I want to be horrified again

Today morning, while I was still drinking my first coffee, my friend told me about this horrific incident that happened; a four year old child was raped, sodomized, mutilated and then left to bleed by railway tracks in Delhi. A voice inside me said "Please lets not discuss such unpleasant things first thing in the morning". The moment I formed this thought in my head, I realized how complacent and insensitive and selfish I was in that moment. 

kafila.org

It reminded me of this article I had read a few days ago on Kafila. The article talked about the Dadri incident where a person was killed by a mob that falsely accused him of eating beef. The author, Gautam Bhan, talks about how forms of violence against certain sections of society becomes so routine, that it becomes the order of things. Towards the end he said:

We must assert our words so that the violence slowly, painfully becomes less banal, less ordinary and we are horrified again.

These words struck a chord in me - I want to be horrified again by how commonplace violence has become. In this context, reading about Pinjratod felt great. I've lived in PGs and hostels and faced all the things that these brave women are protesting against. I had honestly accepted them as facts of life, so it is very refreshing to see comrades taking on everyday forms of sexism.

I like this platform and websites like News Laundry (full disclosure: while I support NL financially by buying a subscription, they haven't paid me anything to write this) because they question the dominant narrative and because they do not come down to morbid sensationalizing of non-issues. Most of the popular news media is basically reporting on the verbal ping pong matches between politician while Rome burns.