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..
