hmm...long time...

Despite my determined resolutions, I am here to post after a two-month gap instead of the two-week or one-week gap I had envisioned...anyways...so much did happen that I wanted to pen down but here it is...cooled and distilled...It is methinks imperative that we stop using the phrase 'moral policing' and start referring to certain personalities who graced the newspapers recently as 'moral terrorists' or 'social terrorists'. Though a rose is a rose no matter what it is called, I am beginning to realise the immense power of renaming or naming...People who want to grab eyeballs through their 'cultural sanitisation' should not be given front page coverage definitely but whenever they are referred to, anywhere in the media they should be necessarily called 'terrorists'.Not only because they attack women/girls/men, but also because what they are essentially doing is exactly what all world leaders and activists and the most importantly, The Common Man, strongly condemn all the time, everywhere...terrorism. Terrorising human beings in the name of religion/culture/ whatever ideology the barbarians can conveniently latch onto. While I do not think that wearing jeans/drinking/smoking/even education is the act of emanicipation of women, I do recognise that it goes a small way in forming a world where women are considered human with a will of their own and not an object men have to take care of. But what amazed me was that nobody, man/woman reacted to a news story that appeared later in the week after all the hullabaloo. There was a court judgement in TOI just last week where the judgement read that the rape victim could not have been raped because no Indian woman allows another woman to be raped in front of her. The victim in question had alleged that the wife of the rapist had abetted the crime. I do not know the facts of the case but what shocked me was the judgement which in my friend 's words was 'regressive'. The victim may have been lying, the man might be innocent, his wife again innocent. But why does this judge feel that Indian women are incapable of heinous crimes when there are criminals of the female sex ? Or maybe he meant married Indian women are incapable of anything immoral/heinous ? oh so is that why mothers-in-law kill their daughters-in-law ? Is that why well-off mothers do not hesitate to kill a foetus if found to be a girl ? Or is it only rape that they will not tolerate ? When a judge who metes out justice can bring his personal prejudices into his judgement in the year 2009, and nobody reacts to that statement when it was across the front pages, I can happily predict many more moral terrorists creeping in.
The Indian woman seems to be an alloy of purity, chastity, resilience, goodness and silence in the face of suffering. Nothing more, nothing less !
Meanwhile, Swat valley has been taken over by Neanderthal Men. The world including India(which had a woman PM and still has a woman behind the throne apparently) or the US of A(headed by a charming young Prez) doesnt seem to be able to do much abt it...Though I am pinnin my hopes on Obama who seems to be genuine enough abt removal of terrorism. If some kind soul does not liberate Swat soon, the female species of homo sapiens (this must be the way the Neanderthals regard girls/women) there might soon be driven to extinction or a fate worse than that and obviously India will soon be at the receiving end of more Mumbai-like attacks. [Interestingly and on a very different tangent, I must say that the recent Mumbai attack seems to have opened many more eyes than usual for the simple fact that the upper classes were also victims this time around. Random, innocent but rich and influential people...now is tht my bias?!]
Hmm...the next thing tht had caught my attention was of course the ubiquitous 'Slumdog Millionaire'. Yet to see it, though it seems to have swept up almost all the awards worth their salt, the music seems to sound average to me. Anyways...good to see the Oscar winners especially Winslet who won after 6 nominations...