I remember having seen a brutally sensational movie, about a decade back.The intentionally futuristic movie , narrated in an almost mythical but grossly spine-chilling fashion, was one of a woman getting married into a womanless family and subsequently being brutalized by the men of the family. The story had the backdrop of a town, which had this traumatized girl as the sole woman member.
Today, when I keep coming across newsbits ( I squirm at the concept of 'updating' myself ) about lexicon-defying and human-behaviour-defying attrocities against women, I wonder whether the film was a clear prophetic paradigm. And I, for my part, have been at tremendous unease , although the post-Godhra riots and the post-partition upheavals were not unknown to me. The mere sight of a truckload of ironbars makes me traumatically break into bouts of sweats. What I am penning down is, probably an attempt at a sublimational release. Within a couple of months of a gruesome brutality wrought upon a student of physiotherapy in December 2012 ( I refuse to classify it as mere rape ), an entire Pandora's box , an entire can of loathsome worms seems to have been left
open. And out is spewing an unending volley of similar crimes, each gorier in degree than the previous one. A pregnant woman raped and then stabbed several times. A disgruntled lover shoving an iron rod down his paramour's mouth. Or a goon threatening a harrassed woman with a fate similar to that of Nirbhaya , as if the incident was a standard, a prototype . I shudder at the thought that crimes similar in magnitude and manner would be termed as 'Nirbhayad', just as castration got a new nomencaltural identification as 'Bobbitized' !
On one hand, it has woken up the equanimous and the less inhumane among us, out of their reverie to understand the vulnerability of the human body and psyche. On the other, you almost fume in indignation and ask whether it has to be at the cost of what a nubile
23 year-old had to go through for what would have seemed to her as epochs. On one hand we raise our voices against female foeticide, while on the other you wonder as to whether a woman has to aspire for a better life or to choose a better mode of dying !
Is it a case of one sex against another ? Or as a 'well-meaning'
( let's give him the benefit of doubt ) political leader stated, a case a migrants against locals. I doubt this. For, the victim as well as the perpetrators of the crime were not locals. Sounds trite, but it is definitely a case of sanity, rendered weak due to minority in sheer numbers, losing a gory battle against insane and depraved brutality, strengthened by sheer numbers again.
What comes to my mind is a case study that exemplifies Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection, in which he propounded the paradigm of 'survival of the fittest'. It is about two sets of moths, grey ones and black ones, in Birmingham, with the grey ones being larger in number in the pre-Industrial Revolution era , due to their ability to camouflage themselves against predators, among the clusters of fungi that formed a thick patina on the barks of trees. But the Industrial Revolution changed the scenario, what with soot spreading itself all over the trees. In the following few years, genetic mutations in the following generations ensured a step-by-step conversion of the grey moths into black ones. So much so that black moths became almost extinct in that geographical region !
Should I nurse the temerity of prophesizing a similar change in the structure of human population ?
No comments:
Post a Comment