THE WOMAN'S APOCALYPSE

"Some say the world will end in fire

 Some say in ice...."

Doesn't look like it will end either way. Fire and ice are too mild and tame for mankind's brutal strength.
21st December 2012 came and went and here we are...ruthless as ever, shameless as ever, drunk in our vulgar bravado...continuing with our wretched lives. There is no Apocalypse for us. Nothing can kill us. We will live on and on like cockroaches. The only way we shall go, perhaps, is when we finish each other off.

When I titled the last post with a smiley, saying I will be back soon, I wasn't aware that a 23 years old, bright young paramedic, a victim of prolonged gang-rape and brutalization, will lie dying in a Delhi hospital with gangrene spreading rapidly inside her body. Her uterus will probably never work anymore and almost all of her intestines are gone.

I wasn't ready for this.

I am, like my fellow countrymen, pretty roughened and weathered by all those bold headlines I see in newspapers every day. Murder, rape, molestation, child abuse,theft, robbery, scams and other assorted national pastimes. Like the average Indian, these things do not shock me out of my skin. They used to,but not anymore. Two days without one bad news and I start thinking the news people are a lazy bunch.I have read the worst. The very worst. Brothers killing brothers, mothers selling off daughters, young girls beating babies to death, fathers raping infant daughters, innocent animals being set on fire, women being stripped and paraded...what have you. I thought nothing could shock me anymore. I thought I knew it all.
But nothing I have ever read in my daily newspaper, which I peruse religiously every morning, could have prepared me (and I am sure any of you) for this. NOT FOR THIS!

There is this young girl I know who has just entered her teens. At school she is learning all about the various body systems in details. Respiratory system, nervous system, circulatory system et al. Sometimes she shows me the complicated biological diagrams she has to draw. Veins, organs, arteries. But a thousand times more complicated than any of her intricately accurate bio diagrams was one simple remark she made after hearing about the Delhi gang rape case.

"How can her intestine get ruptured through rape? Isn't the intestine a part of the digestive system? Isn't the digestive system way different from the reproductive system, which is the primary system involved in cases of rape?"

This one doubtful question from one teenaged girl (who dreams of becoming a doctor someday), underlines, highlights and focuses boldly the sheer brutality we harbour in our hearts for one another.

Drunk uneducated male rapists are the worst of the lot no doubt, but remember baby Falak? The infant who was thrashed by a teenaged girl? Fractured skull, broken arms, human bite marks, cheeks branded with hot iron, the baby left for a better world after battling with death for around 60 days at AIIMS. A charge of culpable homicide was slapped against the teenager who had thrashed and beaten and vented all her anger on the baby. She, this 14 years old murderess, herself, has been abused, assaulted, raped and made to have sex with at least seven men per day for as long as she can remember.

Given a chance, it seems to me, that each one of us - irrespective of our gender - will not bat an eyelid before tearing another human body to pieces. Reasons could be so many. But it all results in brutalization in one way or another.

Why are we so violent? So brutal? Why are we so angry? Where is all this angst coming from? How can we have fun tearing someone's uterus and intestines apart with an iron rod? Is it funny? Will it make us laugh? How can we have fun slapping, hitting, kicking, screaming, punching and struggling? The act of sex wasn't meant for this.Even if I cut out all the romance and affection we generally associate with sex, even if, for argument's sake, we see sex as only an animal method of procreation, violence and brutalization were never meant to play any part in it.

There was, there is and there will be no need for iron rods in sex. Or even rape.

And if this heinous crime which has rocked us was an act of venting out anger, then we go back to my first question again...why are we so angry? Why are we so angry with women, babies and men who try to defend them? Why do we always want to teach women a lesson? What is wrong with us? Who is messing our brains up? Or were we like this since the beginning? Is civilization only a veneer as thin as a virgin's hymen? If not then why does it give away at the slightest of excuses and expose our bloody ugly faces?
If a woman cannot stop herself from being dragged and raped can she please please please beg not to be ruptured, torn and infected in every possible manner? Can rapists please be content with focusing on sexual intercourse and not harm heads, ears, noses, stomachs, hands, legs and every thing inside them? What is the next level, after iron rods? Nails and hammers? Road levellers? Crushers and shredders? Chainsaws? Mixers and grinders? A whole range of industrial machinery to assist with brutalization after rape?

Why are we hurtling so rapidly back to the dark ages?

People come up with loads of papers and articles on the psychology behind rape. How a rapist's mind works. How it is not about sexual pleasure but about a demonstration of dominance. How some men are angry at the mind boggling progress women have made over the last few decades and being unable to compete with the girls on an intellectual plane, they want to "teach them a lesson" physically.

But brutalization? How do you explain that? Let me talk in crude, vulgar, downright shameful words and make you cringe a little. Let me spell out in clear, sharp words what we all know of this case and will not lucidly state.
How do you explain the sadistic need of inserting a rusty iron rod inside a woman's vagina and jabbing it into her with so much anger and force that it goes past the cervix, bores a hole through the uterus and embeds itself into the small intestine, after you are done raping her with your biological organ?

I will tell you why those monsters did not feel for one second that the person lying naked and bleeding under them was a person at all. Because women are a different species altogether. Women are not what is scientifically called Homo sapien (Linnaeus, 1758). Only men make up Homo sapiens. Women are just two things - a pair of breasts and one vagina. THAT IS ALL.

We women are not human.

That is why the same friends and relatives who will innocently play with a female infant cannot stop ogling at her breasts once she reaches puberty. Women are not human. We are not living creatures, in fact.
We can't think, we don't feel pain, we don't feel hunger or thirst, we don't laugh, we don't cry, we can't learn, we can't love, we can't hate. we can't decide...and the best is, if you cut us open we won't bleed, like you will. We can't walk, run, sit or stand. Oh come on! A pair of breasts and a vagina cannot cry, laugh or feel. Even to feel pain they have to be connected to a brain via some nerves. But we do not have that as well. We are just two functional breasts and one functional vagina connected somehow by a rubber or wooden structure. Rubber and wood don't bleed or hurt, do they?

And therefore, what is so wrong and strange in abusing us, cutting us open, humiliating us, raping us, burning us, slitting our throats, rupturing our organs (again, all rubber), tying us up, parading us, killing us?

Sometimes, just some times, when you are in a better mood, or when some woman has allowed your sperms to mingle with her ovum and handed the resultant product over to you, you may be benevolent enough to call us goddesses, put us on a pedestal, write poems and songs, call us THE MOTHER, make films and stir up storms over coffee tables about our greatness.

And then, it is back to abusing, cutting, humiliating, raping, burning.

I am sorry I was born a girl. And then dared to grow up into a woman. I apologize. I will try not to be a female next time.
But this time I don't want to spend the rest of my life doubting every male I know. I don't want to love and live half hearted, with a quiet fear in the back of my mind that I can be brutalized the moment I need to be "taught a lesson".
I don't want to close the door on every unknown person's face, who comes asking for a glass of water. I don't want to travel around with an arsenal of weaponry like Swiss knives and pepper sprays to hurt people around me. I want to meet new people and make new friends. I don't want to spend all my time clutching my bag to my chest so I can avoid being groped there. I want to travel without bags and scarves sometimes at least. Sometimes I want to just look ahead towards the road I am walking and not keep engaging my side vision. I don't want to be on the lookout for people who may hurt me all the time.
I don't want to indiscriminately hate an entire gender. Don't make me. Please.

I have just one more question. Is there a "God for women" too? Do women count on God's list as living things? Or is the "God for women" dead? If not, then why hasn't He (or She) equipped us with any natural form of defence against the atrocities the "God for men" has designed for us. Almost every other female animal is equipped to protect herself from violation - a lioness, a tigress, a she-elephant, a leopardess, a cat, a bitch - speed, strength, teeth, claws - they all have some means of protection or the other. The only population left defenceless and helpless is the human female.

I don't know if the Mayans knew anything about the end of human life and I don't know if they were really entirely wrong, even though 21st December is gone without any noticeable change on the face of Earth. Because if you feel enough, you will know that for women it is the end of humanity as we knew it. The prediction was correct.

The "women's" apocalypse just went by.