The gau goons can probably take on China!

What’s going on in our jails?

It does seem unbelievable that in this day and age, we still don’t talk about those who have been jailed. In fact, we completely ignore them. Otherwise, tell me what’s been happening within those caged interiors.

Why don’t we talk of the living conditions of the imprisoned? Where can the prisoners go to lodge complaints? What is the aftermath, that is, if they pick up adequate courage to raise their voice? What is the nexus at work within prison walls? What good are jails if they ruin the very mental and physical health of the prisoners? Why are jails associated with inhuman treatment meted out to the jailed? Where are the supposed reforms? Where is the concept of ‘open jails’ where the inmates can at least survive like human beings?

I’m hurling these queries in the backdrop of several news reports that all’s not well inside our prisons. Last month a convict died in Mumbai’s Byculla jail after the prison staff assaulted her in the most horrifying way by pushing rods into her private parts. Mind you, the prime assaulters were four women cops, so let’s not come up with the hackneyed assumptions that if the number of women cops are increased then it’s all going to be okay.

Nothing is going to be okay until there’s some level of transparency in the functioning of jails. Currently, the flow of information is through the released prisoners – who have been fortunate enough to have survived the jailed ordeal. Or through prisoners who have written volumes on their prison terms. I have read at least ten such volumes and each one of them is laced with details of torture and inhuman treatment meted out to the prisoned lot. In fact, so horrifying are those details that the read gets difficult.

Why don’t we talk of the concept of open jails! For God’s sake, don’t cage these men and women as though they are wild animals! They need to live and live with dignity!

Of Books and Writers...

I keep marvelling at our writers’ sheer output as more books keep hitting the stands. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the one and only sphere where we seem to be going ahead is on the books front! Books as never before!

And, these books build bridges, helps one to connect. This summer, I read three ‘impactful’ books: Sanchit Gupta’s The Tree With a Thousand Apples (Niyogi Books), Manju Kapur’s Brothers (Penguin) and Marion Molteno’s If you can walk, you can dance (Niyogi Books ).

They are different in terms of the storyline, settings, characters, plots, yet there is a connect. These works focus on human beings and with that those struggles and pains, turmoil and tragedies each one of the characters goes through, rather is destined to go through.

Whilst Sanchit Gupta’s book focuses on the Kashmir Valley and how the havoc is affecting lives, Manju Kapur’s novel dwells on human relationships in the backdrop of feuds within a Rajasthan-based business family, Marion Molteno’s novel is about a young woman’s life on the run across frontiers and cultures, ‘from southern Africa to the 1970’s London, it weaves the music of Africa and Europe through the patterns of work, love and politics in which she tries to find meaning in her everyday life’.

Days after I finished reading these three books, I kept introspecting on the very fragility of human relationships and forms. Not to overlook the psyches!

Who will take on China?

The joke doing the rounds is that China’s aggression on our eastern borders can be dealt with rather too effortlessly by sending all those gau rakshaks and the vahini and private sena brigades! For one, with all the lynching and killings they have been indulging in, they have become experts of how to settle the enemy! In the training sessions, they are taught to target the enemy — the Musalamaan of the country. Let the name of the enemy be changed! From Musalmaan to the Chinese! Also, stationed up there, the gau rakshak brigades would be able to control the beef eaters of that belt!