Shock and Horror

10

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A 15 year old is raped and murdered ... preyed upon in her youth, in her weakness. Preyed upon by a society whose fabric has been so badly decimated that not even a veneer of civilisation remains. A deeply repressed, lecherous mindset that pervades the country, even the most touristy of tourist hotspots... that more than three decades of drugs and the Israeli and Russian mafia can do nothing about - never mind the beaches, the steady influx of tourists. And this is Goa.

A world away on the outskirts of the murderous Capital, a 10 year old boy is burned to death by a marriage party. Because he allegedly wanted compensation for the damage done to his bicycle. A 10 year old.

And there's no shortage of sleaze here ...The same day, a smaller headline, a smaller victim. A two and a half year old boy is sodomised and murdered in southwest Delhi. A labourer goes to jail. A two and a half year old child, a toddler. At the threshold of developing... a two and a half year old is learning to eat on his own, can be taught to wash his hands before his meals, may be able to start using pea-sized amounts of toothpaste on his own without swallowing ...will have all 20 baby teeth ... has just stopped sucking his thumb.

It will never be ok.

We barely register the headlines anymore, other than to hold our own closer. Get more protective, more watchful, but it will never be enough. There's no reason, there's no method to the horror.

And the horrors just don't end, in this, our global village. Scour the headlines and you'll find that half the world away in the cesspit that Iraq has become, the self-professed saviours of the free world, US soldiers shot and killed a young Iraqi girl. Because in their paranoia they thought she was being signalled at, on a road north of Baghdad, where they'd found bombs earlier. She appeared to be 10 years old, they say. She doesn't even get her own story. She doesn't even stand out for more than half a second in reporting on the biggest, most intensely observed flashpoint of the decade.

As far as international news goes, Governor Eliot Spitzer's dishonour gets more weightage, so does President Bush and his daughter's wedding plans.

This is not natural. We froth at the mouth when we hear talk of a clash of civilisations. We beat our chests over alleged infringement of our freedom of speech, our freedom to choose, our freedom to be. And we've become a civilisation that doesn't even value the next generation. There's a word for it, barbaric.

And though none of it figures on the Vatican's new list of mortal sins, there's a place for us collectively - that place is hell. A place where we will be haunted by the children of last year, from Nithari on down to Scarlett Keeling, no matter how much we try and project the blame, to fringe elements, or "the other"... An eternity in hellfire is getting off lightly.