Alice In Katjuland

Hello Justice Katju,

This is Alice here. You wrote about me in your blog. http://justicekatju.blogspot.in/2013/01/alice-in-wonderland_6.html?m=1 Am so flattered! But wait, you weren’t laughing at me were you? Some vile person told me you were trying to discredit me. Uff. They are so suspicious.

Anyway, here’s a confession: I like dreaming up nightmares. It kind of distracts me from real life, where everything is so perfect and so boring. Everyone is just wasting time, trying non-stop to fix poverty and stuff. As for Indian women, they’re having a good time everywhere, dancing away, like in the item number “Fevicol se”. Btw, can I tell you how depraved we all were in that dream? Not only were we getting angry about rape, we were even talking about idiotic stuff like governance issues and apathy of judges.

I wanted to say sorry to you. Had I not been sleeping and dreaming, am quite sure all the world’s problems would have been fixed. Fighting for women’s dignity etc. is just so frivolous. If they have to get beaten, insulted, raped and all, they should at least do it quietly? In fact I would say, where there’s hunger, women should be fed last. They’re less than half of India’s population anyway. With this sex selection business, they’ll soon be a minority. So they really should pipe down now. And now the whole world is doing hoo-haa about how Indian women are having a harrowing time in homes, in streets, on buses, everywhere. We’re doing nothing but scaring tourists away!

Am so glad you wrote this, because now you remind me of this policeman I was really fond of. He also thought there are other, more serious problems in the world than rape. Like you, he didn’t like people wasting time on women making too much of a fuss. In fact he quite enjoyed asking raped ladies what part of their clothes were ripped first etc. He liked telling them about the two-finger test. He used to get mighty bored of women who didn’t have mutilated bodies. Poor guy. Once, a sick (in the head) mother came to him with her baby girl, who she said was being raped everyday by her father. The policeman was so upset hearing this nonsense. The woman was lying of course, because the baby girl had no injuries on her body. By the way, did you see the policemen beat up protesters in my dream? You’d have been so proud of them!

After reading your comments, I got a bit angry and sent an email to Justice Verma asking for rape protests to be banned because they are the problem. But Justice Katju, something must have scarred me in my formative years in Delhi. On buses, I used to hit fellow passengers with empty plastic bottles when they groped at me. Once on a train, along with my little sister, I ran away from a group of men who said they would rape us. I was such a bad girl. I should have let them have a little fun.

Sir, I recently found out that there are places in the world where women walk in the street with their heads held high. Men don’t even drool at them or as much as let out a whistle. How lonely these women must feel, walking around as if they are not even attractive. That kind of messed up my brain. Then someone told me the media is very powerful, but the world over it ignores women’s problems. So why should the Indian media get over-enthu trying to change mindsets? We have to move on from this boring news and get back to the old routine. These ladies are better off going back to making sacrifices and all. You like it better that way no?

Oh, about that “Castrate all men” placard you saw? “All”? Are you sure? Where was it? Because I didn’t see it in my dream. You mean those ladies hate all men? They must. You can’t be saying it only to make them look completely ridiculous. Am confused now. Actually you should visit my dream again because you only saw the slogans you wanted to. Did you see mine? I even wrote “Justice”, on it. Bit like your name 🙂

Also those ladies you saw in my dream saying, “You have no problem since you have not been raped”. I didn’t hear them say that. Now, now, Justice Katju, you’re not making stuff up are you? It’s my dream you know. I did hear those ladies say, “This is an urgent awakening!” or something hyper like that. But please don’t invent stuff about my dream, it’s annoying me.

Anyway, that hungry boy in tatters you spoke of, did you see his sister? She was married off at 13 apparently. As for his hungry mother, why would she worry about getting beaten to pulp every now and then? She has more serious things to worry about. Like giving her share of food to her sons. This discrimination business is a myth created by over-confident, non-poor women. How can women’s empowerment be related to their education, jobs and health care? Dreadful liars.

Phew! That beating that woke me up from my dream was much needed. All of us needed it in fact. We the dented-painted, wasting the nation’s precious time. That our stomachs were full somehow made us so obscene and irrelevant. There should be fewer of us on earth, really. Or we should all be only hungry and poor. At least then, we’ll be more important.

These well-fed, well-dressed ladies are too smart for their own good. They claim they are there to speak for women who are forced into silence. One paranoid woman even said she was filling in for a girl who couldn’t come because some “Khap” people said they would break her legs.

You know, I could have sworn I saw you in my dream, with a lathi in that crowd that fell on us in the end! But don’t mind what I say. Am just a dreamy girl in a frock anyway. Just ignore me.

Image By -Abhishek Verma

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