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Akarsh heard people shouting in the news discussion bulletin on TV. They were arguing about something about Kathua. He overheard his father slowly talking to her mother, meanwhile keeping a check that nobody else can listen to him. He understood the case while his father explained everything to his mother in hushed tone.
Akarsh felt disgusted, hoping that is just fiction that he had just heard. He felt disturbed. The voices which he can hear on a daily basis were making more noise than ever today. He felt like the tipping point seemed to be closing. He thought of focusing on the voice that gave him direction. He couldn’t hear the voice today. He focused and tried harder. Finally the voice answered. He felt a disappointment in the voice today.
“You sensed what I wanted to talk about.” he asked the voice.
“Everybody is talking about that only. You are too small to be handling that topic.”, the voice answered.
“Maybe that is the mistake we have been making.”
The voice thought for a moment. It could come up with no answer. It shrugged.
After a long silence, it spoke:
“There is no way back from this. The epidemic that is rape, has affected India these days, goes beyond my comprehension. Is it religion, is it stupidity, or is it such hard placed belief that a cry for help doesn’t shake a person anymore? It was just to prove a point, I heard.
Nothing remains of her. The only daughter of the family rested in the ground for good. It seems we are obsessed with burying women to the ground one at a time. How do you even determine what she did to deserve such fate. Probably temple was not the safest place for her. Probably, God doesn’t exists everywhere.
We promised after Nirbhaya that we wouldn’t let anything of that sort happen. But look at us now. Making the same mistake, hiking the same path, placing blame on other’s, while failing to realize the fault in us. Our education system, our political inclination, our blind faith in our religion, while making sure that we keep on increasing the population frantically. This ends nowhere, but more pain and more outrage, increasing every single time such an incident happens.
From 1947 to now, we are still a slave to our age-old beliefs that doesn’t let us see that we can be more than aimless followers and backers of our stupid religions, caste, gender, sect or country.”
Akarsh clearly overwhelmed tried to sleep, losing all hope, hoping this was all a dream and wishing he could wake up to a better and hopeful Earth.
The voice called him, he felt a sudden optimism in the voice. He called out to it, “Go away! There is no coming back from this. There is no hope.”
“Hope is you!”, the voice said and transpired through the air.
Akarsh, after scratching his head for some time, realized what the voice meant. The hope are the people who call things out as they see them. The people who fight for injustice, who respect women, the people who get equally disgusted with such news. We need more of them. We need them in this fight, against the ones with no moral values.
Lets Fight!
