Diluted Death

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My friend called me this morning. The voice of doom sounds feeble. "My brother Danny* died, Lav". She pauses. I can hear her choking. My friend makes it a point to call me a day before New Year. She always wants to be the first to wish me. This time she has called a day early. Not to wish me. But to tell me that she has lost her only brother. I ask her in a stunned state, parking my car to the side of the road, what happened. Drug overdose.

Danny was young. Very young. He celebrated his 22nd birthday exactly a month ago. Death cannot touch a young man so soon. Not when the parents live to see their only son die before them. Death is cruel, unfair, cold, determined.

Drugs diluted Danny. Death diluted that hope to survive.

I turn the car, and head to be with my friend.

I knew Danny. He was a normal kid on the block – wearing a t-shirt that often had funky messages, loose jeans hanging from his hip, spiked hair that made him look like a rock star, and not to forget his ears pierced and a tattoo on his left arm. Those are fashionable traits for a young man, who appears “Yo” to his pals. The tattoo on his arm was a tombstone with a cross that reads RIP. The prophetic Rest in Peace.

Danny a Product of Culture

Peer pressure forces you to act and behave in conformance. The desire for upward mobility in a social strata forces young kids to be “trend setters”. In the meanwhile, fashion statements of smoking out cigarette fumes in surreal patters, holding a bottle of beer, listening to hard rock, speaking grotesque yet surreal truth about society, life and world, almost in post modern, existentialist manner is a place one starts. Souding deep and philosophical is cool. And then there is social networking that is connected to the cool world all the while.


The Call Centre World

Danny worked in a call centre. Call centre jobs are available to students relatively easy. A tele-marketing job got without too much toil. One merely needs basic education and basic spoken English. The call centre teaches American accented English that adds further to the fashion lingo. What happed to a normal kid on the block like Danny happens to most boys and girls his age. They are allured of money, status, and independence. They quit their studies, because the only driving force is economic independence that they have the means and capacity to exercise independent and responsible choice.

Then comes the world of the Call Centre. High stress. Acute deadlines. Risk of being given a pink slip unceremoniously. Free sex. Fragile, strained, stringed relationships.  Long working hours. Phased out brain. The stress leads to taking measures to ease the pain. It begins with caffeine, a fag, and then graduates to drugs. You live in a muddle. Trying your best to clean it up, and failing constantly.

Danny was put to rehab. He came back home in a few months time. Clinically most people fall into a relapse. So did he. He dressed to meet his friend. What followed after he stepped out of his house, with a promise to his mother that he will be back soon, no one really knows. Until a sedated friend uses Danny’s phone asking his mother to rush to the hospital. He was dead long.

It is IT

Parents feel proud that their children do well. IT has given a new meaning to the traditional way of life. It has juxtaposed two worlds, that are contrary to each - the traditional with the modern. We may feel proud that the IT industry has offered job opportunities to many. But it has also taken away the youth to easy un-introspective careers. It has allured students to abandon a path towards an academic exercise in the promise of earning fat salaries that parents would not have dreamt to earn as much even until retirement.

This tilt in the socio-economic world is forcing many young men and women to a new world view that has given very little time to evolve, grow and develop naturally. The IT world has come too sudden and in a way manipulated the society into a capitalistic and consumerist world.


Messages Left Behind

I am curious at what messages Danny may have left in his public profile. I read through some of the lines that may sounds very post-modern. It leaves me numb. It is a mind of a psychic overdrive? A feeling of grandeur? Is this a result of the constant ebb and flow of the dependence on drugs that brings these fatalistic lines out?

LIFE IS SHORT SO JUST LIVE IT NOT LEAVE IT..........


HAVE FUN ALWAYS N U LL FIND THAT LIFE IS REALLY ROCKING.........


LEAVE UR TENSIONS 4 2MORRO N BE SURE THT 2MORRO NEVER COMES!!!!!!


just remember one thing :


NEVER SEARCH UR HAPPINESS IN OTHERS IT LL MAKE U FEEL ALONE.....SEARCH IT IN URSELF, IT LL MAKE U FEEL HAPPY EVEN WEN UR LEFT ALONE........


Reading the Diluted

I try to fathom what these mean...I find it difficult to crack the codes of the mind that wrote these lines to describe oneself.

May be Danny would have thought he knew what he wrote here . Or did he? Or was it the writings of a mind that was being smoked into nothingness? A reality different from the courage of perseverance? A clarity of the mind without the confusion? Was it a reality of doom where the circle of life was a fateful existence...

Father..i wanna kill you...mother..i wanna fck you


"Father i wanna kill you...mother..i wanna fuck you" is simple....


Kill the father is kill all alien concepts instilled in you..that are not your own.


Fuck the mother is get back to the essence,back to reality..mother..child birth-reality..embrace reality and get ur own concepts.

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PS: The name has been changed to hold on to the memory of a young boy who was loved by all around him.

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The Rape Culture – A Moral Curfew

"...Why does Samuel Butler say, "Wise men never say what they think of women"? Wise men never say anything else apparently."

                                                                                                   Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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The cases of rape, molestation and violence against women never make news. It is not considered a unique story to capture important print. Even if there is a compelling tale, it is tucked into the deeps of neglected pages where reader’s eyes seldom scan.  Then, suddenly from nowhere, there is prime time news covering a story that begged to be heard for sixteen years, of a child molested by the then Inspector General of Police Rathore who drove her to ending her life. She consumed pesticides. She dies. Her dreams of becoming a Steffi Graf go to the grave with her.

He lives on. Promoted to Director General of Police of Haryana. Recipient of the Presidents medal for meritorious service to his land. The epitome of valour, character, defender of law. Then nearly two decades later, the law finally manages to catch up with him. Delicately offcourse. He is sentenced 6 months imprisonment with a surety of 1000 rupees. To top it all, he is granted bail.

We live in a fair world: Molestation and Rape and Theft and Murder are Bailable Offences.

Under the Indian Penal Code, molestation is a bailable offence under section 354 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Under new laws on terrorism, not giving information of a tenant to the local police is made non-bailable under section 188 IPC. Inflicting grievous injury with sharp weapon is bailable under section 324 and 325 of the IPC. The mere possession of a knife is non bailable under section 25 of the IPC Act.
Receiving a bail under the bailable offence, therefore is a right. No application is needed to file for bail. The court grants bail, thinking him fit to be free.

Freedom is the retired DGP Rathore’s greed. He saved himself so long he was in service, using his office to wield power over his victims. He was asked to pay a bond of 1000 rupees. The bond amount merely proves how trivial this case is. It must be noted that the bond amount is fixed depending on the circumstances of the case. This is an old tale of mere molestation. How does it matter if this is a tale of Ruchika. There are unnamed women who have gone her way, without making it to the headlines, long after.



A woman is molested every 26 minutes in this land. Every 34 minutes a woman is raped. Every 42 minutes a woman is sexually harassed. Every 43 minutes a woman is kidnapped. Every 93 minutes a woman is killed. In Punjab alone a woman is raped every six hours. A woman is gang-raped every four days, and yet only 321 rape cases were reported to the police last year. It is all about statistics. It needs to be low. Complaints are not treated as First Information Report (FIR).

The statistics could be much higher. The occurrences of sexual atrocities are coffined in the four walls of the house for fear of victimization and cultural taboo.


Moral Curfew

We live in a RAPE culture. This has now become the norm of our land. There is a moral curfew imposed in our consciousness by the double standards we live in. The moral consciousness is a turncoat that is worn depending on which side of the fence we live. Our parents fail us. Our education system fails us. Our society fails us. These uproars need to be heard not every other decade. Ruchika was expelled from a prestigious convent school stating lack of character and poor morals. The molesters own daughter studied with her, and the school chose to favour the influential. When her brother (who was only 14 years of age) was charged for the sixth time for a spurious thefts, she blamed herself even more. That evening she put an end to her life.

The Language of Rape

Our language teaches us the culture of rape. We fuck the world. The world fucks us. It’s a poignant curse word. Used with passion. It is a favourite curse word of most. Used interchangeably with Screw. The word connotes every meaning of the English dictionary to the force with which it is uttered:

A simple machine of the inclined-plane type consisting of a spirally threaded cylindrical rod that engages with a similarly threaded hole.

A propeller with several angled blades that rotates to push against water or air.

The plethora of Indian “Rape” lingo are equally repelling: “behen chod”, “theri ma ki”, “randi”, “gaand ka ched”, and a countless more words that I shudder to spell here!
 
When such all-pervasive language pervades the grammar of our minds, how then can we have a world free of the act of rape?

The Rape of Innocence

Innocence is raped. Repeatedly. Over and over and over again. There is a moral degradation of our grand “Indian” values. The moral curfew has taken precedence due to the constant percolations of the patriarchal value system that constantly states that men are sexually aggressive and the female is passive and therefore she must be submissive.

Rape and molestation are traditional concepts of male aggression against woman’s sexuality. The definition of rape is when the woman is subjugated against her will. Men who molest children do it with a sedate glee, that their acts are an outcome of social convention, free will, and devoid from a threat of punishment. This drives them to perpetrate violence time over time.

Sexual attitudes and practices are often learnt and not instinctual (as most would believe). In this country, children are raised to believe that boys are stronger than girls, and therefore logically more sexually active and aggressive, while the woman must be passive and submissive. It is also assumed that men cannot control their desires and every woman is taught that she must be the responsible party in any sexual encounter. The rapist gives reasons to why he could not control himself. The woman is blamed for her character. For the clothes that she wears to arouses a man enough to leap on her. Or better still, that he was drunk and knew not what he was doing. Either which way, a woman is at the butt end of life.

Child Molesters Love Children

It is always a known member that turns predator. A friendly person, a kindhearted soul, an ever generous, giving individual – these are qualities that are needed to assure a child that there is no monster behind the benign smile. This smile has been with Rathore, since the time he called her to his office on the pretext of encouraging her to take up a tennis coach. She did not know that Rathore had intentions otherwise. He was after all the president of the Haryana Lawn Tennis and a man earnest to help her take her sport to the next level.

He did what every child molester does. Offer candy.

A Thought Every day

Not a day goes by without the thought of feeling that you are scanned by searching eyes, groping you, fantasising about you. The eyes follow you everywhere. You step in a crowded bus and you are rubbed, touched, felt and teased. You step in a rickshaw, and you may see exhibitionism at your face. There is no place that is free from these glares.

There is not another thought that does not surface- the fear of rape. Day after day. After day.

The curfew is imposed. The men are out and women are “curfew-ed".

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Girl Child Day

A woman is to a man what a slave is to a master
                                                            - Plato

It may be that Plato articulated the master-slave relationship as he saw it. It may be that Plato believed it, for that was the norm. Centuries have passed. Woman is seen in realtion to man. Slavery is abolished. Or is it? Woman is the Second Sex.

 “...what particularly signifies the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.” (Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex).

The conditioning of the Second Sex, the other, the female, takes place soon after birth. She may grow up without feeling the distinctions of her sex or her power to explore the world like the male child of her age, but as she becomes bolder, assertive, articulate, she falls trap of the gender conditioning. She then grows away from the realization of what she was when she started out. The memory of her A-Sexual being is long forgotten. She begins to align her life into the nuances of the masculine world.

The XX Chromo

A woman's world is fractured from the time of conception. It starts from the very stage when rapid cell division takes place. When the mutation of chromosomes begins, sex determination sets forth. The survival game begins. In the world of the XY, the chance of the XX surviving is bleak.

Gender inequality takes covert ways to bring about a masculine order. The dichotomy between the Male and female to survive kicks in – and mostly, even if the female foetus is far more resilient, the chances of survival in a patriarchal world is bleak. The female foetus, it is scientifically proved, has lesser chance of miscarriage then male foetus. But once born, survival becomes a wild game. Nutrition and health care is always given far lesser priority. The male child is fed better and more frequently. The girl child may not survive her third birthday.

Step into a rural village in India. Female infanticide – a systematic killing of the girl child at or soon after birth is prevalent. Even if a child survives the pangs of coming to birth, she may not survive her fifth birthday, as she has every chance of dying of malnutrition. Her brother gets all the attention and the nutrients to allow him to survive. It makes economical sense for the family to protect, nurture the male child – he will grow strong to be able to earn and provide for the family.

Missing Women – Gender Fixing

Over 100 million women are "missing" worldwide and it is argued that over 50 million women are missing in India alone. This gender fixing continues unabated. Dr Amartya Sen’s study of the missing women in a British Medical Journal in 1992 paved the way for a thorough examination on gender discrimination.

The female ratio in Karnataka is below 930 (per 1000 men) in places like Bijapur, Gulbarga, Bagalkot, Bidar, Belgaum, and Bangalore Rural. I make mention of this because I have seen this trend far closer in the areas of Bagalkot (Badami)when working on the flood relief activities.

Child marriage, unequal education opportunities, discrimination in employment, victimization due to caste and creed, persistent domestic violence, lack of property rights all adds up to the early exit of the woman. They perish also from lack of health care.

A New World Order

A woman can only be an agency of change for her own sex. Women who have arrived at the scene of change need to be the harbinger of more change. Independence to a woman is got through her purse. This can only be true, if education is made available to every girl child. Educate a woman, her entire family is educated. This broadens the horizon of the house she lives in. Thus the change peculates to the neighbourhood, to the village and then to the world.

Woman needs to be the agent of her own change.

To the girl child erased from the face of the earth...
To the woman who knows her then, and realizes her now...
To the woman of change...
To the woman who remains a child in her heart...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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