India's Daughters, India's Sons - Part 1

I too saw ‘India’s Daughter’ today. Like the many millions around me have already.

I saw the raw open wound that Jyoti ‘Nirbhaya’s’ parents are still nursing. A wound that will certainly never heal. You and I see the scar, the bleeding, but can we ever, really know what it feels to have it?

What must it feel like to bury a child you had once cradled in your arms and put to sleep on your chest? To have battled the current at every stage to give your daughter wings to fly, only to see them so mercilessly mangled in minutes? To live every day for the rest of your life with the awareness that your little girl, whose tears you couldn’t bear to see, was brutalised till she literally bled to her death? We, the world, most of us at least, will never know the intimacy of that injury. And for that we must all be grateful.

I also saw the men who inflicted this ghastly gash.  Crushed by life every day since they were born, made to feel impotent by the million humiliations that abject poverty thrust upon them. At the very bottom of society’s stratifications. Dreamless, ambitionless, going about their days as if they were the walking dead. There are a handful in that crushing circumstance,  that manage to defiantly dream. Lighting candles of hope, as they take step after painstaking step out on the long road from darkness. Telling themselves and others ‘I am something, I will be somebody.’ But for many, that darkness, hopelessness, is their only familiar friend. Any dream, distant, impossible. Dignity, an alien experience. Their ‘I am nothing’ ness reinforced by life, by their multiple small and large daily subjugations.

What does forced impotence make you want to do? To await opportunities to avenge your accumulated humiliation. To strike back with force, prove to your own ego ‘I am not nothing.’ ‘I am not just a nameless driver, who gets spit on every day. Who drives your children safely to school every day, but whose face you still don’t recognize?’ ‘I am not just a faceless cleaner who has subjected himself to infinite indignities just so I can stay alive and have 2 meals a day”. And what better expression of potency than rape? GANG Rape? An expression of inflamed power, over the momentarily powerless, by the perpetually so. Temporarily empowered by their collective muscle, their individual ‘I am nothing’ anonymity, their alcohol. A bubbling unfocussed rage, fuelled by spirit, ignited by the spark of a mild altercation that scorched an unsuspecting girl’s life and burned the entire nation.  ‘I am not nothing’ was their intent, their message. ‘DON’T MESS WITH ME, I AM SOMETHING.’

We share some of the blame in creating Mukesh Singh and his compatriots.

We all have been culpable of some expression of power over those weaker than us, haven’t we? Of passing down the power ladder, the slights we receive, to those below us. Of saying in our heads or aloud ‘Don’t mess with me, I am somebody’. When we bullied the weaker kid in school, when we took out the humiliation of an office episode by hitting our child at home, or by shouting at the maid or abusing the cab driver, or maybe, even, slapping the spouse? Arrogant in the knowledge that those under us, will dare not retaliate. The outcomes vastly different, the ‘Lakshman Rekha’ drawing at different levels of violence, of social acceptance. Sometimes verbal, sometimes mildly physical, other times aggressively brutal, but the motive, the message ‘Don’t mess with me.”

Every time our lives collide with those of others – whether above, below, or on par with us in our internal power ladder, we have the opportunity to dole out degradation or dignity, of treating people as worthy of respect or as worthy of contempt.  Respect gives the message ‘You are something’, scorn screams ‘You are nothing’. Recurrent disdain reiterates over and over again ‘You are nothing’.

 ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing ’‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing ’‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’ ‘You are nothing’

“YOU THINK I AM NOTHING?”

“DON’T MESS WITH ME. I AM SOMETHING”