Before I proceed further I would like to first set out to admit the wrongs done to many in India:

a)It is true that in the past much wrong has been done towards those who did essential manual work for an elite priestly class.
b)It is true that there still exist rigid marriage rules which prohibit racial dilutions.
c)It is true that our nation is still suffering from these caste distinctions.

But it is also true unlike say Britain, where Lords continue to sneer at commoners and a Queen ultimately mocks any pretension to democracy, we are a nation willing to redress our own sins. Thus we have the quota/ caste - reservation system. This system is necessary for the welfare and correction of many of the socio-economic diseases which still haunt us. But here are some hard truths; like every human system, this too has becoming a burden in some cases.

Scene I

In one of our states, there is taken a regular Public examination for recruitment of school teachers. Candidates have to clear the first paper with a certain percentage for having their subject papers (2nd) papers marked. Whereas General Category candidates need to get often at least 16 out of 50, candidates under the quotas need not score any marks for their second papers to be corrected. So who will be our future teachers?

Scene II

Mr. R has a First Class MA & a PhD to boot but is teaching school for all the universities he has applied to have no place for him since he is from the General Caste. His monthly income is less than 2 lacs per annum. The nation loses out on his years at research.

Scene III

Mr A has been teaching in a premier university in Kolkata for the last three years. Recently Masters Students complained about his teaching. He cannot spell Shelley. Oh well, he is from a rich family and never bothered to study for the quota-system is his ticket to higher academics.

There is a definite need of the quota system which does not base the sins of our forefathers as the beginning for brining justice to our marginalized. But rather we need economic quotas now. Let merit be patronized, not caste-origins. Otherwise we are pushing our nation to another scarred future where the only solace will be that the circle of injustice would have come full circle. Let the meritorious poor be helped by the State and anyone using caste-distinctions be punished with life-imprisonment.

There is another insidious manner in which the quota system hurts some of those who are forced to take advantage of it. A brilliant doctor told me recently that he is not going to apply quota-cards for his daughters. You see, he had topped every examination he had given in life but while in India he always felt an intruder amongst his general-category peers. Abroad he just felt like a successful Indian. It is time we overhaul the quota system, political hobnobbing notwithstanding. One can understand St. Stephen’s College desire to put mediocre Christian teachers in its faculty lists only if one sees the scurry in the nation at large to finish off all meritocracies everywhere. Brilliant students, both from reserved and unreserved categories are not spared. And the poor keep on being poor.

PS If my Western readers think that they are free of such biases, then please read Edward Said to begin with!

Image: Thanks for the Image.

Due to the nature of my profession I have to travel a lot through the hinterlands of India. Sometimes I have to halt at remote villages where even today there are no signs of even the advent of electricity. There may be lights in the next village but some bureaucratic quirk has prevented this particular one from being lit up. Truly, India still lives in the heart of darkness. This last week I stayed for about three days at such a village near a semi-urban town in Eastern India. As is the custom here, we group for chatting under desultory skies in the evening where tea and biscuits are customarily served. The men told me that for the past few months a strange malaise has struck this village. Their women are being abducted at night and even during the noon when the men are in the fields cultivating paddy. Have you informed the police? A home-guard among them spoke up, yes, sir, the police themselves are scared. It seems every night or so a group of people terrorize this village and ones nearby by first knocking on the doors and then someone starts crying pitifully till the door is opened. As soon as it is opened, people are put in a coma through some odiferous powder. Then the women are no longer seen. Two of the abducted six have been later found raped and murdered and left in their own paddy fields. Though hard to believe, I decided to investigate this more thoroughly.

Why have you not informed the press? Why has not police acted? How is it possible that at 2pm a green Maruti with darkened windows come up to a remote meandering red-soil path and just grab a solitary woman walking? How come none raised a hue and cry?

There seems to be great reluctance on the part of the villagers to divulge their gory details to the outer world for the following reasons:

a)Their village is near a rural tourist spot. None will come here if this is known.
b)It seems that one or two locals may be involved who have veritably bought the police of the area.
c)Metropolitan brothels are paying huge amounts for these kidnapped women.
d)The women themselves don’t want to speak out for fear of violent reprisals from the men folk.

On my last day I had a brief chance in my professional capacity to question a young newly-married woman in her early twenties:

Are you scared?
Silence.
Do you know who doing this?
Silence.
I heard six have been kidnapped and of them two raped and killed?
Sobs, much more and all six killed…

I rest in peace thinking everything to be only a rumor but then it has to be a very well orchestrated rumor for the girl to cry uncontrollably and lapse into an unending silence. A wee boy also told me that the girls are being taken for their blood and body parts, i.e. an organ donation racket is functioning there. Curiously, when I tried to visit the families of those who have lost someone, I was hurried out of the village and there my investigations ended. Take this as yellow journalism or what you may, but let us be warned that evil walks in our midst.

Image Source

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
“I deeply sympathize.”
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.

The Walrus and The Carpenter
Lewis Carroll

Doctors are good, god-like and like everyone else, get angry when criticized. But they must be held accountable. Not merely for negligent practice but for being indifferent to the queries of patients and their families. In our countries, medicos often do not bother to explain prognoses, medication proper living-style changes to the common person. They think the latter to be too ignorant in things scientific to be able to understand what is going wrong medically. Of course, there are good, humane doctors who are genuinely interested in the welfare of their patients. For example, there is Dr. Sukumar Mukherjee against whom a case is pending for gross medical negligence of the wife of his NRI student, Dr. Kunal Saha. Dr.Saha has accused his teacher of deliberately giving steroid in higher doses to the late Mrs. Saha. But this writer has met patients touched by the healing hands of Dr. Mukherjee and found that they think of him as a veritable deity. I found that without Dr. Mukherjee’s help patients suffering from auto-immune diseases like SLE and rheumatoid arthritis would have degenerated long ago. One patient from Dhaka told me that when her SLE made all her vital signs to drop, Dr. Mukherjee was at her bedside for over five hours till she showed signs of improvement. The doctor sees patients till two am in the night. One veritably doubts whether such a man can ever deliberately kill a patient. But this is an example of a good man practicing medicine. Unfortunately too many doctors have made a business of their professions and also there is working a sinister nexus between pharmaceutical companies and doctors. Pathological laboratories are known to pay up to 30% to doctors for prescribing high-cost tests. While investigating for this report I have come across large chain hospitals in Kolkata setting targets for surgeons to achieve. A famous, resort like hospital off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, Kolkata, has set certain benchmarks for appraising the performance of doctors in its pay. One is aghast to know that a doctor’s acceptability to the hospital increases only if say, a spinal surgeon fulfils a certain quota of surgeries. Other staff has told me on conditions of anonymity that in such a situation doctors have to force patients undergo dangerous surgeries for trivial reasons. Otherwise their jobs are at risk. A curious fact has come to light; patients undergoing routine and sometimes urgently recommended angiographies to check for heart-blocks are suddenly declared in the gravest of dangers. The cardiologist in charge will suddenly declare that if the patient is not given stents right at the moment then the patient might not live; the blocks are so disastrous. The patients’ families are then charged anything from a few thousands to lakhs, depending on the economic strata of the patient, for those stents. Doctors receive very handsome commissions on stents costing over a lakh each, sometimes to the tune of 25% of the billed price. There are indeed cases where doctors do have to perform angioplasties urgently but the greater malpractices erode our trusts in honest doctors.

Three horrendous cases have come to my notice. I have the prescription of one of them with me. A lady in her late twenties visits famous, busy rheumatologists. She complains of knee pains and joint pains. The doctor who boasts of a tight schedule cursorily looks at her and prescribes her the deadly (when not necessary) methotrexate and diagnoses her as having progressive degenerative rheumatoid arthritis. He advises the starting of the medication without key tests. When the patient’s family asks him whether tests are necessary, he bursts into a diatribe about the idiocy of the patient-party and reluctantly insists that some very expensive tests be done from specific laboratories, though there are known better laboratories in the city. It was later found, on second opinion, that the said lady had only a minor sprain and suffered from exercise related transient injuries. A general physician has last week told a family that their patient has throat cancer. It is the truth. Then the doctor has delicately put forward the proposal that he be taken with the family to Mumbai where he will be so kind to arrange everything for the patient at the relevant hospitals. One just has to pay his for his flights, his residence there and also his days missed at work in Kolkata. When the patient’s family refused, the doctor had first thrown a tantrum and then refuses to set eyes on them ever more. This is as far as I can write of doctors here. A medical representative recently ran up a bill of more than Rs 55,000 for a dinner for three at the Taj, Kolkata. There was a doctor-couple and himself. He was mandated by his pharmaceutical company to hard-sell ginseng capsules to the docs. Incidentally, ginseng has been reported to reduce long term immunity by some researchers. His company also manufactures atorvastatin. He suppresses to the doctors that this cholesterol lowering drug often has serious motor-neuron side effects which may possibly be reduced with CoQ10, an enzyme. Neither are the doctors too interested to know the nitty gritties of the medicines. They have just been offered an all-paid trip to Switzerland.

What can the layman do in such circumstances? I have put up a post here about how to deal with medicos. But then, nothing is foolproof.

Ranajit Guha started the subaltern studies group long ago in Switzerland. He and his cohorts curiously left out itinerant monks, Christian nuns and sadhus in general from his study of virtually every aspect of Indian life. I have been always interested in the life of what goes on behind the veil. Today being Good Friday and Holi, I thought of looking into a much maligned and misunderstood aspect of Indian society.

I am not here talking of god-men or gurus. I am talking of those young men and women who are leading quiet lives when they could have had great careers and most probably, excellent families. Yet they gave it all up and seek themselves.

What is of concern is that fewer people of merit are joining both Hindu and Christian monastic sects. The famous Naga sadhus now have very few ideologically motivated and intellectually brilliant candidates among them. Our nation faces a serious crisis today, something that no mainstream media-person will deal with unless there is some perversion involved. We forget that marriages do not lose their efficacy and beauty just because there are too many divorces these days. Neither should we neglect the monastic life just because plenty do not feel there is a God to begin with and most cannot be celibate. Also we must not confuse true monasticism with the fanatic polemics of zealots, either Hindu or Christian.

In a society glutted with sensuality and greed for wealth and the search for status, I present below a few lives which may goad you, my patient reader, to reflect on your own life.

The Ramakrishna Mission, Head Quarters Belur

There is a Swami I know personally. He is about 35 now. Cool guy. He was a regular at the Tantra (discotheque at the Park) and an IIT alumnus. He has an MBA and liked the finer things in life. Worked for TCS, Cognizant Technologies and then one day he tells me, he was having the time of his life at a work-place lunch when his life changed. Till then he never cared for God, religious lives and all that bunkum. There he was, there the grub was, and all the people everywhere. Those pretty girls, the smiling boss and the soft lights of the restaurant. He suddenly felt at one with all of them, mama mia; I feel I love all of these people here, he suddenly saw everything, everyone as One Being. The moment passed, and he was left a quieter man who woke the morrow morn. Nothing anymore appealed to him. Not sex, not money, nor learning. He thought he was getting depressed. Dutifully he visited a counselor. It was through the latter that my friend the Swami, got to know that he might have a vocation. Under advice, he visited the Ramakrishna Mission. Voila! He felt happy there. The ochre robes pulled him. Finally he got the courage to tell everyone about his desire to leave them all for good. Now he is a geek living happily there. Though he once in a while misses the dancing, but then he says, I am only human.

Monastery of Christ the King, behind St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta.

The Roman Catholic Church has a long history of retirement from the world. Over the centuries young people at the peak of their careers have been touched by the fire of Love. In the heart of Kolkata, there is a Carmelite monastery where even as I write; there are 12 women who live behind the grill. They follow a strict rule of silence and none has seen their faces recently. We know they exist by their regular tolling of the Church bell and their evening hymns from within the alcove of their Church. An Irish doctor had come to India about five years ago. By chance she went to Carmel and has now given up her career to live there as a nun. Make no mistake, they too want to have kids, to raise families and have brilliant careers. But something within them will not allow them to be content with the material world as we see it. The Carmel nuns have a drop-box where one can drop prayer petitions. They have no television, radio or internet. But the Mother-Superior knows if something goes wrong outside. There are too many prayer petitions then.

Baranagar Burning Place, by the Ganges, Calcutta.

The dead come and go and their families often start bickering about property even before they are fully burnt. The initial wails turn into angry accusations. This is life, tells me Shitangshu Kabasi. The man is just above six feet, has jet black hair and an intimidating beard. He can walk on his fingers; can teach you yoga which will surpass many well known masters. He lives in a garage nearby. The garage has been given to him for staying by a local man. Otherwise he would have carried on living in the open by the Ganges. Kabasi is mostly found in the crematorium meditating. His house is nearby though he never goes there. I now know him for over five years. Till date I have not seen him beg, ask for money (which if he gets, he gives to beggars immediately) or gossip. He had quit studying when he was sixteen and from then till date he just lives without encumbering the earth. He teaches free yoga to the local slum children. He smiles a lot and talks little. I ask him, have you ever though of marriage since you are not gay? He replies much in the same way one Christian Brother once told me, when I was an adolescent I told God to make me His, God listened. Period.

Make what you will of monks and true renunciates. As the family is important, they too are important as signs in our blighted lives that hope is still there for mankind.

Can we have a marriage without love? Is it possible for two unknown people to live happily ever after without really knowing each other? What makes a marriage tick? Are Indians shifting from a society preferring arranged marriages to love marriages? Is there any relationship between dowry-related tortures and the type of marriage one is in? Last but not the least, which type of marriage tends to last longer? Put in another way, which type of marriage statistically leads to lesser divorces? What implication do these types of marriages have for the evolution of the family in India?

It is C.S. Lewis in his classic study of the origin of love in The Allegory of Love shows us that love as an emotion is a socio-economic and cultural construct. There can be no such thing as love unless certain social conditions and economic structures are in place. Whether he is right or wrong is beside the point. But his basic contention is held sacred by many in our society. There is a prevalent feeling that love is just an emotion which may not make a bad marriage but definitely makes for a dubious beginning to anything as solemn as a marriage. In fact, the recent Rizwanur fiasco only proves how love is often thought to be an economically motivated game. This is the same reason which compels so many of our block-buster movies showing young lovers rebelling against their elders’ choices. Love is subtly equated with rebellion. There is implied a falling in love which is entirely different from being in love. Love-marriages thus often take on a pejorative connotation.

Arranged marriages on the other hand are seen to be blessed by family approval and there is a collective onus for others in the two families to keep the relationship working. Since the bride and the groom have hardly any idea about life with the other, expectation from each other initially is less than in a so called love marriage. Both parties know they have to make certain adjustments and compromises to make living with a stranger possible initially. And the trend in our country is overwhelmingly to purse this route for marriage.

As will be seen from the two examples below, both these types of marriages have equal chances of deteriorating.

Urban couple settled in Bangalore (I have changed the names and the guy was my classmate in college.)

Jyoti married C. Anita. They met at the workplace a few years ago. After a whirlwind romance they got through a breezing registered marriage. Neither Jyoti’s parents nor Anita’s family attended the party. Jyoti is a non-vegetarian and Anita is a pure vegan. Everything started off well. They went out daily for expensive dinners and the last I heard of them, they were in heaven on earth. Day before night I mailed Jyothi after about two years asking him to tell me whether he is happy. I present his reply after some editing:

Hi (my real name),
… I am rid of that woman (he wrote a swear-word). I could not bear to eat dosas and idlis day after day…I cud not take it any longer, pal. She insisted in hearing Carnatic music from dawn to night…we are separated for the last one year…my marriage is being fixed by my mother in Kolkata…

Rural arranged marriage, Garbeta, West Bengal.

Shandhya has been married to Mithun Ruidas. Mithun is a graduate. He has some land which he cultivates. Shandhya is also a graduate from the local college. She wanted to study further. Her in laws with whom they stay do not like girls working outside the house. And getting an education is also mixing with other guys. Shandhya is regularly taunted by her in-laws for not getting their son a tractor. Her parents only gave Mithun a motor-cycle. Shandhya cannot think of divorce though she hates her life. She tells others that she will adjust over time and after all, Mithun too is educated.

Happy long term marriages seem more and more a thing of the last generation. I know a Bengali man about 72 now, married very happily for as long as I have seen him to a Punjabi lady. I see my parents and people in their age-groups. Divorce and non-committal living is virtually unheard of in their groups. But now Orkut profiles advertise ‘Open Relationships’, whatever that means. I recently went to Pune and heard a psychologist predicting that worse is to come. The poor man cannot understand whether people are marrying anymore for keeps at all. All the marriages he seems to come across are just breaking apart. The family unit is in serious threat of being annihilated.

Disclaimer: I have not purposely gone into the countless happy marriages for the sick need the doctor, not the healthy.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…

These lines by W. B. Yeats best describe what is happening to our country. We are as a nation breaking up. Separatist forces want to assert independence, either from the country or from a larger state. We can no longer afford to wish their demands or their struggles away. Boston.com reports of the people of Darjeeling wanting to break away from its parent state, West Bengal. There is one issue which makes this struggle both alluring and yet alarming. The struggle for forming a new Gorkhaland state is interwoven with music. Prashant Tawang, a lad from the hills won the Indian Idol show. The hills rallied behind him and somewhere down the line everything got politicized.The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (Gorkha People’s Liberation Front) used the unity in the hills to build up a popular movement for cessation from West Bengal.

Why is it important for the Gorkhas to have their own state? Their languages, culture, physical builds are all different from the plains’ Indians. In short, they are ethnically unique. Moreover, as local leaders point out; there has been little development in the region in the last quarter of a century. Darjeeling, the scenic British hill resort, is plagued by water scarcity, unemployment and general apathy from the Centre. Tourism is the mainstay of the people living there. Even this lucrative industry is threatened by the frequent curfews and strikes in the region. The charisma of Subhas Ghising has disillusioned the local populace.

Tawang ultimately went on to win the Indian Idol music competition. This has brought back the pride of the people there in themselves. Unfortunately, the Gorkhas are often stereotyped in the larger Indian population as being only fit for low-end jobs. This writer in a year old trip to Lava found young people demoralized. This was before Tawang’s victory. Now the youth of Darjeeling and other adjoining hills know that they too can make a difference if they try hard enough. They see the forming of a new state as the first step in this direction. The only fear which remains is their eagerness to embrace ideologically neutral music as a vehicle for rebellion.
Source: Boston.com

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Hindi movies have made a mockery of our higher education system. Being intellectual is akin to being a nerd, unfit for any serious purpose. Scholarship is well nigh dead in our country. Mediocrity has given way to meritocracy. General stream students are often resigned to low-end jobs or see their college degrees as tickets to an MBA or Mass Communications courses. The number of PhDs in India is declining and due to some bad measures by the University Grants Commission, the condition of our higher educational system is surely going to decline further. Much is written about student unrest in colleges but unless we have excellent teachers, our country will not be able to attract best talents to higher education in the general sciences and the humanities.

The apex body controlling higher education in India has made the National Eligibility Test or NET, optional for aspiring college and university Lecturers. It suffices to only have an MPhil or a PhD.Earlier one had to clear the NET to be able to teach, notwithstanding a PhD. This new rule is detrimental to our country as a knowledge economy. The NET cannot be cleared by most students and thus, our government chooses quantity instead of quality. Better have many teachers than only excellent ones. PhD or an MPhil are research oriented degrees, whereas the NET demands an overall and broader understanding of ones’ chosen subject. Also political compulsions force governments to lower standards. Party cadres in different states have to be accommodated. The UGC mandates that a principal of a college should have a PhD, but the West Bengal government has recently overruled that and demands only 50% marks in the Masters level for becoming the principal of a college. The recent debacle of St.Stephens’s principal is a case in point of what happens if one tries o churn out a PhD.

I provide below two instances of what happens when mediocrity rules the roost and we have bid adieu to merit.

Case I, the classroom of Prof X

Student Laxmi has written a brilliant analysis of the exam topic. Prof X has marked her below par. When Laxmi inquires about the reason for her poor performance, Prof X flies into a rage and calls her an idiot in front of all the other students.
Don’t you know that what you have written is not in the books? How dare you question my abilities? The professor hollers…
Fact is that Prof X has entered the college on the basis of a cut-paste PhD and some political clout. He hardly knows his subject and being mediocre himself has no clue about the finer points in his discipline. Laxmi is now convinced that she is a fool. She despairs and will later just give up on academics. On the other hand Ram, a mediocre student has been marked high by the good professor. He will someday take Prof X’s place and in turn will perpetuate mediocrity.

Case II, interviews for Professorships

Shyam Kedia has just passed his Masters. His dad is a professor. And is an acolyte of the ruling party. Kedia is a mediocre student. His father arranges for him to get published in peer reviewed journals. The interviewer in the examination is Prof Kedia’s friend. The latter had called the former the day before the interview to talk of old times. Rahul Srivastava’s dad is a clerk at the post office. Rahul has a First Class Masters degree. He is competing against Shyam. And we know who will get the job. Don’t we? Rahul has the NET; Kedia has just about turned in a badly written and plagiarized MPhil thesis.

Professors in our country have no accountability and corruption is rampant in the process of selecting teachers. Exam scripts are not corrected properly and private tuitions by teachers have poisoned the education system. Reports are trickling in how researches by eminent professors are just plagiarisms of foreign papers. And thousands of students have seen their marks increase after Calcutta University reviewed their marks. I believe the nerdish teachers are nerdy because they are unfit to teach and encounter life. Those who are indeed suitable to teach in the higher educational institutions are self-actualized individuals, they can never be geeky. It is wrong and detrimental for our nation to lampoon them.

Disclaimer: Not all Professors are teaching by virtue of being favorites of ruling parties or through nepotism. But even if one is there, she can wreak havoc to many students’ lives.

Scene I

There is a room full of naked middle-aged women. They have shaven heads and are in a state of perpetual shock. The ones who are even slightly coherent keep on muttering Shame! Shame!. A male barber crops their hair while they sit nude in front of him. Where are their clothes? None knows. The ward-nurses pretend that the clothes have gone for a wash. I have a psychologist friend: I ask why this mess? The psychologist keeps mum, one of his colleagues has been assaulted by the Hospital staff for protesting. This is Pavlov Mental Hospital, Kolkata.

Scene II

Northern Kolkata, the by lanes are just too many to remember. The houses are decrepit and everyone knows everyone else in the locality. I visit two sisters in their forties. They request me to keep them anonymous. Their mother has just died. The father had died long ago. They are as thin as bamboo poles. One is pale and bloodless. The other dusky and tired. Both are rejoicing the death of their mother and plan to move away from their house. The people in the locality shun them. The local GP had declared them mad years ago and they were taken to various facilitates in Kolkata for shock treatment. One of them has been to Dutta Nagar Mental Hospital long ago and she shudders remembering her days there. They suffer from schizophrenia. That is all. Not something deserving electric shock and whipping. The dead mother whipped them regularly; even if they complained of a headache. They do not have any friends anywhere at all. Only a palatial building falling to pieces like their lives.

Scene III

Sujata feels chronically tired. Her parents have been called to her school recently. She had tried to throttle a class-mate for disturbing her during the math exam. Sujata tells me se feels intense rage at people. She does not mean to. That just happens. Her father beat her for it and mom is not talking to her. I suggest to the parents; she needs help. Counselling. I am thrown out of the house without ado. Is our daughter crazy or what? Do you want to spoil her marriage chances? What little I know of the human mind, Sujata is surely suffering from paranoia and depression. She needs help but will not have any. Not while we brand people mad, insane and useless.

The Christian Brothers, a global Catholic Religious Congregation running orphanages and elitist schools worldwide, had to pay huge amounts in damages in Ireland, Canada and Australia. They were accused of sodomizing orphan boys under their care. In Australia they were accused of forming sex-cartels where one Brother informed other pedophilic Brothers about which boys were soft targets. This is not a phenomenon confined to the developed world or to only those Catholic Brothers. This case just shows that often those whom kids trust explicitly are harming and destroying their lives. Pinky Virani’s Bitter Chocolate remains the best study for the layman till date on the problem of child abuse in India. But the book is skewed towards abuse faced by girls. The abuse of boys does not receive much media attention but is tragically rising in our society. The New Media can correct this.

I have a posting here, about how to recognize whether your son is being abused. I have changed names wherever I have felt it necessary.

Case I

Ten year old Prakash is a beggar at Howrah Station, the main railway station connecting Kolkata to India. He cleans the floors of railway compartments and then begs for his rupee or so. He is a confirmed ganja (a potent hallucinogen) addict. He has acquired the habit from a senior beggar who pimps him for truck-drivers and coolies coming to the station. He refused to go with me to a refuge-home for young boys run by a Religious Order in the vicinity. He said there the conditions are worse and at least here he had freedom and his ganja. This was about three weeks ago, my efforts to trace him now has failed.

Case II

Biswanath Oraon, a boarder at a senior secondary school, was kidnapped by Naxalites in Purulia district, West Bengal. He was taken to Jharkhand where he was trained in firearms’ operations. At 13, he has run away from the camp and has been given shelter by the Jharkhand Government. Oraon receives regular counseling. Part of his past that he has to deal with is the sexual abuse he received from a senior Naxalite leader. The fear is so overwhelming that Oraon stays in a girls’ hostel and is counseled by a lady psychologist. He trembles to come in front of men or other boys.

Case III

Vivek, the only son of a well-off working couple is no longer willing to go to school. He is suddenly flunking English and History. Teachers at school found his sudden silence exasperating. Vivek is taken to a psycho-therapist in Kolkata. The old lady starts her sessions with him and then one day the truth dawns on all. Raj uncle, his private tutor, has been abusing him for sometime now. Raj teaches English and History to Vivek and also abuses him. Raj is serving a jail sentence now. But Vivek is irreparably damaged.

Researching for this article I have come across adult women abusing small boys. That too is heinous but for brevity’s sake I highlight only the plight of little boys being harmed by men.

Social scientists are of the opinion that as taboos against gay relations in India are becoming increasingly lax, and as chat room-predation increases, we shall see an increase in such violence. Also any basic psychology primer on child-abuse brings up a startling fact to the fore: pedophiles are incorrigible. We just need to hunt them out and make sure that they no longer have access to children. Unfortunately, that does not happen and our laws are too lax. Once, a much esteemed Christian Brother told this writer what should be done to those who perpetrate such crimes: they out to be neutered and made a public spectacle. It sounds barbaric but then what pedophiles are doing to kids is bestial and demands the law of the jungle.