Phones are Smart but not the Young Folks

Why the youngsters take fancy to selfies?

If you ask such a question, you may get looked askance or presumed to be a person living in an den several notches below a go-getting world. Again, you may get branded an odd person coming from the medieval age. For, now, the modern world discovers a new gizmo every second and, remains littered with devices with amazing Apps.

This is the time when a tiny device, apart from being an instrument for communications, dabs even in creativity, making men and their minds irrelevant. Yes, a contemporary mobile phone is smarter than a genius.

It is the age of smart phones and it belongs to the youth. The advent of such phones, in a riot of colors and sizes, creates a different world for the teens and make social media their second homes. Selfies, an offshoot of smart mobiles, enliven the life of a youth now more than ever and engage himself all through the day and night.

When the word ‘selfie’ got into the teens’ vocabulary – it very well matches with the maimed English they speak and write --   the word ‘sharing’ too got a significant space in their diction as the young folks cherish sharing their selfies rather than clicking them. As vanity chums, they go an extra mile to display their selfies and make their clan envious

.Objects of selfies may be anything or everything under the sun; both animate and inanimate things. It may be a roaring sea, a quietly flowing stream, a celeb, a Hollywood Diva with wardrobe malfunctioning, a gruesome accident with its bleeding victims – you name it, the brats will click it. Not long back I got a display of a teenager in the social media. It was a selfie of him with a dog pissing at a lamp post. Good god, I am still to understand the meaning of such a shot.

Little guys who indulge in unabashed selfies even at the risk of their lives click bizarre things, share them in WhatsApp just to get innumerable likes. You may call it an act of vanity, but to them, it’s the adventure of a daredevil. But what they don’t figure out is that such cheap adventures may be fraught with dangers.

A few days back, a crazy young boy got into jail as he took a selfie with a woman DM and had a wordy duel with the reporters who objected to his snap shot. But, this youth was better than his counterpart in Chennai who got himself run over by a suburban train while clicking his selfie with the speeding train behind him. In yet another incident, a young man got thrashed blue when he took a selfie with a bathing transgender.

In yet another case of people bypassing their personal safety just to get a glamorous selfie, a man In Kerala got suddenly whacked by an elephant in his bid to take a photograph with the pachyderm.

One of the reasons that lead a stripling to clicking selfie is a sort of syndrome – attention seeking syndrome. Besides being narcissists, the youngsters are immature lots. For they display their selfies in the social media just to earn plaudits over their peers. They want to show their audacity to the world. And there they go, pitching in themselves to click their pictures with the things they are passionate about. Sadly, they are not conscious of the dangers that lurk behind them while they pursue their mad game.

A smart phone becomes a quintessential device for a teen. It is like his sixth finger – always inseparable. But such sixth finger, at times, becomes a killer demon and suck his/her life in a flash. A bud, thus gets wilted and dropped to the ground before its time is up for blooming.

Images Courtesy: Google

Hurtle the Time down the decades…

A young man’s hearty laughter: he is riding a bi-cycle along a decrepit village road full of potholes; a ball rolls down on your way kicked off by a hunk; this happens when you speed walk on the side of a playground just to shoot down your sugar level; now a different youngster slapping his friend on the back for munching a sugar candy when the national anthem is being played; another young chap who darts to a hospital carrying a small boy injured in a road accident.

All the young fellows you run into trigger your memories. They look like your alter egos. You become pensive, begin to see in them the adolescent you from whom you have walked away long back.

Rewind the time a bit; hurtle it down the decades; and there… you are, a stunning young man brimming with youth. A rugged man, you make life run errands for you. Adventure was then your vocation given a sturdy body and mind.

We want to be what we were once. Since the past is so yummy, we wish to cud chew it whenever life’s obstacles become insurmountable. When the goings on in life become tough, old memories offer us their sanctuaries. We, again, seek to blow up our memories into a bubble and live in it forever.

I used to take refuge in the cool shades of my retrospections when life becomes so hot and scalding.

Amen!

*

Sunday morning. Predawn bustle took over the home. I was sleeping jolly well. When the alarm clock shrieked at 5 a.m. I gave it a big punch. It became subdued. But not Papa. A man not to get discouraged by a single flop, he had many tricks under his sleeves just to chase me off the bed as soon as he got up.

Unmindful of the failure of the alarm piece that succumbed to my assault, he shuffled into my room like a thief. Pinching my forearm, he tried to wake me. But I did not yield to his machinations. Like the legendary Kumbhakarna, I got myself immersed in the ocean of sleep. One of the things you should never miss in life is the pleasantness of late morning sleep. Unfortunately, Papa had no inkling of it.

‘Would Papa engage a band of musician – who might play an assortment of instruments into my ears – or a herd of trumpeting elephant to make me jump out of the bed?’. Thoughts gushed as I was half-conscious.

 My honeymoon with the morning slumber continued until it rained in my room. ‘Rain!!! How could I get a rain inside the room? Was I hallucinating? No… I wasn’t. If it didn’t rain how come I get my face wet with water still dripping from my head?’ I moaned, saw Papa exit from my room holding a water jug in hand.

When I was about to resume my sleep, I saw a scrap of paper flutter in the hot air of the whirring ceiling fan. It was placed under the time piece. I dried my face in the bedspread, took out the paper and read it. It was from Papa.

“Easwar, don’t be lazy. How long will you sleep? It has been hell of time since the day dawned. Your late morning sleep makes the sun squirm. If a bird becomes a despicable slug like you and sleep late in the morning, it could never get a worm or two. Will go without feed. If you don’t get up now, I will toss you on to the road.

Get up, moron.

Papa”

‘Huh… why Papa tortures me like this on every Sunday, thwarting my indulgence to sleep a bit late’. I grimaced, turned my head to the table. My pen wasn’t there. Only got a blunt pencil. Turning to the back of the paper where Papa reproached me for my long sleep, I scratched something that occurred to me then.

Another hour flew. I was straddling sleep and wakefulness. Soon, my room got jam packed. I writhed in pain when a rain of slapping lashed at my butt. I screamed, sat up and saw all my family, including my septuagenarian grandma crowded around me. They looked askance at me as if I was a crab.

I now heard Kala, my sister, read what I wrote and, she did this at the instance of Papa.

“Papa, why don’t you allow me to sleep late in the morning even on Sundays? You know those who oversleep are smarter than the early risers? I don’t eat worms as I am a human, not a bird. The sun comes to work early as his father may nag him like you. Papa, don’t you have any work worth doing. The barn in the backyard clutter with heaps of uncleaned cow dung. You’d better go there and clean it. Don’t fiddle with my sleep.

Easwar.”

I heard a riot of laughter break out when my sister finished reading the stuff I wrote. While my family was chortling at the discomfiture of Papa, I curled myself on the bed again, pulled the blanket, covered it on my face and began snoring.

*

 This is another bout of memory The World Sleep Day unfolds and, it helps me find out the adolescent boy I have lost in the sea of time. I love those recollections that make me smile no matter what is going on in my life now.

Guys, try to walk into your past once in a while just to see how sweet it is.

 Images courtesy: Google

When Traitors become Martyrs, Nationalists become ‘Hooligans’

The JNU imbroglio hurt me too. I felt provoked as if a lunatic smacked my mom and made her bleed. Given below is what I wrote in my journal when India-bashing was at its peak at some of the educational institutions.

Read on:

*

It was to Afzal Guru’s discomfiture that the Indian security forces thwarted his bid to raze the Parliament down. I could still remember Promod Mahajan hurriedly runs along the corridors of the Parliament with worried looks. He was so scared of what was happening around him.

There were human losses in the terrorist attack. But still, Guru might have been disgusted of his not being able to bring more anarchy to the Parliament as planned. He would have been even cheerful at the time of hanging, had he known that a herd of misguided young men would come soon, resurrect him from his grave and glorify him a martyr. Sure, we have in our midst such prats; such a bunch of devil worshippers.

I know Guru is dead and gone. But the breed of saboteurs, he left behind is still at work. They are onto his agenda to finish the work he started. Their infiltration into the highest seats of the country’s learning can vouchsafe what they are after.

Their purpose is not to bring mayhem to the University campuses through a series of bomb blasts. But, they engage themselves in doing more abominable act than physically wrecking the educational institutions they encroach. Yes, they begin tinkering youngsters there, sowing wild oats in their minds and turning them potential dangers to the nation’s sovereignty.

That is why we see a cluster of ill-advised young chaps at the JNU and other Varsities sing paeans to Afzal Guru and his ilk and heap indignities on their motherland. The bizarre slogans shouted against India at the JNU is not a freak incident, but a well-planned campaign. Thus the fringe who indulge in anti-country antics transform traitors into martyrs; anarchists into heroes.

This may be due to the handiwork of infiltrators. But what I cannot understand is, can indoctrination can go to such an extent of making innocent students a bundle of jerks? Can it make them slight their homeland and kiss the feet of terrorists? Yes, it did and would do if the nation is not on its guard.

Pitifully, anti-govt media and some revisionist ideologues defend the students’ sloganeering saying they are only exercising their right to speak and it is not an affront to India’s unity.

It is still puzzling to know why the opposition parties are silent over such campus fracas. Why don’t they condemn the smear campaign carried against the nation at the JNU during a cultural programme? Tragically, the granny Congress too – they ruled the country for a hell of time and knows what unity means to India – is not getting provoked by such anti-India tirade. May be, the party looks at this issue as fodder for their guns always trained against the ruling BJP.

Comrades, left or right, would always like to grind their own axes in the Indian political arena. I hear them shrill, too on the JNU issue. But, it is not to pull up the students for their backstabbing the nation. Nor for their singing hallelujah to the terrorists. They hop on the campus turmoil only to defend their students’ unions who are said to be accomplices to the anti-national fringe.

Berserk goes the media, especially those of the visual ones. Wedded to sensationalism, their primary concern is to either retain or expand their share of viewership. So, it becomes necessary for them to pitch in themselves against the ruling party come what may. So, when a herd of students heap indignities on India at the JNU, they manufacture their own version of the episode. They call people hooligans, Modi toadies, Patriotic freaks who condemn the fringe for throwing invectives at the nation.

The intellectuals also go wayward and buy the media’s rubbish. Their phobia against the ruling party make them invent a series of reasons to justify students adoring terrorists and maligning India. Their hostility to the govt is so strong that they don’t see the elephant in the room.

And that is the story of nationalists becoming hooligans. Anti- govt turkeys still continue to hound them for not towing their lines on JNU’s hoopla. No conscientious Indian will buy their ‘right to speech’ stuff. For, we know they lean on Constitution only to save those who are out to destroy India. We also know the social and political philosophy they teach reeks of despicable anti-nationalism.

The Delhi HC has since granted bail to Kanhaiya Kumar. He is now back to the JNU. Thanks to the efforts of a callous media, he is now a cult figure. Writers of substance vie with one another in giving him a halo of heroship.

Though I get upset seeing the nation celebrating his release from the jail, my spirit of nationalism gets emboldened when I read the remarks of the Hon’ble Judge while giving bail to Kanhaiya.

Excerpts from the judgment:

 “Freedom of speech guaranteed to the citizens of this country under the Constitution of India has enough room for every citizen to follow his own ideology or political affiliation within the framework of our constitution. While dealing with the bail application of the petitioner, it has to be kept in mind by all concerned that they are enjoying this freedom only because our borders are guarded by our armed and paramilitary forces. Our forces are protecting our frontiers in the most difficult terrain in the world i.e. Siachen Glacier or Rann of Kutch.”

“The thoughts reflected in the slogans raised by some of the students of JNU who organized and participated in that programme cannot be claimed to be protected as fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression. I consider this as a kind of infection from which such students are suffering which needs to be controlled/cured before it becomes an epidemic,”

 “”Raising anti-national slogans do have the effect of threatening national integrity. The kind of slogans raised may have demoralizing effect on the family of those martyrs who returned home in a coffin draped in the tricolor, the Judge observed.”

Jai Hind

Image courtesy: Google

Are You a la Confucius?

Have you quit beating your wife?

It is a loaded question, put forth to a man to trap him. It tries to taunt him even when he answers the question in either way – affirmative or negative. But the contemporary man is very clever. Known for circumventing things, he will simply brush aside the question with a smile. For he knows he cannot even raise his hand against the woman at home as the DVA 2005 stares at him constantly.

 But, a man from the Victorian era would be more honest. He would, without any hesitation, take this question in his stride and answer it in the negative. For, back in centuries, husbands had the privilege of beating their wives. But the stick they use for beating should not be longer than their thumbs. They called it a ‘thumb rule. And the savage male society cherished having such a rule.

Good god, womenfolk was not allowed to move in bed even during intimate movements not to speak of moaning or groaning.

Confucius must be mad when he said:

“The woman’s duty is to prostrate herself submissively before her husband in such a way as to have no will of her own, but to demonstrate a perfect form of obedience.”

 The society got wild oats sown in its midst because of the Chinese philosopher. He was only responsible for the emerging of the patriarchs and the misogynist clan in later years. I guess Confucius’s spirit had not gone anywhere. That the thinker’s spirit got hold of a former UP CM became evident when he refused to condemn a gang of rapists, but cherished calling them as ‘boys are boys’.

Women were like personal effects of males in the bygone centuries. Heeding to Confucius’s advice, the patriarchal society made women subservient to them. Even Eve knew the agony of being a woman as soon as god created her. While munching an apple, she heard a voice telling her, ‘He [Adam] shall rule over you’. Shakespeare and Milton too told the women ‘to keep silent, be modest and accept a lesser place.

At last the inevitable that was in boil had exploded.  When oppressed women rose in rebellion it was like bomb blasts. It became necessary for the 18^th century women just show to the society that there existed another human species called ‘Woman.’ They had to wage many battles before getting them released from men’s cages. Their organized strength and indomitable spirit won them not full freedom, but a semblance of esteem.

The birth of the 20^th century was like spring for women. For women folks who were chattels, at last, heard gratifying words like ‘freedom for women’,’ women’s empowerment’ et al. They are now free to scale the walls set for men. There are now no domains exclusively ear marked for the male. Fair sex can grab them and pitch in their tents with flourish. They now don’t have to fear about Confucius, who had once commanded them to kiss the men’s feet.

But the euphoria and exhilaration the present century gave women was short lived. It was to the discomfiture of women that only a minimal percentage of them are able to climb the higher rungs of society and enter men’s turfs. A vast majority of unlettered and economically deprived women is still at the mercy of their spouses for survival. Like their counterparts in the Victorian era, they too are getting beaten by their partners not with the proverbial thumb-like sticks, but iron rods.

They say Confucius is dead and gone. They claim there is all round progress in women’s life. And the chains that tied them to stakes have already been broken. Free birds, they could now fly anywhere in search of new horizons.

All hyperbole. If women are in such eminent positions, why there is a law to protect them against violence? Why we needed to get a Statue amended to prevent harassment against them in work places? Why women are denied entry to temples following the 400 year traditional ban? Patriarchal society might have cast off its anti-woman outfits, but not their mindsets. Most men have Confucius lurks in their minds who would come out on demand.

Deepa is a smart young lady, a go-getter. An executive in an MNC she earns handsome pay. Her family too is affluent. A chirpy young woman she gets her life derailed past marriage. Having a drunken ape for a husband, she gets thrashed daily for trivial reasons. Life becomes so thorny for her that it gives her only bruises and wounds.

Parvathy, our maid, is not like Deepa. Uneducated, she is homebound, looking after her three children. Her husband, though a labor, earns a decent daily wage. But he spends his earnings on drinks and cherish being drunken all through day and night. On the days when he has no work, he would pester Parvathy for money and beat her black and blue.

Of the two, Deepa could hit back at her hubby and walk out on him. But she is silent, helpless. Since she doesn’t want the society to look askance at her – she is very much scared of the social stigma as her caste is not kindly disposed to single women – she chooses to live in her marital home. She is ready to get mortified … ready to bear with her husband’s physical assaults. She doesn’t give a damn to her emotional and psychological damage.

Parvathy is not bound by any social stigma like Deepa. But, she too cannot avoid putting up with a hellish life as she is emotionally and financially dependent on her husband.

Enacting more laws won’t solve women’s troubles and trials. It is time for men to change their Confucius-oriented mindset against women. They should assist the weaker sex set their sails towards a new world of freedom.

Women too need to treat the world as their own. They don’t have to feel they are living in that slice of the world leased out to them by men. They could live their own life, not the one expected by the society. For, besides seeking happiness and love they must strive to find themselves in life. The world waiting outside their homes can be explored and tamed only if they become ferocious tigresses not timid chicks.

Happy Women’s Day.

Dr. Kalam is no more --- nation in tears

Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam is no more. When I heard about his sudden demise – he collapsed and succumbed to a massive heart attack while addressing the IIM students Shillong, an end so happened as he wished – I felt like having lost one of my close family members. I could feel a sudden vacuum enveloping the country. That way Dr. Kalam had been connecting himself with every Indian and had created a niche for him in every Indian home. For he was humane and his demeanor and deportment were such that a common man from a remote village was able to identify himself with Kalam. He abhorred ostentation. He was never putting on airs though he had held prestigious positions during his lifetime. A man among men, he proved the epithet true through the way he lived and the cause he espoused for India.

Always a humble being – simplicity and honesty were his hallmarks -- he stood tall amidst his contemporaries. This was not because of his being a missile man; not because he was once the President of the country; and not because of his being the recipient of the Bharat Ratna and other awards, but because he was a simple human being, a simple man with high and fabulous ideals, a simple man who dreamed of India becoming a giant among nations. He wanted India to be strong because, as he said, ‘only strength respects strength.’ He inspired the nation, mostly the youngsters, with his mind stirring speeches and writing. A great teacher, he had students always swarmed him as they cherished to get connected with him. His efforts to shape the young and make them redefine the course of the country by imparting to them worthy tenets placed him in high pedestal in the heart of the nation.

His striking frankness, outspokenness and flair for calling a spade a spade, though remarkable traits, didn’t bring him any plum job after he demitted the presidential position in 2007. A man of integrity, Kalam found the political arena an albatross and the politicians as Machiavellians.  This was the reason why no political party sponsored him for the presidential election for 2^nd time. Of course, Kalam accepted what destiny offered him as he refused to be a slab of a dirty political meat.

Post presidency, Kalam didn’t tie himself up to a homely tether. He didn’t relax or recuperate as his counterparts did. Stirred by the call of a new duty, a new responsibility, he thought, he owed to the country’s youth, he was always on his legs. He traveled the length and breadth of the country, met youngsters, interacted with them, with a flourish, and imparted to them the fine values of life. He said: ‘we will be remembered if we give to our younger generations a prosperous and safe India, resulting out of economic prosperity coupled with civilizational heritage.’ Younger generation of the country enamored of the new inspiration they got from Kalam saw in him their new messiah.

Kalam was not an individual but an institution; a one man army that tried to reform the youth, and, through them, make India more assertive and strong. Unfortunately it didn’t occur to him to channelize the new energy and power he created among the youth. I thought, many times, Kalam, using the potent youth power, will start a movement on the lines of Jeyaprakash Narayan’s ‘Total Revolution’ sans politics. Such a movement would have fortified the nation and healed off its ugliness. For reasons best known to him, Kalam didn’t go for such an evolution. Instead, he cherished being a teacher. India, thus lost a momentum and I don’t know how long it has to wait for the happening of another one.

While a silent and shocked nation witnessed with tears, Kalam was laid to rest in Rameswaram, his home town, and ‘a punya bhoomi’ [sacred earth] that – according to Hindu Mythology -- got the footprints of Lord Ram imprinted on its soil. A real tribute our grateful nation could pay to Kalam is to live up to his teachings, which he taught with fervor and hope.

May his noble soul RIP.

I have dreams both beautiful and bizarre

“Dreams are not those which come while we are sleeping, but dreams are those when you don’t sleep before fulfilling them” – Abdul Kalam

I always love to flirt with dreams. And I don’t grade them big or small. My thoughts and perceptions about them go well with dictionaries that say ‘dreams are the manifestations of one’s pent up feelings, desires, images and sensations, occurring during sleep’. Hence, a dream is a thing relating to human mind and not body.’ A matter of mind’, I would say. Though a dream is a matter or vision you experience in an unconscious state of mind, it still piggybacks you the rest of your life, make you reshape it in such a fashion to get what you aspire for.

“I saw my mom in my dream the night before,” said my friend, one evening, when we were in a restaurant sipping degree coffee. ‘She didn’t seem to age. She was like the same when I last saw her in my teens”, added my friend, his eyes moved to tears. Not a worldly person, my friend was always impassive and flat – a big stone sans emotions. But, now his dream made him euphoric as the old sweet memories of his mom seemed overtake him. ‘That’s another dimension of dreams; they paint human lives with tasteful colors,’ I told my friend who nodded his head in the affirmative. A dream has the power of adding luster to a man’s life, if he is emotional or stoic, give him wings and make him fly to the land of his fantasies.

There are still persons who say, with pride, that they don’t get dreams. They even compliment them for not living in a make believe world. I only pity those rough-hewn, passionless minds. I would call them uncharged gizmos no matter how elegantly they look and work smartly. That the odds men face in lives give them only those skills necessary for living and shut all his dreams and fantasies cannot be accepted. For, dreams represent what people see, hear, experience and wish. No man can latch his mind to avoid getting dreams. We’d better remember that dreams aren’t our errand boys but masters.

Though, to a section of humanity, dreams are superficial things – a bundle of mysteries – they still become integral part of one’s life. They are significant as they aren’t biased. Both the rich and the poor, the king and the slave can catch up with their dreams and stretch them the way they like. A dream is like a movie where you, a decrepit citizen, watch yourself swapping position with a monarch. The only tool a dream needs is a mind: a mind capable of dreaming, a mind capable of sustaining a swirl of fantasies.

 So many are the hurdles of life that it always become impossible for you to get what you desire. You often begin to hunt an elephant, but end up trapping only a mouse. The wounds your psyche thus receive from life gets healed by dreams. They, for example, make a physical wreck become a world champion in a hurdle race; a decrepit writer, thus find himself getting a Noble Prize for his writings – though they’re pedestrian; and an adolescent boy, to his excitement, sees himself flirting with a dream girl of his choice. That’s the effects of the dreams, they metamorphose men and women what they aren’t in true life.

There were times man could not deduce reasons why he had dreams.  Long research, after much sweat, found REM [rapid eye moment] stage of sleep to be the cause of dreams. That’s right. But even assuming that you get your dreams during your REM, some dreams never allow you to sleep before you fulfill them. It happened to Napoleon and Gandhi. Moved by their dreams, both, one a warrior and the other a Karma Yogi, went sleepless until they made their visions come true. But, wait. If you want to have the hang of a dream, it needs to be a quality one -- worthy of pursuing.

People all over the world invest their best mettle and achieve something remarkable in many fields, but attribute the reasons for their feats to dreams. Pitifully, we still have persons in our midst who evince interest only in getting their dreams interpreted than working to make their visions come true. This happens because we lack courage; don’t have the fire to follow our dreams. People, with indomitable courage and grit, don’t let their dreams go past them or let anyone stop them from having them as goals. To them, dreams are treasure troves, and, to follow them and fulfill them, they would forgo food, sleep and all the comforts of life. Like the sun rotating with the earth, they rotate with their visions.

Since ‘dream is a wish your heart make’, believe it, work for it and make it come true. To honor your dreams that show you a rosy way, you could make them a ladder, climb it and reach out to the higher rungs of life.

Why the World Bedraggle India's Daughter?

The room is in dark with intriguing silence; the laptop is on, blinking and emitting snippets of light. We get our breath hard, blood chilled when my wife and I watch the monitor, languorously re-enacting scenes of a gruesome rape being perpetrated by a group of goons in a moving bus. The voice that shrieks for help belong to a teenage girl who gets raped because she is out of home after 9 pm; murdered because she resists the thugs’ attempts to get their cardinal desires quenched. The BBC documentary has many loose ends and overtly biased. Instead of condemning the heinous crime, it gives amplifiers to Mukesh Singh and his cohorts to justify their acts and the subsequent murder of a gullible girl. “What I’ve pulled out of her body, I threw it away,” the juvenile’s bizarre voice slaps my ears and make me recoil. My wife gets into her feet, races over to the sink and throws up. I still sit frozen, gazing helplessly at the ceiling mired in cobwebs and piles of paint peels.Mukesh Singh, one of the rapists, continues to drone. His grading of Indian girls – he says only 20% of them is good – coupled with his lawyers’ gibberish on Indian tradition vs Indian women make my wife feel nauseous again. ‘My god! Who made this video? Was it by Leslee Udwin or by those misogynists who had snuffed out a flower and thrown it in the gutter? For the documentary puts the victim in a poor light and shows how circumstances lead a group of guys become rapists’, I say to myself, suddenly remembering the ‘boys-are-boys’ statement I heard from a senior politician,  months back. ‘Is the world too, like our country, not kindly disposed to women? Does it treat them as chattels?’ my wife asks, her voice is in shards. I get a numbness. I’m in no mood to speak, leaves her questions hang on fire.  I take a peek into the FB. It looks saintly. No verbal explosion is let loose there because of the British documentary. Only a few gets agitated over the video and vent their injured expressions. As for others, they’re still in the comforts of their cocoons either writing eloquently about their upcoming books or displaying heartwarming quotes or presenting recipes for new stuff.’ Why people are what they’re?’ a question confront me. Now I hear someone or something begin to speak from inside me: “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

RIP Nirbhaya.