
I can! The act of female infanticide where you drowned a new born baby girl when she was born in milk. Crazy repulsive shit. The maddest bit is that this practice is still in vogue in India. There are people who still actually feel in a way crazy enough to kill a new born baby. By drowning her in milk.
In a society of paradoxes, the act of raping and killing Nirbhaya almost seems benign.
In a society of Khap Panchayats, where girls are not given the right nutrition, leave alone freedom to be educated, it’s a wonder that they have the right to vote, the right to breathe, the right to anything at all. This is a place where Fathers kill daughters for honour….where girls are conditioned from the moment they are born to be second to their brothers.
I laugh at people who say that these are pangs of transition. They say that the Urban milieu is more liberal and Women are actually getting savvier and assertive.
Don’t believe them. I know for sure that the large majority of Urban families are still fighting paradoxes. They still view the girl child as a liability…still labor under tremendous pressure if they cant get their girls married on time.
Crazy….
It will remain till the beast remains.
2013 has to be different.
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