It’s A Rape-Fest and Everybody’s Doing It!!

Get on with it mate! Stick it out and shove it in at the next unlit street-corner, abandoned paper-mill, behind the tall grass or in a moving vehicle. Have a good one!

The PMO and the Antilla are opportune settings too though it’s the big boys arena. This where they rape communities, ecosystems and if you’re at the top of your game, entire civilizations. The whole world’s your playground! 

Let’s talk about rapes and while there, I invite you to widen your imagination. Let’s not limit ourselves to just non-consensual penetration. What is that; a little bit of in-out, in-out? Like some trivial game. Let’s broaden the canvas, shall we?

Fundamentally, rape is about power and its unchecked use. The most personal and private choice being violated by the rapist. I wonder if it’s rude to suggest that the right to wholesome food and clean water is a more fundamental and inalienable right. I wonder if it’s a travesty that it has come down to this but there certainly is a hierarchy to it. Without food or water, the right to choice of a partner would very soon be compromised.

So how well have we done here?

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The state of Maharashtra is in a severe hydrological crisis. On the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, deeply psychotic developers are constructing 5-star hotels, golf-courses and super-luxury condominiums that boast of a swimming pool on each floor!

The construction laborers are mostly ex-agricultural workers; small and marginal farmers from drought-affected regions of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and as far as Tamil Nadu. Entire communities driven out, families broken up for want of water.

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With all energy devoted to loot and accumulation, the psychos have little left for drinking-in the som of life; the pearls of the deep, the juice of the marrow. At the hotel, they hang life-size Renaissance art in the lobby, fakes of course. Blissfully unaware that any Renaissance man worth half his salt would bring a bloody flame-thrower to their establishment.

While the proletariat scrambles their young ones for ‘Operation Seek and Secure’ to bring a pail-full, the hotel's restrooms are fitted with large WC tanks, 25-liters. The Minister’s mistress mounts a hydro-war against every last rebel turd. She likes it squeaky clean!

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Advised by a PR department that’s more influential than Operations, they name their learning centers Heritage or Sanskriti, calling them Global or World schools.

Without a prayer of a connection with the human spirit, ravaged by a wretched poverty of imagination, they seek an escape from routine by chomping on international cuisines. Moroccan lamb testicles, Icelandic caribou roast, Scandinavian smoked salmon and Prussian shrimp salad. They post photos of it on social fora and specify spices and herbs for preparation and garnishing. Whoever gives a bleeding rat’s ass.?!?

It’s an extended bout of self-deception I say, a bubble. It’s bound to burst and when it does, some would end up blowing their fucking brains out. Which, had they considered earlier, would have saved the world so much trouble. I can hear the shrimps and caribou cheering and the lambs, the loudest!

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P Sainath, the lone ranger, the shining beacon of Indian journalism, standing tall in the rubble of ‘to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable’. The only man among Ornobs, was on tour when he was approached by a group of social workers, barely 50 km outside Bombay, Mumbai. They wondered if he could pull some strings and have the ‘school mid-day meal’ ration doubled for Mondays.

PS: Doubled for Mondays! Why?

SWs: Sir because Sir, for the most children, it is very hard Sir. They have no food from last Friday. We don’t get anything done till lunch-time Monday Sir.

(Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday; kids as young as 6; 50 km from Mumbai)

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Rapes don’t follow the laws of classical Newtonian mechanics. Not limited in time and space, they operate with a quantum mechanical mystery and splendor. They occur in Bangalore but also at the same time in New Delhi, Yavatmal, Baghpat, Hissar, Itanagar, Lucknow, Haldia, Badayun, Mumbai, Rajnandgaon, Khairlanji, Imphal, Bilaspur and Dantewada.

They are perpetrated on a girl or two but scar multitudes. And like funky Hindu Gods, they are everywhere at the same time and if you ask the Police, nowhere in particular! Shrouded in a probability cloud of reasonable doubt.

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I meditated on rape. Not ‘he raped her’ or ‘they raped her’ but rape; that which came from rape and that which would become rape.

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They wanted to keep the bauxite in the mountains. A porous ore, it absorbs rain, replenishes rivers and supports forests and farms alike. You wanted it for your cars, jets and missiles.

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They wanted to keep their fields and a semblance of sovereignty and dignity to go along but you wanted your factories, dams, mines and highways.

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They wanted to save seed for the next crop. But you legislated against it; against a farmer saving his own seed! You said they must buy from us and then jacked up the prices, as much as 7000% (not a typo). Hopelessly indebted, hundreds of thousands killed themselves. The news stories focused on Lakme Fashion Week instead.

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You seduced them with promises of ‘fruits of urbanization’ but offered slave labor, slave wages, slave rights and heavy metal poisoning, as bonus.

They were smarter, the next time around so you called in the riot-police who did not bother using rubber bullets. Their sheer existence at stake, they refused to capitulate.

So in addition to the Air Force, you recruited the ‘hardened from a lifetime of crime’ news editors, the spin-doctors. 'Let's brand them an ‘internal security threat’; raving lunatics dismembering and gutting our brave soldiers.' The urban middle-class cheered Har har Mahadev and voted likewise.

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Rape has been institutionalized and structurally built-into the fabric of our society. It’s in our mythology. Duryodhan/ Dushyasan attempted it. If you believe Jung and that ‘we are the stories we hear and the stories we tell’, you know it is in the collective unconscious. Woven into the archetype of power, it lurks deep in the recesses of the psyche.

So are we all potential rapists, unrealized?

Unique beings we are, not one but many; ghastly as beast, divine as Prophet and everything in between. It is upon us to choose not to rape when someone or something that’s not rightfully ours catches our fancy. When we’re powerful to arm-twist, out-negotiate and manage the consequences. And yet we don’t.

Till then, let’s not get too carried away with the candles.

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Kabhi to insaan zindagi ki karega izzat,

Yeh ek ummeed aaj bhi dil mein pal rahi hai..                                    

                                               

                                                 – Javed Akhtar

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