HURT, ANGRY AND DISTURBED

It has been more than a week since the Delhi gangrape incident. The whole country is protesting and screaming capital punishment for the culprits. I am a silent protester sitting in one corner of this country called Bharat Mata where women are both worshiped and raped at men’s whims and fancies. And yes I am a woman!
The horrific incident has melted the hardest of hearts. But somewhere in my psyche, I have become a tad fatalist because I am a woman, an Indian woman, helpless and hapless. Suffering is my destiny and my fate. And I must live and die with it.
I find myself thinking about Amanat (the name given to the victim by one news channel) almost all the time. I get the shudders whenever I think of all the injury and violence that has been inflicted on her. I remember having raised a storm once when I cut my finger. I complained to my mother about the imaginary pain for almost a week. It was just a nick. And here we have a girl who was thrown out of a bus after being raped, brutalised and violated.
I really don’t know why this particular case has affected me so much. Everytime I get an update on her condition, my hatred towards men grows more intense. I find myself seething.  And I just can’t help it. Accepted, not all men are rapists. But are all men not obsessed with a woman’s body? Doesn’t a bikini-clad woman appeal more to men than a woman covered in a sari? But I must say that men, especially Indian men, are a highly evolved and intelligent species. They know how to distinguish between own and other’s property. I have never heard or seen a man leching at his own wife. But the same man will not miss a chance to cast a dirty glance at his friend’s wife! Long live the Indian man!
I just can’t come to terms with what the six men did to the girl. I can’t sleep in peace when I think of the agony and the trauma that Amanat is going through. I find myself mumbling a prayer for her in all my waking hours. Amanat is no longer a stranger to me. She has become a part of my life. I am concerned about her. I care about her well being the way I care for mine.
And why not? There is a battered Amanat in every Indian woman. All of us (women) have been victims (though I prefer to use the word survivors) of one form of molestation or the other, whether it is social, mental, emotional or physical. We have been stripped nude by the eyes of men (as one person rightly said on a television show) Dirty uncles have acted funny with us. Men have brushed up against us in public transport. Men eve tease us in public. We are every man’s fantasy. We are blamed when we give birth to a girl child. We are killed within a few days of marriage just because we did not bring enough cash and gold. Fathers and brothers and uncles and grandfathers rape us. Families sell us off because we are a burden. The system blames us for being provocative and inviting. Khaled Hosseini, the famed novelist has rightly said, “Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger will always find a woman. Always” Period!
There can be no punishment on earth that can compensate the agony and hurt of a woman who has been gangraped, who has been groped all over by complete strangers, who has been beaten black and blue and who has to live with the scar, the horror and the trauma for the rest of her lives. I think India is the only country where men defile one Ganga and take a dip in the other! Har har Gangey!
Virginia Woolf was so very wrong when she said, “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world!
As a woman I have no country to call my own. No world to feel safe. I am just a woman, who is perpetually vulnerable, who is always a victim.
On the one hand we go gung ho about the ban on pre natal sex determination. But on the other hand, we kill our girl children from the moment they are born.
Oh Indian woman! Why are you killed before you are born and why do you have to die from the moment you are born?
[recvd on email]