Rarest of Rare: A Bloodbath

For rape and sexual assault, the death penalty is meant to be reserved for the rarest of rare cases - crimes of such extreme, “unprovoked” brutality, whether or not born of diabolical planning, that they shock the collective conscience of society. For a harm that can never be undone, mentally or physically, and may never be forgiven.

Under this (negatively framed) standard, in 2022 the Indore bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court heard the case of a man convicted of raping a four-year-old girl. His life sentence was later reduced by the judge to a mere 20-year imprisonment on the basis that “he deserves credit for being kind enough to leave the victim alive.” Is it a legal standard or a hostage situation when a court grades the rape of a child on an A–F scale where not also killing her counts as a mitigating factor?

Mission Shakti, the government’s umbrella scheme, exists precisely to try to close this gap - funding helplines, One Stop Centres, and legal aid for women who face exactly this kind of violence and exactly this kind of institutional response to it.

But a helpline doesn’t fix a courtroom. And the courtroom is only the sharpest edge of a well-rusted blade that doesn’t always show up as a judgment, but as a lifetime of small, constant instructions about what a woman is allowed to want - because of which far too many young girls have started flinching at the sound of the hammer.

Former BJP MP Pragya Thakur once told parents that daughters who visited a non-Hindu’s home of their own will deserved to have their legs broken for it. BJP MP L. Ganesan pitched a “one boy, two girls” ratio as the fix for India’s skewed sex ratio, as if a girl were a correction you legislate into existence rather than her own person. And in Uttar Pradesh this October, a former BJP MLA stood in front of a crowd and turned two women into currency - promising jobs to any Hindu man who could “bring” ten Muslim girls in return, calling it justice for two alleged conversions no one could even confirm had happened.

Women, on every side of this theatre, exist as a mere tally mark to be ticked off the chart of unmarried liabilities. This isn’t three unrelated bad days for three unrelated elected personnel. It’s what happens when a society has practiced, for generations, treating a woman’s body as a number to be managed rather than a person to be asked. Internalized patriarchy doesn’t announce itself; it just determines that women are the terms of a negotiation between men, never party to it themselves.

Ask a room full of people to raise their hands if their mothers gave up a degree or a career after marriage, and more than half the hands go up. Ask the same room who has a mother who works and still comes home to cook and hold the household together, and nearly the rest of the hands go up. In that room, almost no one has a mother who simply worked the way a father simply works. The daily, repetitive labour defaults to her. The occasional, optional kind - the weekend gardening, the convenient dog walk - is what gets praised as “helping around the house” when a man does it. Though not bad in itself, it negates the value of the woman’s work when household labour is often not even recognised as true work.

There is no thirteen-year-old girl in any school who hasn’t been told, while doing some household chore, that it’s natural for her because she is but a girl. There is no girl child whose parents haven’t, at some point, been “blessed” with the hope that their next child would be a son.

It shows up at work, too: widely cited workplace surveys put work-life balance as the single biggest obstacle women name to career advancement, with large numbers of women reporting they turned down demanding roles specifically because of caregiving expectations that rarely fall as heavily on men. Career breaks are especially punishing; many women who step away from paid work struggle to return, and many simply don’t. Some studies even show that women are less likely to get salary hikes or promotions after having kids compared to men, because he is seen as more “responsible.”

Meanwhile, women now outpace men in educational attainment in India, yet remain underrepresented in the highest-paying technical fields - whether healthcare or manual labour. The pattern holds steady across all of it: not a lack of ability, but a system that unmissably tries to steer women toward the exit at every layer.

It even shows up in speeches meant as encouragement. Just this month, Uttar Pradesh’s Governor told a hall of women graduating with degrees that whatever else they became - an IAS officer, a teacher - they should “first become an expert mother,” and that every woman should know how to cook. It wasn’t said with hostility. It was said warmly, to women who had just earned what they came there to earn. That’s the pattern underneath everything else: a girl might begin as a topper, a coder, a doctor, an athlete - the opening scene keeps changing. But somewhere along the way, she keeps being steered back toward the same ending, as if the ending had been written first and everything before it was just detail she can optionally invent.

And this is usually where someone asks: why do we even need feminism? Don’t men have it hard too? It’s a fair question, and one that comes up constantly, pointing to false accusations, custody bias, the absence of a men’s helpline, unequal expectations around who has to provide (especially alimony laws), and the rarest-of-rare clause that doesn’t even recognise men as victims of rape. Aside from the fact that feminism stands for equality of all genders, those aren’t imaginary grievances, and a serious answer to “what does equality require” has to include them. But that question and the one about women’s safety and opportunity aren’t actually in competition with each other. One is about a system that grades a court case on how much mercy the survivor’s rapist showed. The other is about a system that hasn’t built equivalent support for men in distress. Both are failures of the same larger indifference - the fact that a courtroom would even entertain “he could have killed her” as a mitigating factor is not a women’s issue or a men’s issue; it’s a conscience issue named the patriarchal society.

You may not take your husband’s name, but you are still stuck with your father’s. Age-old traditions such as marriage strengthen this by promoting women to shed their past existence under their father for their new husbands - in the name of homes, surnames, even “gotras.”

Real empowerment means fixing what all of this points to: an alarm that actually works instead of one unconnected that nobody dares touch because touching it invites judgment. A well that people are willing to listen to when someone finally speaks into it, instead of one that just returns silence - because the data on what women face is not a substitute for asking women what they’re actually living through, and neither is a substitute for the other.

None of this means rejecting family, tradition, or care work. Plenty of people build their lives around exactly that, by genuine choice, and that choice deserves as much respect as any other. The problem was never cooking, or motherhood. The problem is a script that insists every road has to end there: being married off, raising kids, teaching those kids to carry forward one side of the family’s name and “legacy,” no matter where the story started.

Empowerment doesn’t ask society to install a fancier-looking alarm. It asks society to finally connect the wires so the next girl writing her own opening scene also gets to write her own ending: to dress, drive, educate, work, live - without being told to just smile more.

The question was never whether a woman can live without guilt. It’s whether she should have to die without it just to prove she deserved to live it her way. Empowerment isn’t asking society to deny the past; it is to make better the future. Because until it does, we’ll keep hearing the same quiet ruling passed down in a thousand different rooms, in the silence of everyone who decided not to say anything. We’ll keep being told that what happened to her wasn’t quite bad enough to matter, wasn’t quite loud enough to count, wasn’t quite rare enough to change anything. As if cruelty only becomes real once it’s proven unique and deserving of the final punishment - as if the rest of it, the daily and ordinary kind, gets to stay unnamed simply because it isn’t rarest of rare.

Do Young People Have the Power to Change Society?

When I was young I used to roll my tooth over the small red craving of my gum which once held a tooth. A small hollow. I don't feel it now; maybe because it is now burdened by the weight of a new tooth, or maybe because it has turned into the crater of life in which kids are pushed into and told they’d be pulled out only when they have acquired the power, and the passion to change society. Young people, in all their might and raw honesty and boundless energy, try to emerge with the strength to build what has been broken. These youngsters keep touching the wrinkles of society and ask it questions that older generations have stopped asking. They are the nerve endings of progress.

The challenges they face are many and complex. Economic pressure, limited political voice, unequal access to education, and social expectations narrow opportunities for many young people. For example, global youth unemployment hovered around 13 percent in 2025, leaving many talented young people in precarious work or out of the labour market entirely. Social media both amplifies youth voices and shortens attention spans; online campaigns may win notice but not always durable policy change. Still, constraints shape rather than nullify youth power: they force inventive strategies, from community organising to technological entrepreneurship, that translate moral urgency into action.

When a dog passes through a lane cluttered with trash and shattered glass, it sees the present, the past, and the future all at once. The road bears traces of those who came before - elephants, cavalry, the battalions, the steady march of institutions - and also the refuse they left behind. The dog must learn to navigate that legacy. Like that dog, young people walk a path scarred by earlier generations; they stumble over the same obstacles yet persist in looking for safer footing and better routes.

On that battered road the dog finds a broken mirror. The mirror reflects a fractured world and, paradoxically, the possibility of repair: a way to imagine what a mended society might look like. Youth are often less clouded by the complacency and compromises that harden with age; they can see both the harm and the potential more clearly. Their clarity becomes an engine for demanding accountability, as in the campaigns led by figures such as Malala Yousafzai for girls’ education and Greta Thunberg for climate action, or in student-led movements that have forced governments to reconsider policies. Their vision can prompt large institutions to act.

This hunger is not merely hypothetical. Young people are present in masses on the digital platforms of our era, and those platforms give them reach and rapid organising capacity. Online movements can turn private grievance into public pressure and mobilise resources swiftly; youth-driven digital activism has raised awareness about social justice, influenced elections, and helped pass local reforms. Young entrepreneurs and student innovators also convert ideas into practical solutions - developing affordable 3D-printed prosthetics, launching educational apps, and creating low-cost green technologies that show tangible impacts beyond protest. Yet digital visibility must be paired with durable organisation if it is to produce lasting change.

The craters of injustice are also places where the roots of renewal take hold. Youth plant those roots through protest, invention, art, scholarship, and community service. They build grassroots initiatives, design inclusive technologies, and push for laws that address long-ignored harms. These efforts often begin modestly, at the margins, but persistence widens each crack into a space where repair can begin. Healing - like the filling of that hollow in my gum - does not happen instantly or perfectly. It happens over time, with repeated attention and care.

What matters more for the future - protecting nature or pursuing material advancement - is another question youth are eager to answer. Their priorities often reflect a broader view: long-term ecological stability and social wellbeing enable durable prosperity, whereas unchecked materialism can deepen inequality and destroy the commons. Youth are using digital advocacy and grassroots organising to push for policies that balance conservation with equitable development. Their ability to envision a kinder, more sustainable future, founded on hope and pragmatic action, is perhaps their greatest asset.

In short, young people are hungry enough - morally and politically - to change society. They already are; through questions, actions, and innovations that expose injustice and propose remedies. From the craters of injustice emerge the roots of renewal; whether those roots flourish depends on whether others will water them. If the world chooses to listen and to act alongside youth, the slow process of repair can become a shared project rather than a lone stagger.

The Two Nations Theory

You must have heard the saying, "We all live the same life in different fonts."
Well, well, well.

I used to be an empath. As a kid, every time we crossed a stoplight and I saw, out of the window, a lady with a kid in her arms begging for money, I used to cry. Because why was her kid in the arms of her mom in the scorching heat and I inside an AC car? Why was she wearing a ragged loincloth and I a frilly white two-piece frock? It had always bothered me.

Not now, no.
Now I am a smart girl of fourteen who has watched a thirteen-minute Dhruv Rathee video on the beggar mafia strategies. Knowledge has, and always has had, a peculiar way of replacing innocence with suspicion.

If you go to an MUN and your suit is not as suits-pretty as everyone else's, and you are the smaller person, don't worry. Just go to such a stoplight and stand and watch. Men with dreadlocks looking like they belong on a ghat in Banaras. Women with knotted hair, with her kid on her hip, selling a jute trinket nest with plastic blue jays.

You can be an unidentified person in uniform with three stars seen poking a girl from behind while she was walking away. Or in yet another video, the personnel are seen surrounding a girl, groping her while others leer and laugh. Or maybe instead you can be THAT GIRL, that very girl. You can even be a proud "anti-national" fourteen-year-old girl fighting with your friend on said topic. You can even be a twenty-three-year-old minister's son studying at Stanford and doing an internship at UNICEF.

To put it in Hannah Montana's words:
"Who said, who said I can't be Superman?
I say, I say that I know I can.
Who said, who said I won't be president?
I say, I say, 'You ain't seen nothin' yet.'"

To put it all this way - We were all just people roaming the extents of jungles, naked with thought and body. Naked in the technological sense and naked in the psychological sense. Then we started seeing each other as inferior or superior. There were heads to no tails. There were sarpanches, but no civilizations. Those came dressed in ivory and grey and red and clay.

We are now people identified with nouns, not adjectives.
We can be Indian, Cuban, Mexican, tennis player, chess player, dictator - sorry I mean politician - and whatnot.

We do, yes, we do drink water. We do eat. We do sleep. We do have people yelling at us, every single one of us.
But is that the only thing differentiating us from each other?

Are we actually living the same lives as those who are not reading this essay, who may never read this essay, who are sitting on the streets begging for alms? Those who may never even know that we have ever upgraded from 2G to 5G? Why, when I go by in a bus, do I see BMWs and people sleeping on the footpath? Why does the rain not equally harm the caged pigeon as it does the free one? Is the free bird truly free, and is the caged bird truly caged, if it is just money and names and nouns differentiating it from the free bird?

We like to imagine there are either nearly two hundred nations on Earth or just one life. I think there are only two nations. One where tomorrow is something you plan for. Another where tomorrow is something you survive long enough to see. And we, as a community, have reached a point where these are not separated by time or fossils, but rather by the amount of zeroes you have on your see. And the border between them cannot be found on a map. Yet every traffic light seems to know exactly where it is.

Dil Dil Pakistan

(An essay on how media, the government, mainstream media, and Bollywood have us believing...)

Media, the government, mainstream media, and Bollywood have us believing ethnically evolved leaders like Sonam Wangchuk are (flagged as) Chinese agents when they host or even attend discussions on ecological systems in Pakistan. It shows how the media is anti-Pakistan and not just anti-terrorism or anti-hate crime. I am anti-hate, unless ethically sourced. Pakistan has done a lot of brutalities, and many have been done by India too - arguably more by Pakistan, and maybe arguably not. The point is, if you heard I talked to a Pakistani yesterday, you would probably switch off your phone and focus on your faecal process, and how to renew it by letting MSM feed you yet again.

The enemy is not the civilians of any country. The enemy is not a nation. The enemy is the ideology that kills, and the people it has condemned to so far a point that no return is possible. Too often, public discourse stops distinguishing between a government, extremist groups, and two hundred million ordinary people. When those distinctions disappear, suspicion becomes easier than empathy.

And it shows - in casual racism, casual Islamophobia, and casually calling the faces of Bollywood - the ones that have the most renowned patriotic movies, the ones who have starred in the very songs that you sung in your society’s 15th August talent show - “Pakistani” simply because they have a surname that starts with a “K.” It shows in the way people cannot stand “Indian” couture and traditions being localised elsewhere, even though that is just the propagation of the Hindutva they follow. It shows when little girls argue over the origin of yoga or the origin of the dhoti. It shows when people try to get the Taj Mahal destroyed by calling it “Tejo Mahalaya,” even though the word mahal is legitimately Persian. It shows when lawyers do too. It shows how people have stopped seeing people beyond the borders.

If someone is advocating against the axe, why should we be against them? Didn’t you say you hated the country and loved nature? If yes, is nature not the trees there too, or is it selective, just like your secularism?

The water does not ask who drinks it. The rice does not either, no matter how many times you say, “Daane daane pe likha hota hai khane wale ka naam.” Then why are we - the most mentally evolved pieces of flesh - still in the restraints of words like nations, culture, or historic kingdoms? Why have we forgotten that culture was always meant to be shared?

History has always been showing us that, no matter how harsh trade is on the economy, it still tries to mend the gap inside us through blue, through hue, and through force. Be it the culture of blouses coming to India, henna travelling across Africa and India, scarves, sunscreens, jhulas, rebranded jhumkas, boho, chic, or Hawaiian influences, everything has evolved enough to prove that differentiation is a sin.

History has always found a way of entering our homes. Sometimes through trade, sometimes through conquest, sometimes through a recipe, a language, a song, or a scar. The same roads that carried spices also carried soldiers. The same railways that reunited families could become symbols of division and unity. History has never been innocent. It has always been crowded.

If your house had a rat infestation, would you flip the house upside down, or would you first ask where the rats came from? We keep overturning the furniture while leaving the infestation untouched. We mistake the symptom for the source.

The Samjhauta Express was never just a train. It was proof that even hostile neighbours once left a door unlocked to pass a cookie or two. Even after Partition, steel tracks remembered routes that politics wanted forgotten. Its suspension felt less like solving a problem and more like congratulating ourselves for removing the symptom instead of confronting the disease.

It reminds me of the suspension of the Non Cooperation Movement. In both cases, the performativity of action seemed louder than the substance of change. Both became performative, symbolic, and ultimately “khokhle”. Stopping the movement did not erase violence overnight. Stopping the train did not erase trust overnight any more than the bilateral tensions escalating following India’s revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status (Article 370). In both instances, a visible symbol was halted while the deeper conflict remained untouched.

It is easy to stop a train. It is easy to stop a movement. It is much harder to stop the ideology that made either seem necessary in the first place. History keeps proving that appearances are cheap. Causes are expensive. Cutting a bridge is always easier than rebuilding or repairing one.

Coming back to Pakistan and India, even a clause in the Two Nation Theory was that India turns Hindustan, Pakistan stays Pakistan, and together they form India like a union. Why can’t we forget all that has happened? Because we never will know the full story, the number of calluses on the feet of the fled and the migrants. But we can make sure that our kids do not have feet that bleed because they cannot find a land to call their own.

Exchange of media, culture, style, and ideas has happened throughout history. When it happens today, when things are replaced, inspired, or renamed, people forget that this too is history. Tomorrow’s futurists and historians will look back at all of this and admire the naïveté of it.

First came love. Then came marriage.
Then came a few specks of white privilege.
Their marriage was toxic.
At least, that is what propaganda told the media.
Their children were called Propaganda, Fear, and Nationalism.
Their grandchildren were called Wars.