to read or not to read

i haven't written much in several days now and i feel a bit cranky. probably because writing is one of the things that helps me to know who i am and what i really want at any moment. 

i have been reading a lot for my coursera course on sci-fi and fantasy. our first text is grimm's tales and i am really hating wading through heaps and heaps of them. i began with enthusiasm but soon i just started feeling ill. i wondered why such tales would be crafted? are they really stories we want to tell our children? some of the 'morals' seem disgusting. all sorts of unsavoury characters flourish, trickery is rewarded and the gender bias makes me want to hit someone. luckily my daughter tells me i did not read them to her even in their later, more sanitized forms. 

but right now i still read on - its like a madness. i have to just finish them. why, because i signed up for the course? is that reason enough to go on like this? i have been so busy and still in between things - on buses, waiting in lines - i read them in the hope of finishing them in time - before the next text is up for reading. i no longer enjoy the tales and yet i read on. all my empty spaces, my rejuvenating white spaces, are filled up  by these tales and i feel exhausted.

i am really confused. part of me wants to scream and stop the insane reading. another part of me believes that if i just push and get through and do the work set for the course i might learn something important. i might even be changed from the inside. just push on and i will find a rainbow at the end of ten weeks. 

is it a conflict between long term benefit and instant relief? but it also seems something else that i cannot yet pin down. it's something like intuitively knowing that this course of action is detrimental to me, to my real goals and yet not trusting that knowing. have i have lost touch with what i really want or maybe i am just not listening to my inner sense that is giving me a clear message that this pursuit is meaningless? it's also a tussle between outer expert knowledge and inner experience. i normally favour the latter - am i missing out?

back and forth and back and forth - if i don't read i am missing out... if i read i am not getting on with my own writing... but this might be a chance to deepen my writing... or i might just feel at the end of ten weeks that i wasted yet another few months... 

tied up in knots. unsure of how it will resolve. thoughts welcome :)

delhi gang rape sentence

I just read another article on the Delhi gang rape sentence. This one titled 'Delhi gang rape death sentence won't make India safer for women', by Monisha Rajesh. Of all the articles on similar themes that I had read this one has got to be the most patchy and badly thought through. 

What bugged me first is the title itself. It was not for rape that the death sentence was passed and it certainly was not  to appease those baying for blood. India does not yet have the death sentence for rape - I am shocked that a journalist writing on this would not even know this or wrongly represent it in the title. Secondly the title suggests that another sentence would have been better in this case or specifically that another sentence might have made India safer for women. If that is the case why not suggest the sentence and if that was not the intention of the writer then maybe the writer should have thought carefully and chosen another title.

The writer then has gone on through the article just using bits and and pieces of commonplace information that she has not even bothered to connect up well together. It feels like she has just lifted them off other articles that actually dealt more thoroughly with each issue. I am left unsure of what the writer really wants to say about the issue except be controversial? She seems to have not one original thought in the article nor really want to even rearrange other thoughts in any new way that makes one think deeply on this topic. 

But what bugged me the most is the writer seems to present it as an either/or situation. That now this awful sentence is passed the discussion will not continue. Does she mean to say that if there had been some lighter sentence then at least the conversation would continue? The Indian public is not stupid that we feel that just this sentence will make the country safer -  not one of those crying for justice ever felt that i think - and nobody is 'hushed up' by the sentence, and even when media stops 'talking' about rape many conversations continue.

Not sure how to conclude this post but this really is bad journalism at its worst - at least in my opinion. It's an issue i feel passionately about and it hurts me to see it handled this way.

What do I think about the Delhi sentence? That I cannot really say in a handful of paragraphs but I do feel that nothing less would have given some sense of justice to the victim's family especially after the  judgement given for the juvenile involved.