The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday 10 April 2012

ANOTHER FALAK LIKE CASE – WHY THE WORD FOR HOPE BECOMES A SYMBOL OF DESPAIR


Falak is a nice word. It has the tenacity to mean something positive in everyone’s life – for it means the SKY – of hope and of endless possibilities.

But since January, the word has been a grim testimony to the atrocities against the better part of our existence – yes, the gender crime incidents against women continue unabashed.

The baby who was brought to the Trauma Centre of All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi left all of us after fighting with pain and injuries for many days. From battered baby of AIIMS, she had become centre of everyone’s prayers who came to know about her. She was named Falak by the hospital staff and they made every possible effort to sustain the hope to keep her alive.

Falak’s case will always remain a blot on us, questioning how cruel we can be, for, it was the sin of women and girl-child trafficking and the mental agony of a minor-aged victim who battered the baby in a fit of rage after finding herself staring at nowhere midst the ordeal of being an object in the sex trade.

Delhi is India’s capital city but it is just yet another Indian city reflecting the Indian mentality of garbaged dogmas – though such cases were being reported even before Falak’s case came to light - their run continued in the city even after the national cry on Falak’s plight. There have been over 10 cases of abandoned babies and minor girls raped killed in past three months.

And when this is the sorry state of affairs in India’s capital city, the thought of misery in other parts is just shivering, for, every regional formation in India is full of cases of gender discrimination. So we come across reports of female foetuses found dumped in dustbins in Rajasthan; so we have many researchers from abroad studying the catastrophe of underage and highway sex workers in almost every part of India; so we have deteriorating sex ratio after every annual population count; so we have ever-increasing numbers of female foeticides; so we have ever-increasing incidents of honour-killings, dowry deaths and lynching of women branded as witches; so we have regular reports of gangrapes in India’s supposedly safest area, its National Capital Region; so we have archaic practices of minor marriages continued; so we come across another Falak like case, this time, in Bangalore, yet another progressive, cosmopolitan Indian city.

A three month old baby Afreen was badly hit by her father who was unhappy over his wife delivering a girl-child. With severe internal head injuries, the baby is now fighting for life in a government hospital of Bangalore.  

Premise of the cases, in Delhi and Bangalore, is different, but it underlines the eternal question mark on values of our survival as a just human society.

Falak’s case is an outright offshoot of women trafficking.
Afreen’s case is representative of the narrow-mindedness of human existence in patriarchal societies like India.

But rascals in every such case are the menial creatures who somehow have come to dominate the social weaving, manipulating it for their selfish gains, believing in the fizzy castles of male superiority. They are to be forcefully thrown out but who will do it when the whole system is polluted by them. A recent report by the Country Mission to India Christof Heyns, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions says the cultural killing of women in India has social sanction. Though the report is in the context of honour-killings, dowry-deaths and women being branded as witches, it tells of an all-pervading male dominated dogmatic mindset that always tries to exercise its influence making legal remedies almost unavailable to the victims.  

Urbanizing India is still largely rural. And when almost of the urban pockets are witnessing the rising bar of the crime graph against women, we don’t need the statistical expertise to realize the ground reality in smaller towns, villages and remote areas.

Cases of atrocities against women continued even when Falak’s plight had become a national cry. The whole of India debated and prayed but where was the action on the ground?

The hope floats again whenever some atrocity becomes a national cry, for there is that rare chance of taking tough action on ground to check the menace then. Once again, that could not be.

It is an irony that a word like ‘Falak’ comes to remind us of despair instead of hope.

How many more incidents do we need to see before we act?

We need some immediate purging. We need some drastic measures now to changes our mindset.

Men and women, they jointly sustain the creation but we need to realize woman is the better part of the creation, for, men may support it but women sustain it.

How come, we have drifted so far from this fundamental dictum of human civilization?

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/