Editor,
As it is well known in this class-obsessed society, the collective conscience of the nation gets hurt only if the victim is Delhi-Mumbai-Bangalore-centric, hails from middle/rich class and, most importantly, if the culprits hail from the lowest strata of the society, like bus conductors, helpers, or cleaners.
Perhaps this is the reason why nobody cared to protest when two cab drivers picked up a footpath child and drove throughout the night on Kolkata’s streets, sexually abused her, and thereafter dumped her body in a canal. Or when that Kerala girl had met the same fate – by taking advantage of a lonely compartment, a youth launched a sexual attack upon her and she fell down on the tracks from the moving train and the brute jumped off the train, raped her in that bleeding unconscious state, and left her to die.
So the nation believes in pick and choose methodology while contemplating whether it will allow its collective conscience to get hurt or not on the basis of the yardstick named class/region. So, when such a sensational case arrived on the Indian horizon, hurting the collective conscience of the citizens, a much-hyped 50-plus matinee superstar remarked that he was feeling ‘ashamed’ as a man.
Perhaps it was the first time the said superstar heard of gangrape and/or murder being committed in India. Perhaps he was residing in an ivory tower of his own for more than five decades, oblivious to such horrendous sin.
The statement of that matinee superstar hit the mind following a former Indian cricket superstar’s comment revolving around his holiday in Kashmir valley. If it was his maiden trip to the valley, he was absolutely justified in getting mesmerised by the region’s beauty, dubbed as Paradise of Earth for centuries. But isn’t it a wonder that, after leading more than five decades of life in this very large diverse country, at last now he has understood the fact that that there is so much to see in our nation, that too following the prodding of a dynamic Indian political leader. Nothing can be more hilarious than it. And yes, the exceptional hospitality of common Kashmiris is indeed legendary (as rightly experienced by the former cricketer), but has he tried to perceive the embedded pain in them also? Which pain? Exactly that pain which would be felt by any person, zealously boasting of Maratha manoos or Gujarati asmita if Maharashtra or Gujarat got unilaterally divided into two, relegating both parts to mere union territories. And when any self-declared patriotic Indian feels offended when China/Pakistan/Nepal include parts of India within their map, he/she must also act in a sensitive way when certain independent countries get featured in a map of ‘Greater India’ instead of proudly getting photographed with it.
Perhaps the role models of India are urgently required to do some homework.
Kajal Chatterjee,
D-2/403,
Peerless Nagar, Kolkata