The technique of torture

It seems that it has become a trend. I baulk as I just wrote “trend’’, and so wait for the ink to dry before moving on. Trend to hurl acid on the face of a woman, a girl, who perhaps, has not responded to the displays of affection or advances, overtures of the man, boy who then thinks the only answer to being spurned is buy acid by the gallons and seek “revenge’’. No other way of teaching the object of his desire the lesson of her life! Maiming her forever by putting her through ear-shattering pain. Afterall, how could a male take rejection lying down, without taking any concrete action?! If the reason of scalding her to the very bone, blinding those eyes that would make him go rhapsodic, was not about being unrecognized, undiscovered, but a case of having “loved and lost’’ or being “brushed off’’ since the lady-love found you not to be the right person or was being stifled by you or whatever be the reason, decided to call it quits, then being frozen-out comes with serious repercussions. A bucket full of sulphuric acid to be flung on the love-interest’s face to teach her the by-product, the ramifications of cold-shouldering a man of his “stature’’, of slighting him.
The most recent case of mutilating a girl by throwing acid on her face, occurred in Delhi on the 14th of this month, Wednesday it was I think. The 17-year old, 12th grader had left her house to go to school when two masked young men, zoomed by on their motorcycles, with the expressly-planned purpose of tossing acid on her. Three boys were involved in this operation. One of the boys on the bike had been friends with the girl—their friendship had fizzled out in September, so this “course’’ of action. The third person in this gory story, Virender was zipping around on a Scooty with “thwarted’’ Sachin’s mobile in hand, downloading his live location, so as to create an iron-clad alibi for the cops.
Everybody knows you can leave home without your wallet, but your phone, impossible! In other words, when the police went knocking at Sachin’s door, he had ample documented proof to show that he was nowhere near his ex-friend when the savage acid attack was perpetrated. And the acid, procured online via Flipkart?! Forget about the regulation of the sale of acid, of having to offer an identified reason for its purchase, but it available at the click of a button, delivered at your doorstep?! We talk, indignantly so, how in America guns are available off the counter. The debate regarding gun control in the States has gone on, albeit round and round in vertiginous circles. And then every couple of months the grisly details of how some person sashayed into a school, going on a shooting rampage to gun down as many kids in sight. Or how on a Sabbath Sunday, a mind possessed of God knows what, barges into a Church, to create a blood-bath. And guns still, as readily available as cookies and cola?! The argument: one has the right to keep arms so as to protect oneself, for self-defense…A psychopath might just smash the windows of your house for forcible entry, to eliminate you, and so guard oneself, one must! Then how, for the most, will someone explain how owning a gun is for gunning down herds of innocent helpless people?! Anyways, to scoot back home, statistics reveal that in our acid flinging country, only one out of five are tried and convicted for the crime. (Crime…living death if one survives.)
For now, let us move away from this savage scenario to grievously halt at another monstrous site. And what is this latest thing about chopping another person into bits and pieces—a new way of eradicating another human, and then disposing off the diced parts in different directions of a nearby wasteland. In November, television burnt the candles at both ends, wearing itself out, graphically reporting how Shradha Walker had been butchered into 36 pieces by her boyfriend, Aaftab. He then goes on to purchase a refrigerator—with Sharadha’s money—besides procuring Ziplock bags to dunk her chopped body parts. The Skinner then systematically goes about the business of storing the 36 plastic bags in the fridge, to methodically, with a staggering pace, discard in the backwoods. Six months after choking Shradha to death, then with a zeal of sociopath making mincemeat of her— a missing person’s complaint was finally lodged by the father of the dismembered daughter. This slicing up people, as a means to get them way out of sight, seems to, “post-Shradha’’ (a harrowing torment to the ears to phrase it so!) have become infectious.
A few days after this infernal effacement having occurred in May, but yes, came to light in November, a hard-bodied suitcase was found at Jalandhar’s railway station. After the police was informed of an unmanned suitcase, they arrived at the junction to discover the attaché to be crammed with the carved-up parts of a young woman. Then last Sunday, I needn’t had muted the Telly to see the visuals and read the running headlines at the bottom of the screen—in Jharkhand a repeat of a murder by chopping. A young man felling his girlfriend, pulling out her internal organs as well. After which, but of course, was thrown into the dense watershed terrain of thickets.
Questions or call them observations: remember the movies, “Silence of the Lambs’’, “Dead Man Walking’’? Remember constantly cringing if one could somehow get through to the end? Or being so hypnotically hoovered by the horror that one could not miss a single scene ?! Recall the disturbing nights that followed such post-viewing?! Possibly even feeling nauseous, vowing never to watch such unnatural acts, such premeditated, planned down to the last letter demonic murders?!
Given this slew of the horrific attacks, these new-fangled ways of eliminating a fellow human, it seems that many of us are drawn to the atrocities, imitate, with a relish, the crime series (our own desi breed copying the American ones) viewed on Disney Hotstar or any OTT over the phone.
A case of fiction and fact sharing such synchronized exclusivity, coming out compatibly, when the hankering to acidly maim and tyrannically massacre…