This morning, or more correctly some time in between late last night and this morning, at some point when brain slips to a kind of delirium, when images that we have seen past but can't be irretrievably relegated to the inner folds of memory start circling around you, I was thinking of the girl child.. ..Just the other day, while coming back from a business travel, my co-passenger was a girl surely past her teens and possibly into her mid twenties..a very intelligent girl - not the type who is absolutely oblivious of things happening outside of her county, leave alone her country..very sweet and smart, who one would wish had been his or her daughter ..Her first destination was Kathmandu, possibly a Himalayan trek, and then the next few weeks in our homeland..she told me she'd love to travel all over India.
That return flight was a journey of close to 7 hours, and she slept for half the time...and was taking notes from a book when not asleep..probably making preparations for her trip I thought..
One question she did not ask me was about how safe would a girl just past her teens be in India, alone.. probably it is her own surroundings, the nature of her environs or what she'd have seen all around her while growing up, that made her not ask that question.. or she may have been in the know..but if she were to ask that question, what answer should I have given..?
And this morning I happened to read this..coincidental or not, I can't say either way..
Your words, Babita, somehow pierce into my heart..and surely it bleeds..when you write 'bodies lusted and whisked away in the name of love', I shudder to think it could be anyone's dear daughter, lovely sister who a father and a mother would have grown by giving love beyond what they could... but looking at her being disrobed and raped, the collective conscious of the society feigns to be attentive while talking about the stock exchange or TV serials with nauseating detachment.. yes - it is a collective betrayal on what I'd tend to believe, or what my upbringing has taught me to believe, as world's most wonderful creation..
Looking at the whole thing with a kind of impassioned detachment, I'd tend to believe that ours is a society which is hypocrisy personified in the truest sense of the term.. God's own country - it is made out to be. True, it made a good copy for the ad world , but does it mean anything to us? Society which imbibes relief when "my husband/my wife/my children" (sorry - parents not included) are safe, even when our neighbour has lost his entire family.. when our next door neighbour gets physically attacked in broad day light, we tend to close our front door and look at our wrist watch to see if it is time for the 5.30 serial..we have political parties, why political parties we have a reigning Chief Minister at the moment, who outsmarted anyone else in conveniently using the plight of the girl child to ride a popular wave and snatch a political victory, then only to forget the agonies of the girl child and relegate several of those police cases into the convenient oblivion of our collective conscious..
As a society, we have not seen a war being fought..except dawn to dusk strikes and harthals.... We have never seen even a fraction of the agonies of our freedom struggle, or taken part in any kind, yet ashamedly courageous enough declare before the masses in a self congratulatory mode the fruits of our incessant struggle..what has been our collective contribution to any cause, except certain isolated works by individuals - I wonder..
Cry thy beloved country..what else.. at least let your sins get washed off by your tears (unless they are not induced by glycerine)..
Thanks Babita for the strikingly forceful and violently forthright writing..
That return flight was a journey of close to 7 hours, and she slept for half the time...and was taking notes from a book when not asleep..probably making preparations for her trip I thought..
One question she did not ask me was about how safe would a girl just past her teens be in India, alone.. probably it is her own surroundings, the nature of her environs or what she'd have seen all around her while growing up, that made her not ask that question.. or she may have been in the know..but if she were to ask that question, what answer should I have given..?
And this morning I happened to read this..coincidental or not, I can't say either way..
Your words, Babita, somehow pierce into my heart..and surely it bleeds..when you write 'bodies lusted and whisked away in the name of love', I shudder to think it could be anyone's dear daughter, lovely sister who a father and a mother would have grown by giving love beyond what they could... but looking at her being disrobed and raped, the collective conscious of the society feigns to be attentive while talking about the stock exchange or TV serials with nauseating detachment.. yes - it is a collective betrayal on what I'd tend to believe, or what my upbringing has taught me to believe, as world's most wonderful creation..
Looking at the whole thing with a kind of impassioned detachment, I'd tend to believe that ours is a society which is hypocrisy personified in the truest sense of the term.. God's own country - it is made out to be. True, it made a good copy for the ad world , but does it mean anything to us? Society which imbibes relief when "my husband/my wife/my children" (sorry - parents not included) are safe, even when our neighbour has lost his entire family.. when our next door neighbour gets physically attacked in broad day light, we tend to close our front door and look at our wrist watch to see if it is time for the 5.30 serial..we have political parties, why political parties we have a reigning Chief Minister at the moment, who outsmarted anyone else in conveniently using the plight of the girl child to ride a popular wave and snatch a political victory, then only to forget the agonies of the girl child and relegate several of those police cases into the convenient oblivion of our collective conscious..
As a society, we have not seen a war being fought..except dawn to dusk strikes and harthals.... We have never seen even a fraction of the agonies of our freedom struggle, or taken part in any kind, yet ashamedly courageous enough declare before the masses in a self congratulatory mode the fruits of our incessant struggle..what has been our collective contribution to any cause, except certain isolated works by individuals - I wonder..
Cry thy beloved country..what else.. at least let your sins get washed off by your tears (unless they are not induced by glycerine)..
Thanks Babita for the strikingly forceful and violently forthright writing..
7 comments:
Dear Mr. Hari,
Thank you for the encouraging words, and I share your concern as well.I came to kerala to settledown after 7 10 years of studies and working outside the state and i found all my illusions shattered about the plac. we live in a complacent world which is worse than bihar or gujarat eeven. as you rightly said, we are hypocrits as we cloister ourselves within our nano families, harping on achieveents, bankstatements, real estate businesses and buying chunks of gold. the sad thing is that i have also become part of the society and i have lost my power to react after a year of stay. and writing some english poems in a blog is as useless as keeping quiet. knowing these limitations, i still write. this poem was based on a report by vanita on missing women....May be people like us should do something within our reach, in our small little ways...
Dear Hari,
Thiz is the first time I am visiting your blog and reading an article. You have got a nice writing style. Congrats!
May I say a suggestion ? Some of the senteces are too long to understand. could you please take care of this, so that for the readers (like me) it will be more easy to follow what you say.
Thanks for the comments Babita (or are you normally called Marina?). Was out of cyber space for two days and hence the delay in responding.
Most certainly we can think of doing something in our own little ways..whatever within our reach and can be handled by our hands..
Be in touch with me, in case you come across any ideas on this..
Dear അപ്പു:
Thanks for your comments. I certainly take on board your suggestion. I am aware of the long-windedness in my write..sometimes it just happens - probably when the the string of thoughts goes long :) I will certainly bear your suggestion in mind in a positive way..
well said! but what do we do about it? I can only ask and then go on about my life- but at some point I would like to do something.....
and to be honest I have come across some pretty incorrigible statements from a few men (from) Kerala, some even going to the extent of saying that some of the women who were raped asked for it or maybe they even enjoyed it? A lot of corrections have to be done in our society, weren't we matriarchal at some point? Whatever hapenned to that?
Do not know really D, as to what has happened, or has been happening, to the collective psyche of our society. True - ours had generally been a matriarchal/matrifocal or one that can be called 'gynecocratic' - certainly at some phases during the evolution of our society. In our mythology, Mother goddesses were known to be omni-potent and even stronger than gods. Nature is still 'mother nature' for us, but lately things have derailed...something that sociologists ought to put under the scanner.
Thinking of what we are able to do, in however small a way it be, is the starting point of doing - I certainly believe that to be the case. As I said, I am more than willing, and honestly so.
Dear Hari,
Im babitha, marina is just an embellishment that was part of my baptismal vestiges, just added it along the way. In fact I do follow many debates on women in kerala, had been a friend and follower of women's movements in delhi, hyderabad, etc, and id been quite disillusioned in many ways, where lib became the keyword and turned to intellectual pap and male bashing. in fact, i have found many more sensitive men than women working on such issues.But the majority are insensitive and derisive I shud say.
Academic activism somewhere becomes very fashionable a fad and peters away when one is comfortably couched in academics.
here i am im touch with you, lets plunge then...
Post a Comment