Dichotomy of the Black Dot

Yesterday morning when I woke up and read the news of the delhi gang rape girl passing away, I was numb..I was sure that she would live, and these protests would die down gradually...and she would b forgotten like so many other victims of this barbaric act...A flurry of messages poured in on social networking sites, condemning her death and abusing the inept government...I still was numb, with fear, sadness and anger at the fate of this girl who fought bravely for more than 10 days for a mistake she did not even know- of boarding the wrong bus! She was one among us, leading a normal life...studying, going out for movies with friends...she could have been anyone, my sister, my friend or a colleague...last night I could not sleep, thinking about the atrocities she had to undergo for an hour, the pain she wud have felt...the anger her family and friends wud have suppressed at the media glare and politicalization of the sufferings of their loved one. She may have passed away to a better world, but her soul will not rest in peace until we ensure that no other girl has to go through what she did.

It took the life of an innocent girl to bring us Indians out of our sleep. And the sad part is, instead of initiating social reforms in our medieval society, our policy makers and the self proclaimed social intellectuals are trying to hog the limelight in the current media frenzy on this issue. Our first duty to the poor girl should be to let opportunistic people play politics over her dead body! Women get raped daily in India, and most are not even reported. And we have such a long list of the ones which are reported that even memory hardens after a while, thinking about the history of violence against women in India. This girl somehow became the tipping point of our tolerance and inaction, the one whose battered body symbolised the pain and damage inflicted on women's bodies all over India, whose rapes and deaths are turned to footnotes in newspaper as soon as the concerned people get leverage out of it. Most of these deaths or rapes didn't shake us but this one got through our armour of our 'theek hai' attitude. The grief of her death hit harder than anyone expected. This anonymous girl had a name of her own one day (not Nirbhaya, Damini or whatever the media gave her as if the rape defined her identity), and a life to lead..the life we lead today. By putting up the picture of a black dot, we have acknowledged finally that humanity is dead today.But god did not take her to make us realize this...Her death should mean to us much more than that, it should show us the monster lurking within all of us.

The guys who raped her were the type of people we interact with daily. Statistics on rapes tell us that most rapes are committed by people who are an acquaintance of the victim. It is not a handful of evil men, like the delhi case makes us believe, but the work of extremely common men who carry out such acts of violence against women. We have bred a culture of misogyny and valorize it, the popularity of Honey Singh's songs being an example of how we men think. He, who speaks about taming today's independent and liberated women, is a youth icon! Songs with crass lyrics like Fevicol, Shiela ki Jawaani or Chikni Chameli are chartbusters. Our cinema popularizes voyeurism, by objectifying women through their inappropriate camera angles showing heaving breasts, shaking bottoms and swivelling navels; and we do enjoy it, don't we? This mass culture accurately reflects the values of a son-worshipping society in which large-scale violence against women is seen as entirely legitimate, running the gamut from street harassment to female foeticide. And mind you, policing can’t change a culture that produces and legitimises violence against women. It may successfully mitigate the threat occassionaly but there is no reason to believe that more police checkpoints will deter rapists, as projected by media. 

I believe that I am one among those 90% stupid Indians that Justice Katju was speaking about one day. I am stupid because I feel that writing this note and telling people about my feelings is going to make a difference. I am stupid because I still believe that we as a society are not beyond repair,and that the big black dot can be separated from the whote backdrop. The demands for more police vigilance and an effective justice systems will not suffice if we wan't to tackle this menace of rape. To quote a recent article in The Hindu by Praveen Swami- "Fixing the police and the justice system, thus, will achieve only so much — and that so much is not a great deal. The real battle is one that women’s organisations have fought to address for decades — to change the ways in which men relate to women; to create a culture of masculinity that does not involve subjugation. For progress to be made, we must begin by acknowledging this one fact: the problem isn’t the police, the courts or the government. The problem is us."  And hence, the change has to begin from us, in the manner how we see our women. If there comes a day, when every girl in this nation feels safe to wear whatever she likes and go out of her house at any time of the day, the soul of this anonymous girl would rest in peace. Till then, let Pink Floyd's 'Coming back to Life' haunt and torture our conscience...

Where were you when I was burned and broken

While the days slipped by from my window watching

Where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless

Because the things you say and the things you do surround me

While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words

Dying to believe in what you heard

I was staring straight into the shining sun 

Lost in thought and lost in time

While the seeds of life and the seeds of change were planted

Outside the rain fell dark and slow

While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistible pastime

I took a heavenly ride through our silence

I knew the moment had arrived

For killing the past and coming back to life 

I took a heavenly ride through our silence

I knew the waiting had begun

And headed straight..into the shining sun