HT reports that a couple of army jawans have been arrested in Pune for gangraping a woman. At the end of that report is the following line:
The incident comes days after a married woman was gangraped in the city.
Why does that sentence need to have the word ‘married’ in it? Does the inclusion of that word change either the impact on the reader or the perceived gravity of the crime?
If so, isn’t that disturbing?
So the doorbell rings and it’s the cook. She walks into the kitchen and asks what I’d like today. I tell her, and then ask, ‘How’s your daughter?’ She hadn’t come yesterday because her daughter had a fall.
‘She’s not conscious yet,’ she says. ‘She’s got a swelling in her brain.’
‘What? She’s in hospital?’
‘Yes, but the doctor says that if she isn’t conscious by this evening, she’ll have to be shifted to another hospital. Chicken or mutton?’
Her tone is perfectly normal, like she’s telling me about her daughter’s school results or something. You’d never guess there was something wrong.
And that’s the life. Another maid, her husband was a drunkard who beat her everyday. You’d never guess there was something wrong.
We’re spoilt, and weak, the urban elite with household help. When life knocks us down we won’t have the fight in us. If someone close to me was unconscious with a swelling in her brain, I’d show it.
‘Chicken or mutton?’
In a marvellous essay on self-esteem, Theodore Dalrymple writes:
Self-esteem is, of course, a term in the modern lexicon of psychobabble, and psychobabble is itself the verbal expression of self-absorption without self-examination. The former is a pleasurable vice, the latter a painful discipline.
Indeed, that might also be one distinction between bad and good novelists. The bad ones just do the self-absorption, while the good ones begin their journey towards producing good work with self-examination.
I’d imagine, though, that any honest self-examination would necessarily erode self-esteem. In his essay, Dalrymple defines self-esteem as ‘the appreciation of one’s own worth and importance.’ When I look at the larger scheme of things, it is clear to me that we have no worth or importance, except perhaps to ourselves, which is circular and temporary. We are just one species in one tiny planet in one small solar system in a universe that has galaxies without end. And a short life span that ends when it ends, despite widespread irrational belief in souls and suchlike.
Despite that, most of us see humans as being the center of the universe. For example, we speak of global warming as endangering the earth. But we forget one thing: we are not the earth. Even if the most alarmist claims about global warming are true, then all that it endangers is humankind. The earth has been much hotter and much colder than it is now, and will go on merrily without us.
Our foolish collective self-esteem reminds me of this great quote by Douglas Adams:
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
Indeed. And how absurd is the notion of the self-esteem of a puddle?
(Dalrymple link via @tunkuv. The Adams quote is from Richard Dawkins’s book, A Devil’s Chaplain.)
Aarushi points me via email to a couple of blog posts by Sherlyn Chopra. In one, Sherlyn says:
For quite sometime, I’ve secretly wished for a bigger butt. Guess, my mind strongly believes that my bum is petite. Hopefully, in early 2010 I shall fly to the US and meet some highly skilled surgeons and get their first hand opinion about whether or not butt implants are safe to acquire my desired result.
And in the other:
All through my teenage life, I’ve had a flat chest. Sometimes, I wondered if God had forgotten to give me breasts. It was only recently, a couple of years ago, that I had decided to get surgically enhanced breasts.
I know readers who would find this funny; and others who would say that Sherlyn is just trying to be provocative. But consider where the provocation lies—in honesty. She is sharing desires that many, many women have; she actually has the courage to act on those desires; and she is telling a repressed readership, which has been programmed into believing that talking openly about sexual matters is somehow wrong, about her boobs and her butt. I admire that.
But what does it say about us that such honesty can seem so scandalous?
Check out this headline:
Karunanidhi praises Stalin, doesn’t mention Azagiri
What does it say about the state of our country that petty family politics is national news? And it’s not one state, it’s the whole damn country. We are ruled by families.
For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island’s gone.
There is a lesson in this for all disputes, not just geopolitical ones: One day, that island will disappear. So just chill, no.
(Link via email from Godhuli.)
In Thomas Friedman’s latest column, I come across the following names:
Sunanda Sharma, Arjun Ranganath Puranik, Raman Venkat Nelakant, Akhil Mathew, Paul Masih Das, Namrata Anand.
And a thought strikes me: They could have been Indian—but we fucked up.
The WTF opening sentence of the day comes from a Rediff report:
According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) one married man commits suicide every nine minutes in India.
That sentence makes it sound as if marriage is the cause of these suicides, which is surely unjust to the 57,639 wives whose husbands offed themselves. Causation is often complex and not easy to pin down when it comes to suicide, and the following sentence would make quite as much sense: “According to Cricinfo, 13 married men have made scores of 250+ in Test cricket in the last 10 years.” Huh, no?
Given that life is a fatal disease, it’s not unnatural for some of us to want to get it over with quickly. Marriage, like most of what we seek in life, is a palliative. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it can’t cure nothin’, and it ain’t the cause.
(Link via email from Poornima.)
Update: Here’s the NCRB report (pdf link).
I feel hugely sorry for this kid. In her world, it might be a huge deal to become “the youngest girl to ever write the Intermediate or plus two examination in Andhra Pradesh.” (She’s nine or ten; the article states both.) But the pressure on her must be immense, and such ‘achievements’ are not the stuff of life. She’s obviously enormously smart and talented, but I’m sure there’s much parental expectation pushing her, and that isn’t good. Childhood should be chilled out and as stress-free as possible.
I hope she’s doing okay 15 years from now.
Suppose that you are a cow philosopher contemplating the welfare of cows. In the world today there are about 1.3 billion of your compatriots. It would be a fine thing for cows if all cows were well treated and if none were slaughtered for food. Nevertheless, being a clever cow, you understand that it’s the demand for beef that brings cows to life. How do you regard such a trade off?
I predict that any philosophical cow will consider its self-interest first. It might be in the interest of the species for cows to continue to be slaughtered, but it would certainly not be in the interest of this particular cow—so it would be against killing cows. Unless, of course, our philosophical cow is guaranteed immunity from slaughter, which its human overlords might well consider given how few cows tend to be philosophers. In that case our bovine thinker, freed from concerns about its own welfare, might well take the broader view.
Doesn’t this happen with humans as well? I know ‘intellectuals’ who rail against urbanisation and romanticise village life, while themselves living comfortably in cities. I know women who condone the way other women are treated in some cultures by resorting to moral relativism, while themselves enjoying their full human rights. (For instance…) It’s easy to pontificate about matters that don’t immediately concern us—and most pontification is exactly like that. Such it goes.
*
I can imagine a philosophical cow deep in thought near an unsuspecting farmer. Suddenly, the cow starts jumping up and down, shouting ‘Eureka, Eureka!’
‘What happened?’ says the farmer. ‘Why’re you so excited?’
‘I just formulated the Cowtegorical Imperative,’ says our philosophical cow.
‘That’s impossible,’ says the farmer. ‘You’re just a cow. You can’t do something like that. You can’t!’
‘That’s right,’ says the philosophical cow. ‘I Kant. But you can call me Immanuel.’
*
(Link via email from Prachi Parekh. Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112.)