SIGH

That was the first word that escaped my lips when I heard of the news. Not Again! Yet Another! Who cares??? I don’t!! The exclamations kept flooding into my mind.

Then a shrug of the shoulders and not a thought for the next few days.

Then I saw the water cannons pummeling the students in front of the monuments built to proclaim our servility to the masters abroad now having been taken over by the masters within. I saw them go again and again towards the barricades where the batons awaited. The masters were deaf. They did not care for the screams and the shouts like they hadn’t cared for the horror that had occurred aboard that bus on the 16th of December as the anguish within turned to whimpers which turned to sweet oblivion. They didn’t care that her insides were now outside. They didn’t care that she lay naked beside the road while their instrument of law and order debated which jurisdiction was in action. It was apathy, no, it was a way of life, a way which had become the norm because rulers thought themselves accountable to void. They did not care but they pretended, that there hearts had been rendered bloodied because of this. All the appropriate things were said but then appropriateness doesn’t get the kind of “newsbite” these days like saying outrageous things. So we had a contest where each ‘statesman’ was trying to ‘inappropriate’ each other. From the son who said that the protestors were ‘dented and painted’ to the Baba who said she should have fallen to her knees and called the demons her brothers and they would have spared her. It was so wrong that it felt right. It was as if the fault was hers, that she was a woman who was there where she shouldn’t have been, that because she had an opening between her legs they had every right to put whatever they wanted in there. Again there was opprobrium, the media was up in arms, How dare they !! how dare they suggest such things to someone they had termed ‘Nirbhaya’, to someone they had put on the pedestal as the heroine for the entire womanhood of this nation, to someone they believed would inspire others to speak up and protest against what was wrong. For a moment then I had hope, hope that this time it would be different, that this time this bloody sacrifice would appease the god of inertia within us all and compel us to move.

Then she was dead.

And slowly the lullaby stopped and we awoke to find that things were much the same as they always were. Another outrage had taken place of this one and the dogs had another bone to latch onto. More than anything though the people had lost their voice because they screamed too loud and too long into a vacuum where sound doesn’t travel at all.

I too am similar, I too yearn the numbness which comes with not caring for anyone but oneself but for what it’s worth I believe nothing can or will change unless we stop treating women as second class citizens, when we stop murdering them within the wombs of their mother and when the parents stop thinking of them as some sort of burden to be got rid of. Only then perhaps we could hope for something more substantial rather than a multitude of sighs.