A Land Of Wolves

There is an old cliché that if you want to know the humane level of any society, observe the treatment of handicaps and elderly people in it. I take the liberty here to include the treatment of women and children too. Every now and then we come across few soul-stirring incidents which shake the very pedestals of human conscience or even the idea of humanism itself. The Guwahati  incidence of girl being molested in primitive barbaric manner was an epitome of that itself in full glory. A mute nation of 1.2 billion spectacled on TV this horrendous crime whose nonplussing nature left everyone flabbergasted. Many of them, the so called ‘intelligentsia’ made it a dinner table conversation. Many girls and their mothers vent out a silent prayer to God to protect them from such incidents every time they step out in a local train, bus or metro. A large population as expected flipped the channel and watched those tear-jerker soap operas or music channels. A miniscule fraction had an uneasy sleep with those horrifying images haunting them. A day later, a self-mandated ‘social panchayat’ barely a 60 km away from the National capital announced the diktat curbing the women’s independence to bare minimum. But it is not about these one or two bizarre obnoxious events only. People might say, blabbering on net won’t solve the case. I’m aware of that. I’m not solving the case. I’m presenting my resentment as an Indian and a human being. Today I feel ashamed to call myself a ‘mard’, whatever that means. If stripping down a helpless adolescent girl in a downtown area and getting away with a guffaw is a display of machismo, then I would love to spend my life in a country of hermaphrodites.  Come on people, what has got into everyone??? Enough is enough. Stop basking in the glory of being proud Indians and chanting your country as the ‘Greatest in the World’. This is blatant chauvinism which is bound to doom everyone. Yes, I don’t think ours is the greatest nation in the world, not even close to it. A nation is not about its landscapes or geographical assets. A country is what the people living in it are. And if such wolves inhabit the country in all the parts, then it’s nothing more than a jungle. Yes, a jungle where wolves wear pants and shirts. Wolves that go berserk after getting drunk on streets but treat any female consuming alcohol as a whore, a piece of raw meat which is required to satiate their hunger. These wolves issue diktats that ours is a cultural land where women shouldn’t drink or wear revealing clothes and should confine to the roles of these wolves-reproducing mothers.  What about your culture, your ethics and nationalism you leech? Stop making these frequent visits to Tirupati, Ajmer, Shirdi, Bangla Saheb, the local temples and mosques. God will never be pleased with you no matter how dark are the sandal liners on your forehead or how long the beard you keep. You may not touch non-veg and liquor for life, God won’t give you any brownie points if you’ve kept this wolf alive inside you.

I was born in an educated, unorthodox family, where the interpretation of culture didn’t vary from my sister to me. Yes, I’m a practicing Muslim and proud of my roots. No matter what the perceptions are, I vociferously vouch for the dignity and rights of the women not in spite of being a Muslim but because of it. And I know a fair amount of my religious information backing me. Prophet Mohammed PBUH said ‘’never look down upon people who’ve daughters. Remember, I’m a father of daughters too. Daughters are the blessing of Almighty upon you, a proof that He is happy with you. ’’ a reason why one can see the predominance of names like Fatima and Zainab in Muslim families.                                                  
 Alas, merely naming won’t make the prophet and his God content. Nor will establishing giant statues of Goddesses like Laxmi, Durga,Kali  and Sarasvati if their own human incarnations are pursued as sex objects.

From Mangalore to Lucknow to Mumbai to Delhi to even the perceivably liberal cities of North-East, an obnoxious breed of wolves and jackals are breeding and quadrupling. I reject this distinction of India-Bharat here. No village is better, no city is safer. People are either actors in these crimes, or worse, they are the silent onlookers.  Anxious people are worrisome about giving birth to daughters. They are dreading about their future and safety- adding one of the major reasons behind female feticide and infanticide; a reason which Amir Khan’s Satyamev Jayte missed to elucidate.

Eve-teasers, rapists and molesters are out in the jungle blatantly. The common college goers and working females on one hand have learned to be prone to the passing remarks and glares from the nooks and on the other hand, pray silently that the next victim of any wolf pack would not be them. As for the rest, we are still busy getting stuffed food in our mouth by our ‘mommies’, getting done with our share of daily rituals of worshipping Goddesses and as soon as we step out of our cozy homes, checking the neckline of the female standing near the bus stop and deducing the number of men she must’ve slept with according to the dress she is wearing. And yeah, end of the day, posting ‘’India is the greatest country’’ on facebook. Middle class indulges in cribbing about the failure of the establishment while forgetting that ‘One gets the government he deserves’. If we are demons, we can’t expect angels to be our caretakers. People like me are left wondering what type of creatures we are? Ostriches, I guess.