FOR THE last few days, I am pained. And I think this is a gross understatement. But words actually fail me to describe my actual feelings. That is why language and feelings, which complement each other co- terminously, are inexpressible. I feel awful, crippled  and effete. I am referring to the gruesome case, one has heard of;  torture to a two-year-old girl. Newspaper reports describe the act as grisly: she was hit on the head, there were bite marks on her, the gory details could go in a macabre manner. Even Jack the Ripper would blush. But in the twenty first century India, we cannot, do not blush, in episodes like this. Because we are not ashamed, we have no feeling, no pathos, for a suffering bystander, or for people in slums, or for impoverished, decrepit street children who are compelled into a life style of stealing and chicanery. We turn away. Our eyes are never moist.

We shoo away a ' beggar ' as we shoo away animals and dogs. Yet we pray, we make huge donations to temples, we do not bat an eyelid, when an ostensible Godman dies with a profligate of wealth surrounding him, in his temple precicnts. But we worship the man as an Avatar, go berserk when he dies, weep over his body, and indulge in the worst kind of melodrama. A cricketer of repute does the same, rushes to his hearse, announces to the whole world about his ' loss ' and bereavement. Yet, that cricketerer does not give alms to the poor, in terms of contribution towards mercy homes, or orphanages. We need an Australian cricketer to do that. We needed a Mother Teresa to do that. We even had the guts to bad mouth her, mind you, only after her death, dubbibg her as a wicked proselytizer. How ashamed I feel, how sorry for the state of affairs in India. We can take a leaf out of the wolves who reared Ramu 'The Wolf Boy'.

Way back in the 1980s many people in South India converted to Islam. There was pandemonium in the country- how dare they? B.G. Verghese retorted in his columns, yes they did that because you have treated them like dirt, you have not allowed them to enter where you are ensconsed, whether they be restaurants, or temples...so you raise a clamour that  they should be reconverted. And then you fought in the name of caste and destroyed people professing your own religion. Do you call yourself a spiritualist, or a religionist?

Then you are afraid of opprobrium, if a girl child is born. You say this is bad omen. And you compel someone to commit ' Sati ', in the twenty first century. And now you maul a two-year-old girl, battling for life now. God forbid, if she survives, she is not going to forgive you (read us!).