http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Pak-teenager-denies-being-flogged-by-Taliban/443686/


how do people live with this kind of fear?? the girl who was shown being flogged en camera now denies such a thing ever happened... just coz it would be bad poublicity for the taliban...

conversely... IF the damned video was a fake... HOW in the world did they use her in it?? teh people in the video were identified by the media as locals,.. one even as her brother.. according to news reports... n now she says it never happened.. AND she does not want to appear in court...
could we, people who live in a freer society where we never have to worry bout men with guns flogging us publically just because we were seen with a man.. ever understand what she may be going through???
can ANYONE ever help such girls?? her presence in the video must have brought more anger on her... because the people who did this to her will anyway blame HER.. even though she was pinned down n being beaten.. n had no control over what was being done to her..

how do they live with themselves?? those animals who think nothing of cruelly assaulting innocents in teh name of order... how do they face their mothers, sisters, wives..?? can they really look at themselves in the mirror and not feel guilty?? is fanaticism really that potent a drug?

all through history, there have been cruel armies, bands of vagabonds who have looted, pillaged, raped and killed... how do they really live with themselves??
do they not feel guilt? remorse? sadness? arethey really so disconnected.. so far above the rest of the world that the suffering of those who they hurt has absolutely no impact on them???

makes me sick.. teh idea of people hurting another with that brutality...


as an intern in a news agency once i was asked to do an article on teh armed forces.. the thing i came up with, said my senior, was coloured with the rose tinted glasses i wore when looking at the forces.. "sure, they are patriotic and brave and fearless my child.. but thats not what u have to write about.. what YOU have to bring out is the kind of brutality that they have to make themselves immune to.."
i couldnt do the story... not after my senior sat me down and told me things he's heard from freinds in teh forces.. how they're trained to live in a jungle, killikng their own food, how some sections are trained to withstand torture by going through a short session thereof...

n i read... frederick forsyth, alistair mclain, robert ludlum, tom clancy.. i read them all..

how easy it is for a human being to forget how to care for others.. how quickly one adapts to hurting others when its a choice of 'me or them'...
and yet i cannot understand it

brutality, selfishness..
and we see it everyday.. all day..
on tv, in real life, in books, newspapers...

children being beaten up by enraged employers, women burnt for money, the taliban, the ram sene, the mafia, people who huirt and kill for profit, for political supremacy.. for relieving their own tensions..
and we accept..
accept it all because its so ingrained.. "us against them" "survival of the fittest"

how do we do it?? turm away from sufferiung after offering nothing but a prayer of thanks that it isnt happeing to us.. turn away to save ourselves..

i asked how those who hurt can look at themselves in the mirror..

and now i find that I'm having trouble meeting my eyes...