June 1 - 14 issue
The only option where empty words rattle...
Everywhere I go, I hear people talking about Gujarat. In trains, in restaurants, at parties, on TV... the topic is as inexhaustible as the violence there seems to be. Everyone is talking about it, and doing absolutely nothing about it.
People in other parts of India continue to work, sing, party, eat, cry, fight... Life goes on. It is as if the tragedies in Gujarat were something happening in a movie.
That I think is what watching real-life horror on television, day after day, does to us. Makes us insensitive, makes us believe that it is all a two-dimensional thing that we can switch off and out of our lives by pressing a remote button.
But when a toe or little finger festers and rots, and throbs with pain, the rest of the body cannot help but notice. Though most other functions will continue, the ache will finally overtake the system, and the festering will inflict its rot on the rest of the body. Unless amputation or a cure is effected, the affected part will spread its malaise, till health and peace are lost.
For the first few days after the trouble in Gujarat erupted, I watched the news and read the stories, trying to see a pattern, trying to make sense of the whole thing. But as days rolled past and the violence snowballed into an avalanche of hatred and fury, I found myself unable to even cope with the helplessness that swept over me.
There was an anger growing in me against the powers that sat silent when there was need for effective action that would end the slaughter and the killing. But I also felt an anger against people like myself, people who lived normal lives and worked for a living and belonged to families. People, who only because they lived in a city where violence had taken hold of a few minds, had decided to jump into the fray and let their basic instincts rule.
What I wonder, has happened to the mothers and sisters and the wives and daughters of those who have turned into ravaging monsters and are out singing the song of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and spreading the mantra of hatred?
Don’t they as women, see the pointlessness of it all? Do they not find it in themselves to tell their men, their husbands and sons to hold back and remain human? But reports, even as they talk of rape and rampage, also cite instances of women turning into monsters and leading brigades as ruthlessly as the men.
I wish we could stop and see, when anger brings out the beast in us, what it does to us and even more important, what it does to the generations that look to us for guidance.
We don’t. So, across the world, in Sri Lanka and Kosovo, in Iraq and Palestine, in Afghanistan and you name it, men fight men, in the name of God, for water, for land, as they have done through the ages.
Only those were the Dark Ages. Today, we are supposedly evolved and have enough memories to make it to the moon and beyond.
A friend came down from Ahmedabad, and though I welcomed him into my home, my mind shrank from his coming. Because, I knew his being there meant he would talk of the Gujarat situation... and I did not want to face it.
Did not want to face the trauma of knowing we were a nation lost to reason, to piety, to humaneness and tolerance. That we were, men and women, a nation lost.
I mourn that loss. And hold my silence.
The Editor

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