Friday 11 January 2013

Winter Smiles and Woes

Let me start with the woes (because they came first :P)

About a month ago, I met up with a friend and he asked me for ideas for torture methods for his latest novel. So I thought about what would cause the most excruciating pain. I gave him an answer about two weeks late but the torture method I suggested could scare the living daylights out of the minds of the writers of Criminal Minds. Anyway, I have always known that toes and feet are a sensitive and important and sensitive parts of the human body. It is only this week I realized how sensitive ._.

My feet are mildly frostbitten. What with the temperature dropping to 1.6 degrees here and my feet lacking proper blood circulation, it seems obvious that I'd get frostbitten. But Merlin, this realization doesn't make the mild frostbite any better. My feet itched and hurt so bad that it was almost impossible to walk. I know how I spent three days hobbling around, waking up in the middle of the night because it itched and hurt so bad. But the worst part wasn't the hurt. It was the itch. I couldn't scratch my toes because they were red and blue and swollen and scratching would only make the itch worse. And the level of frustration I had to face was astounding. The itch would go on for hours and I would be on the verge of tears because I didn't know how to make it better. Until the day before yesterday, I didn't know my feet were frostbitten either. Frostbite is the worst kind of torture there is. There is barely anything worse than this. I contemplated ripping out my toes, you know. And to be truthful, that would have been less painful than the itch. Thankfully, before it could come to  that, I saw the sweet doctor (bless his soul) and he gave me medicines for the itching and the pain and assured me that it'll be okay in a week T_T



I had gone for a play called 'Maybe This Summer' last week, until last week, I hadn't seen a good play, you know. If the acting and execution was good, there would be some problem with the script and vice versa. So after I came out of the auditorium after watching 'Maybe This Summer', I said, "I wish I could see a play in which everything's perfect." So apparently, some deity or the other listened to me. Yesterday, I was feeling better as compared to the previous few days. I had made plans to see a play called 'Metamorphoses' with my friends. 'Metamorphoses' was a myth about myths. It is unbelievable until you see it. It basically took from Ovid's 'Metamorphosis'. The play adapted and enacted nine myths from Ovid's works. The actors were absolutely splendid. The spectators were drawn into the play as the whole auditorium was the stage for the actors. The myth that I thought was best enacted was the myth of Erysichthon, a Thessalian king who chopped down the sacred grove of Demeter and was cursed with hunger till he devoured himself. The thing I liked the most about it was when Hunger crawled onto the raised platform in the auditorium to Erysichthon and jumped him. There was a ten second choreography between Erysichthon and Hunger which depicts Hunger devouring the king sensually. I almost had a nosebleed.



Despite my mildly frostbitten toes (and I'm going to deny this if, Merlin forbid, the itching starts again) but I think 'Metamorphoses' made up for my absolutely shitty week.

Till next time, guys! :D


PS- The photos haven't been clicked by me. I take them off the net :P


Thursday 3 January 2013

The Case of 'Damini'

There has been a lot of hype in my country about a recent rape case. Apparently, a girl got raped in a moving bus at 8:30 pm by 6 men. One of them was the bus driver, I think. They made her boyfriend watch her get raped. And she got raped very brutally. As in, they wrenched out her uterus and threw it on the road. She died.

The point of this blog is not to sympathize with the girl (although I do). This blog is about the reaction of the people, rape as a problem and possible solutions to it.

In a country like India, there are too many rapes to keep count of and most of them don't even get reported. This case struck out because it took place in the capital. If it had been in a village, no one would have even known about it, and they wouldn't have lined up in front of a  national monument to avenge the rural victim. I understand that this is because of the lack of awareness of the cases. If people were more aware of the rapes happening around them (especially in rural areas where violence is statistically higher), they'd protest more. But the fact is, stuff like this keeps happening. And the public doesn't even know half the cases. I'm outraged at the extreme reaction of the public to this case, when there are cases similar to this that keep happening in some corner of the country or the other. People have concentrated on this case so much that they don't see anything apart from the punishment for those 6 men. They don't realize that there are  6 million more like them in the country. In an attempt to get justice for the girl, they are ignoring the larger picture of the rapes that happen in the country. 

I would like to make myself clear- I do not, in any way, support the rapists. Having said that, I do think that the public is ridiculous in its demand to castrate/hang the rapists. What good will it do? How will the girl be at peace if her rapists were killed but there were many more roaming around, looking for victims like her?
Instead of thinking rashly, we must realize a few things. And on top of the list is a fact that RAPE IS NOT ABOUT GENDERED VIOLENCE. RAPE IS ABOUT DOMINANCE. I don't understand how anyone can think that people rape exclusively because they're sexually frustrated. That might be true for some deranged cases, but most of the time, raping someone is about feeling powerful. Violating someone gives the rapist a sense of power that might be missing from the rapist's real life. Why do you think most rapists belong to lower classes? They don't have power in their social, political and economic lives. So, they achieve a sense of power missing from their lives by raping people. And honestly,I don't exactly blame them. Who knows- if I was in their position, I might do the same. 

Let's not deceive ourselves here. All of us lust for power in one form or the other. All of us crave subjects to our power. It is actually visible in all kind of structures that exist. For example, your job. Being promoted gives you a sense of elation because you're moving up on the ladder. This means you have more subjects to control and exercise your power on. It makes you feel superior and it feeds your self esteem/ego. But we must think about the subjects too. What about the people who don't have this power in any aspect of their lives? Obviously, this lust for power then manifests in them sexually because they can't have it in any other aspect of their lives. And that's how rape comes into the picture.

Because rape is about power, it becomes a social problem rather than one of law and order. It's not exactly the State's fault if everyone's power hungry, is it? It's a problem that we as a society have to tackle. So, there are two ways we can go from here- not be power hungry or create opportunities so that every person can feel empowered in at least one of the non sexual aspects of their lives. I don't think the former is very likely, but we can brainstorm and try to make the latter possible. 

It won't matter if you get rapists hung or have them castrated or put them under surveillance. It's not going to make a change in the society. The time is past when people could be disciplined by example. We have evolved and none of the old methods of bringing about a change will work now. Unless we can actually see the bigger picture, we will continue to stick to the demands of hanging/castration and blaming the government. And I assure you- in the long run, all these accusations and demands will lead us nowhere. Hanging/castration are immediate and shallow solutions to a problem that is much bigger in nature. If we have to eradicate rape as a problem, we need to pull it out from its roots and not just trim it.