The Horror Of It All

It’s all going to the dogs. Everything is more heinous, more amplified, more disgusting. Scams are not in the hundreds of crores, they’re in the hundreds of thousands of crores. Politicians are not dimwitted, they’re fuckwitted. Sycophancy has made way for a disgusting pride filled slavery. Outrage has ceased to be meaningless and now has a veneer of fashionable impotence. Normalcy was once forced, but is now looked forward to with an anticipation that expedites it as much as it wants it.

The bone-chilling gang rape of a girl in Delhi has caused the entire country to unite for a common cause that, like corruption, goes beyond the petty boundaries of religion, class, race. And yet even in our unity, we remain selective. We choose not to highlight the horror of a four year old toddler who was raped, killed and thrown on the railway tracks. We choose to put our tears on display to perfection. The Delhi CM cried in an interview over this girl’s miserable plight. And yet her office also granted parole to a convicted killer who thought a girl’s life was only valuable if she served him drinks. For every Aarushi that became the poster girl for candle light vigils, a thousand more were lost in the same ashes they were born in, without any mention in as much as an obituary.

I tweeted that the rapists should be castrated to make them understand what ‘loss’ means, what it means to feel ‘powerless’. Will that really work? I’m just treating the symptoms. This wasn’t the first gang rape. It won’t be the last. It’s not about setting sights on a perceived weakling and taking advantage. The real animal lies in the BELIEF that you can do so. It lies in the CONVICTION that you have the right to. It lies in the FACT that you can do what you want and get away with it.

Men believe they can overpower a girl because they’re brought up as the stronger sex. Before they prove it, they’re told they hold the power and position of being the stronger ones. Those who are also taught the responsibility behind it grow up to become the cleaner face. Those who feed that power ultimately become its slave and morph into the vulgar face. It doesn’t stop there. The minute a son sees a father insulting his wife, talking trash to his sister or daughter, disrespecting his mother, he’s convinced his power gives him the right to behave and act as he pleases. That it’s his right to treat the women in the house a little better than slaves and to keep them under his thumb. That’s when things start getting ugly. He looks around and sees a system run by the corrupt. He sees that the police are the ones people actually need protection from, that they’ll sell themselves for a wad of notes stuffed in their pockets and mouths. He sees that even if he ‘may’ get arrested for his actions, he will be released on a paltry bail, he might pressurize the victim to drop the case, or in the worst case scenario, the case will take ages in the sewers of our rotten Justice system. The comfort of these facts is the steroid he needs to break free. The animal is unleashed.

And then there are the cynics. Oh God the cynics. Those aspiring stand-up comedians on twitter who think they’re the Superman of wit and humour. Who think that anything and everything can be made fun of. Who in their infinite wit and wisdom do not know that boundaries exist and need to be respected. Sometimes I genuinely wish harm on these jokers. I want them to be subjected to similar conditions and find humour in it. They’re joined by those doubters with a perennial question about intentions, actions and outcomes. The kind of people who take up the easiest job of demotivating those who believe. The kind of sadists who plant seeds of doubt in others’ minds and nurture them into poisonous fruit bearing vines.

One of these days it will come to a point where a single act will start a chain of event, a domino tipping another and shaping a pattern that will change the face of this nation forever. What face emerges, the cleaner or the vulgar, will depend on where you and I are at that moment, when we reclaim our country from these dogs. And we will have to be in the thick of the action because we’re accountable to our children, and their children too. Because sooner or later, they’re going to ask a single question with tears in their eyes that we better have an answer to.

They’re going to ask us how the hell did we fuck up so bad?

DELTA1