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.

Wednesday 11 September 2013

DELHI GANGRAPE: THE VERDICT AND THE CLOSURE?

..for sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough.. Barack Obama, September 10, 2013 (from his Syria speech) (India timeline – September 11)

I do not have any intention to use these words from yet another highly emphatic Barack Obama speech delivered the Barack Obama way, unambiguous and to the point, but the words somewhere resonated in my thinking while shuffling through the news channels on TV, sifting for the news coverage on the likely announcing of the quantum of sentence in the December 16, 2013 Delhi gangrape case.

In the aftermath of the huge, unprecedented public outrage on the December 16 gangrape, India did pass a tougher legislation but nothing much seems to have changed.

What on paper was done was more than resolutions and statements of condemnation if we go by the printed words, of legislations, of parliamentary discussions, of political promised made in the Parliament, but these measures are simply not enough the unabated wave of crime against women proves.

Closure, the sense of it, the debates around it, if the family of the brave girl is going to get it, if those of the masses who felt at one with the family’s pain are going to get it - the majority is saying in the one voice that only the death sentence to the four accused found guilty of all the charges by a Delhi Fast-track Court can bring closure. The demand was only aggravated after the leniency shown by the System in the case of the juvenile accused, which the reports said, was the most brutal one.


Yes, the family may get its closure the way it is demanding when the quantum of sentence announced on Friday goes its way.

But how can there be any closure that the humanity needs in case of such crime incidents when the root-cause continues. It is in the mindset.

Statistically, crimes against women including rape and murder have increased consistently over the years. Even if we single out Delhi and that too, after the December 16 horror last year, when there has been apparently heightened sense of responsibility from almost every quarter, we come across a frightening set of data that says the first eight months of 2013 have broken the record of 10 years with 1036 rape cases.

It is in the mindset and until that is checked and controlled, there cannot be any closure.

It is not that something so socially demoralizing has happened post the December 16 gangrape that the country (and Delhi) are witnessing higher number of rape cases. It tells us the dark side of humanity was even darker and with increased attention to the crimes against women, some light has started falling on that.

The increased number of reported cases tells us people are coming ahead now to confront the heinous crime shedding the inhibitions of the so-called and planted social stigmas. It also tells us how the governance has been an utter failure that it could not stem the rot even in Delhi, the national Capital of India.

In India, the general perception (and the right perception) that ‘resolutions and statements of condemnation have, simply, never been enough’ is a harsh reality.

And even if that is addressed somehow, it is not going to change anything until the mindset is changed.

We can blame the System, we can blame the politicians, we can blame the governance, but we also need to blame us, the society, vehemently for this.

The rapists are hidden among us only inhabiting the deep-rooted darkness of a criminal mindset.

The light has to be strong enough to weed out this darkness.

Till then, there cannot be any closure in such cases.

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