Becoming A Dragon Slayer

Honestly, sometimes I wish the world would end. It seems to get uglier every single day. This report about ISIS executing 19 women for refusing to be their sex slaves is truly horrifying. They were executed for refusing to indulge in sexual jihad, which, according to Wikipedia is-

"Sexual jihad (Arabic: جهاد النكاح‎, jihad al-nikah) is a controversial practice of women within some Wahhabist groups who are allegedly voluntarily offering themselves in sexual comfort roles to men fighting for the establishment of Islamic rule."

Not only this, a translated ISIS pamphlet was found to be a rate card for prices of Yazidi or Christian women of different age groups-ranging from $43 to $172. The women can be as old as 40-50 or even as young as 1-9. How depraved, how evil do you have to be? What has happened to the world? That we have sunk to such a level that we've basically become the dregs of society? How sick do you have to be to even consider such an idea? The tragedy is that even though most of us will shake our heads in horror and disgust, we aren't really surprised with it. The zillions of reports of rapes, of child abuse on the news has gotten us accustomed to the idea that there are sick perverts in the world. What do we do about it? What can we do about it? The futility of my question bothers me.
There has to be a solution to this. If it were up to me, I'd probably mace them and then set a pack of hungry wild dogs loose on them. But then, we can't take justice into our own hands. If Hell exists, there is a special space reserved just for the sick, perverted, convoluted minds that seem to be growing by the day.
The fact that there is a market where people can be bought and sold for a listed price, makes me want to gag in horror. What is it with the need to dominate, the need to assert one's supremacy, the need to have absolute control over another human being? Why is it that we are so helpless? Forget about protecting others, we are unable to protect ourselves from any kind of threat. We know nothing about self-defense. And the one thing we do have? Our voices? We don't take any advantage of the gift of communication that all is have been blessed with. And the ones who do, meet fates like those poor young women. Its enough to frighten anyone. But should we stop? Just because we are afraid, we shouldn't stand up for what's right? We shouldn't fight for the legacy Nirbhaya left behind? That brave, young girl with a promising future; she could have been any one of us. Her life changed forever in just a matter of minutes. What truly set her apart? The fact that she fought with the courage of a soldier at war till her very last breath. All of us have it within us, the strength to fight for what's right. It's up to us to look within and find the grit that will help us stand up for what we believe in and fight against what we think is evil. We love fairytales, don't we? The Prince slays the dragon and saves the princess? Well, why don't we become the dragon slayers ourselves and protect what we hold sacred? No harm trying, right?

Courage is a Rarity

We are doing Pygmalion this semester. Which brought back fond memories of 'My Fair Lady'. And when you think of that movie, you have to remember how exquisitely beautiful Audrey Hepburn was. I was reading her Wikipedia page where I saw that she was trained in ballet, and she danced to raise money for the Dutch resistance (against the Nazis) and also occasionally acted as a courier for them, delivering messages and packages. She was no more than 15 or 16. So much courage. And she was the daughter of Nazi sympathisers.
It's truly one thing to say you feel empathy and just talk about it and it's another thing to actually get up and do something about it. Its a completely different thing to try to make a difference. All of us hate the Taliban, we hate the ISIS, we hate child labour, but how many of us have the courage that Malala Yousufzai or Kailash Satyarthi do? It's all well and good to talk about the tragedy and go, "tch tch" with pity. We just can't take a stand, can we? We are so frightened that our lives and our lifestyles might be harmed in some way. We are so afraid that something might happen to us, as is happening to the world around us. The fact that these atrocities are happening in the world around us, to our own species, inflicted by our own species eludes us. How can we stand by and watch people who aren't so different from us, people with families, people with responsibilties get hurt and tortured? How can we watch a child's future get destroyed? How are we human if the instinct to protect our own kind is weaker than our fear of something untoward happening to us? How is it it that 99% of us don't have the courage to stand up for what's right, but by some miracle, there is that tiny fraction of society that still believes in humanity and had the courage to speak their mind and do what they said they would?

The End of 2014. Well, Almost.

2014 is coming to a close. Its not been a great year. What with MH370 vanishing into thin air; another Malaysian Airlines flight getting shot down in Ukraine; the crisis in Ukraine; Boko Haram abducting schoolgirls in Nigeria; the death of Robin Williams; the outbreak of the Ebola virus; the terror that ISIS spread around the world with their executions of journalists and aide workers; the Israel-Palestine conflict; the Ferguson shooting and the violence that followed; the protests in Hong Kong; the gang rape and murder of two teenage girls from a village in Uttar Pradesh; the cowards who didn't have the courage to stand up for the two sisters in a bus in Rohtak; the ferry that capsized in South Korea; the 20 year old girl who was gang raped by 12 people on the orders of the head of the village and of course, the most recent massacre of children in Peshawar.
It hasn't been a good year for the world. Of course, there were some moments of joy, moments of happiness; moments of humanity. Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. The social experiment in Canada after the attack on Parliament hill in Ottawa. Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. There have been moments when the times didn't seem so bleak. But they are bleak, aren't they? As much as we would like to live in our pretty little homes with the outside world shut out so that we can never get hurt, it's getting to be quite impossible. Terror is everywhere. Evil is everywhere. Tragedy lurks in every corner. But we ignore it. We're content in our little bubbles. Those bubbles were meant to pop. And when they do, you fall hard.
But how can one ignore the events of 16th December? How can one pretend not to shudder at the evil that lurks in the hearts of mankind? How can one's heart not be filled with sympathy for those parents who lost their innocent children at the hands of the Taliban? However much we can compartmentalise and avoid, nobody could ignore this. This unspeakable act of violence. Innocent children. They'd barely lived. They hadn't seen the world. They were bright-eyed, little boys and girls just waiting to grow up. And that was taken away from them. Even the ones who weren't killed have to live with the violence that they witnessed. They took away their childhood. The monsters stole their innocence. WHAT HAS THE WORLD COME TO? So much violence, so much grief, so much...
There's a little more than a week left for the year to end. Here's to a better, safer and a more humane 2015.