previously aborted posts

March 25, 2021

 

It’s been three weeks since my last blog post. I have made several—three—starts to writing a new post but felt defeated by my feelings of helpless rage and deep sadness, and not completed them.

 

The first was about a 13-year-old girl who was gang raped by a bunch of young men. The family was then told that if they tried to lodge a complaint worse would happen. The father of one of the young men was a police official and the man threatened, that if they lodged a complaint the girl would be raped in public, the middle of the village, and nobody would be able to stop them. Such arrogance—where does it come from? Just knowing that he had more power than the girl’s family and so he felt he could do anything to them? The father did take the girl to the police station and while she was being examined in the hospital the man was run over by a truck right outside the police station. The story ran for a day and then disappeared. The girl was not important enough and the man powerful enough to obliterate the story and the event. 

 

The second was about a book I read, ‘The Terrorist’s son’, by Zak Ebrahim. Ebrahim is the son of an Egyptian man who was convicted for the planning of the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993. The man’s family, which included a wife and three children, was hounded for this act and they moved several times to try to conceal their identity. 

 

On the first pages of the book Ebrahim writes, ‘There is a reason that murderous hatred has to be taught—and not just taught but forcibly implemented. It’s a not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is a lie. A lie told over and over again—often to people who have no resources and are denied alternative views of the world.’

 

Ebrahim goes on to say that statements like, ‘All Jews are evil’ or that ‘Homosexuality is an Abomination’, were as much facts to him as were things like ‘Paris is the capital of France’ or ‘Pi is 3.14’. Ebrahim was beaten by his step-dad and at some point began bullying others at school until the day the look on the face of a boy he was bullying reminded him of how he felt when his step-dad beat him. 

 

Ebrahim’s father was imprisoned, Ebrahim was ostracized at school as the son of a terrorist. Later he was the victim of abuse. These two coupled with finally meeting the very people he was taught to hate and seeing them as human changed him.

 

But what if he had been a white boy whose father suffered no consequences for lynching a coloured man, or he was a Hindu whose father was hailed a hero for killing a Muslim? What if he grew up hearing the man his father had killed being called a termite, a traitor, a cockroach? What if he was taught to think of the heads of these ‘traitors’ as a coconut that could be broken with one swing of the lathi? What if he realized that this was the easiest way of turning his feelings of powerlessness into those of strength? 

 

What would it take for a person in that situation to turn away from prejudice? Maybe if he was stuck in a situation where he or a loved one could die and the only person who helped him was the ‘other’, he might stop hating? Maybe if the same system and institutions he committed violence for began oppressing him he might be forced to rethink his stances? Ebrahim’s short book really moved me. He says towards the end, ‘As for me, I am no longer a Muslim and I no longer believe in God’ and, ‘I put people before Gods… my whole life I have seen religion used as a weapon, and I am putting all weapons down.’ It felt similar to something I feel inside about being a Hindu in today’s India. 

 

The last post I began was the on-going saga of the car with gelatin sticks left on the same street as the phallic residence of the Ambani’s. In the way this story is reported one would think…

(a)   That the car was an actual bomb and that it was left just on his doorstep. 

(b)  Nobody else lived on that street but the Ambani family.

But the fact is that…

(1)  The car was left about a kilometer from the Ambani gate. And that the street is densely populated with other buildings and if indeed it had been a bomb the Ambani’s would have felt an aftershock but the others on the street closer to where the car was parked would have been blasted out.

(2)  The Ambani gate is guarded heavily with armed men (and this frightens me—what if one just opens fire for fun?) The area has barricades and no cars are allowed to be parked close to the gates. This heavily inconveniences many other residents. The street has become more dangerous because the Ambani’s live there, not for the family since they have 24/7 protection, but for the rest of the residents. 

Yet in the way this story is told nobody thinks of the other less wealthy and ordinary citizens living there. And this story unlike that of the 13 year old raped girl’s is told daily.

 

I have one more, or two more, or many more, stories swilling within. With so much going on it is hard to say anything at all. I get stuck, paralysed, numb. I find it hard to organize my thoughts, to find words to express the chaos within. I feel why bother, it is all too much, and I am but a mote of dust. Have you felt that feeling? How too many horrible things, especially things you cannot do much to change, silence you? Better to push them away and get on with the task of living, which can be hard enough often?

 

This is an attempt to try to move out of that space and keep speaking about the things that matter. I know the post I really want to write today is the one about a Bill that was passed in the Rajya Sabha yesterday. One that is another death blow to Democracy in India. But it is too painful to think about it today. I need distance and time. Do you know that feeling too?