If I am raped tomorrow – A poem by Gurnoor Kaur

I was speaking to an Indian-American colleague (born in the U.S. to Indian immigrant parents) who regularly used to visit India every year. When asked about this year, said she was reluctant to go there alone due to the high incidence of rape and sexual assault on women.
This post is in response to that.

 

If I am raped tomorrow,
Leave me on my own,
Please don’t forward messages for my sake,
I am not worthy of your status’ ache.

Don’t give me your pity,
Don’t pray for my soul,
You are the same people who did not care when I lay there in a hole.

Your e-protests are not getting me justice,
Nor my sisters any protection,
The government is going to sensitize the issue, just to win the coming election.

First they objectified me,
Now the turn is yours,
How dare I step outside, I am just meant for the household chores.

Don’t console my father
Don’t try to cheer up my Mom,
It’s something you can forget tomorrow, but for them I’m forever gone.

I am dead now,
Humanity died with me
For I am a girl, I deserve every bit of this, I’m not to be seen equally.

This society is esoteric
A ‘fatal lie’, a ‘deadly truth’
it propagates such evil, and is the one to protest that it is ruth.

It cries for me and still mocks my death
for a few days later you’ll all forget,
hundreds like me will come and go,
For we are all going to reap what we once did plow.

Years ago the seed was sown,
‘She is a woman, she has to be tamed and made to moan’.

Now live with it, and dance with joy,
See her being meddled with, like a cheap plastic toy.

For she is a girl, she deserves every bit of this,
for her’s is weak and Mightier is His.!

Source: Gurnoor Kaur, Yes Punjab

Hysteria – is it real ? Brain Images say yes

Pic : from ‘Hysterica & The Wandering Womb’ , York Univ. Canada Cine Festival 2004

Hysteria : The word itself seems murky, more than a little misogynistic and all too indebted to the theorizing of the now-unfashionable Freud. More than one doctor has called it “the diagnosis that dare not speak its name.”

Nor has brain science paid the diagnosis much attention. For much of the 20th century, the search for a neurological basis for hysteria was ignored. The growth of the ability to capture images of the brain in action has begun to change that situation.

Hysteria actually predates Freud. The word itself derives from “hystera,” Greek for uterus, and ancient doctors attributed a number of female maladies to a starved or misplaced womb. Hippocrates built on the uterine theory; marriage was among his recommended treatments.

Then came the saints, the shamans and the demon-possessed. In the 17th century, hysteria was said to be the second most common disease, after fever. In the 19th century, the French neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet laid the groundwork for contemporary approaches to the disease. Then Charcot’s student, a young neurologist named Sigmund Freud, radically changed the landscape and, some argue, popularized hysteria.

Please read the complete article at this New York Times link. No one has so far been able to explain why women are more prone to this malady.

ps: now don’t ask me why I posted this on my blog !