If...

If wishes were horses...what was after that, I just cannot remember,..it went something like 'if wishes were horses' something would be somebody's cottages...Oh,what is happening to me...I can't recall simple things, things that were once a part of me,things that were me.."Be thou me,spirit fierce!!!" But no, there isn't a stick or sign of anyone that can fashion out meaning out of my nonsense. If only I could recall it, if only there was someone out there...why don't I see anybody...I know how Jimmy must have felt to see such an apathy around him...like him I could also say, "let's pretend that we are humans"

Feminicide again...

To continue with what I discussed last night, I would like to concentrate on the background of both Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua. Both are Mexican cities but this is what I came across about these two infamous cities:

.Chihuahua is the second largest consumer of illicit drugs among Mexican states
• Ciudad Juárez is home to one of the most powerful criminal cartels and street gangs dedicated to trafficking and consumption of drugs.
• As a border town, Juárez receives a steady stream of hundreds of people every day on their way to the United States, as well as residents of that country who cross the border to Juárez for a variety of reasons, among which the most enticing is the city’s nightlife.
• Ciudad Juárez has 3700 nightclubs, but only 625 schools.
• Juárez also has a large number of maquiladoras-these are foreign owned assembly plants in Mexico.Companies import machinery and materials duty free and export finished products around the world. They are also known as twin plants, maquilas and in-bond industries.In the early days women made up as much as 80% of the assembly plant workforce, today they number close to 60%. While they can legally be hired at the age of 16, it is common for these girl-women to get false documents in order to go to work at ages as young as 12, 13 or 14.

The exploitation is alarming with wages being as meagre as $3.40 per day vs. US - $5.15 per hour. And these women are easy prey for any male that wishes to lay his hands on them. These women are killed for nothing and almost everything and primarily because they are WOMEN, their gender makes them liable to be murdered.It happens to women inhabiting the lower stratum of the society, belonging to a lower economic strata.

The problem has not been addressed properly by the police or even the government and so women continue to suffer in the city, the families live in perpetual dread knowing that their daughters, sisters, wives, mothers are not safe...

THIS CRIME SHOULD BE CURBED NOT ONLY FOR THE WOMEN BUT FOR THE ENTIRE HUMAN WORLD WHICH WOULD OTHERWISE BE UNABLE TO STARE AT THE FUTURE GENERATION IN ITS FACE...

Feminicide

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten

every five minutes a

woman is raped/every ten minutes

a lil girl is molested


The truth often really seems not only stranger but also more horrifying than fiction and then one really finds it hard to 'Wipe your hands across your mouths and laugh' as Eliot would have you do. Something of the like stared into my face twice this week, once when I was asked to translate a part of an interview of the Mexican superstar Salma Hayek(see picture above with a mural to spread awareness about feminicide)and another when a Mexican novelist and short story writer, Edmeé Pardo visited our university. Both times I encountered a truth that made me squirm, made my blood curdle and left me trembling in anger, desperation and evoked in me,a whole gamut of emotions unexplicable even to myself. I had come to know about FEMINICIDE.



Feminicide is a form of violence against women due to their gender, class, ethnicity, age, ideology and politics, factors which come together and reinforce one another in a particular period and location, culminating in a series of violent deaths. These damages are inflicted on females by strangers as well as persons known to them. What these crimes have in common is the attitude that women are expendable and can be routinely used, abused and discarded. Ciudad Juárez stands a mute witness to baffled, beaten and battered voices of women that have been cruelly throttled. It is a site of feminicide with numerous killings of women, the impunity for perpetrators and one uniform code of silence...


Since 1993, more than 400 women have been violently killed and there have been over 4,000 registered complaints of disappeared women in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua. This systemic problem has been called "feminicide" and has been known as the most embarrassing human rights scandal in Mexico's recent history.

My senses numbed as I chanced upon articles on feminicide on the Internet, my mind stopped registering the meaningless violence against my own species. These women were unsafe, everywhere, in the confined walls of their homes, they were most at risk, as they were easy preys for the male members of the families. I read about a girl and her sister being tortured and raped for days together by the boyfriend who had a perfect allibi for unleashing such brutal horrors : the girl had kissed another guy. Then again I read about the wives who are being beaten, raped and then burnt in the so-called safe homes. A female drug peddlar was drenched in a vat full of acid as a punishment of an unregistered crime...

As I read it, I was ashamed to be a part of the homo sapiens species and anger gripped me again, an anger directed not so much against the inactive judiciary but against my own ineffectiveness...

The two paintings displayed above are by two women painters who depicted the horrors of feminicide in their works. One of them is Maritza Morilla whose painting is the first one on the top and the other is by Yan María Castro, and the painting is called 'La Basura'. Where voices have been silenced, art seeks to find an expression, it becomes a route towards resistance, a medium that seeks to register a protest, however feeble the voice may be, but there has been a try and that is all that counts.

This is just the beginning and I plan to continue this...so watch out for more blogs on feminicide...

"Los asesinatos de mujeres en Ciudad Juárez son los más crueles de México, pues en esta ciudad fronteriza a las mujeres se lesconsidera peor que basura. La violencia y la impunidad de las autoridades las convierte en objetos de tiro al blanco."

Elena Poniatowska.

Commuter Diary 9/11/2006

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor...

Coming back from the Nivedita School today where I have been tutoring some girls, I was near despair, my head seemed to revolt from an age-old enmity, my legs refused to coordinate with my sleeping brain and sagging spirits and I was certain (for the umpteenth time) that I would die in the next instant...but, Yummy, I suppose has gone on a date with God-only-knows-which Apsara and so he didn't turn up . Finally, when I spotted ny bus, I could cry "yiiiiipppppppiiiieeee" or "Eurekaaaaaa" or "Thank Goddddddddd" or "bancha gelo"...or may be a mélange of all, did that matter???

The journey had been uneventful (well,yup, sorry to disappoint all those females who expected to be disgusted by another evidence of repressed sexuality in males and all those males who expected to be regaled by the story of the discomfiture of another hapless young lady who dared commit the crime of staying out late)....

Tried gobbling up some more pages of Kiran Desai's Booker winning novel "The Inheritance of Loss". The book is intriguing, to say the least and that made me scan it even in the little dull light of the bus :))


But God hadn't opened the box he stole from Pandora (imp: here God is a HE because a theft is involved ) .....


As I climbed into the three wheeler, the rickshaw , once I had reached Kalindi, I had my first whiff of the "something's just not right" instinct endowed only to the better sex(NOT fairer as it is assumed and asserted always) . The rickshawallah who was supposed to drive me home was shabbily dressed, as is the norm, he was some forty five or fifty, had a salt and pepper stubble,unkempt hair and he seemed tipsy. The other rickshawallahs told mine to drive carefully, and as he took off, my nose caught the obnoxious and offensive odour of adulterated country liqour....I was too tired to move even an inch and go for another rickshawallah. He, kind of tortoised on (my lazy brain has unwittingly coined the word on an impulse for the lack of a better one) and I was grateful that I didn't have to drag myself...

Then all of a sudden, a car, a Maruti Zen to be precise, stormed past us, rather recklessly, I have to admit. Before I could react, I heard the rickshawallah's strained voice that rose to a crescendo:

"Ki bhabe ki era, boro gari te jara chore...aamra choto gari chalayi bole ki manush na...amake dile amio dekhiye ditaam, amio pari, ki mone kore ki nijeder...."

he went on and on in the same drab drone and I wouldn't have paid the least attention if my dazed and dozing mind wouldn't have been so drastically hit by a string of english sentences that dropped from my rickshawallah's smelly mouth...(yup....you read that right....ENGLISH) :

"What do they think...have no sense...lost sense, all nonsense...I will show them, all big big people, no sense, what think..."

I was stupified, to say the least...amazed, surprised, even shocked to hear him enunciate such grammatically perfect english. May be my so-called superior upbringing had not prepared me for an alchoholic rickshawallah to rattle off in english. I had little time to recollect myself, but that little he spoke made me ponder a lot...

At home Dad informed me that he had once travelled in the same rickshaw and that this old man had once been a Western Railway employee but due to his excessive drinking habits, he had been show caused and had left the job eventually. Now he was driving a rickshaw trying to make God-only-knows-how-many ends meet.

I realised that being confined to my own world, I have always come to regard rickshawallahs as illiterate. I almost expect them not to know english, though I know another one who stays near my grandparents' house who has cleared his B.Com and unable to procure a job has turned to driving a rickshaw but he doesn't indulge in alchohol. May be we expect a certain class of people to converse in english and this rickshawallah could not be fitted into that group, yet by some kind of ironic twist that left me befuddled, he had trespassed into that territory...

I hope to encounter him once more, in a sober state, so that I get to know him better...
Till then I pray to God that SHE look after him( imp: it's a job only women are capable of)...