Mohabbat

There was a time in this country when people used to express their impulses into art, anger, desire, or any impuse creative or destructive. Art now majorly exists only as a skill and not as sublimation. When I was in college I used to write poetry, it was sublimation of my romanticism, idealism, desires and grief. There have been numerous Saints documented in the Christian tradition to have suffered pangs of desire and they suffered them, struggled with them. To discuss extreme cases, there is a scene in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac Vol. II of a pedophile resisting his impulses. It's mark of a civilized man to resist his impulses especially to avoid harming or disturbing the other person. The country, as it unfolded in front of me and privately, I realised functions on impunity. From what I saw I realised there might be countless unreported cases of rape, pedophilia and incest and while it maybe a source of contention and quite scandalous, I realised this impunity is centralised. It's not very much different from the old village rapists who used to rape women of a person's family in front of him to assert dominance, and in some cases for entering a temple or drawing water from the well. It is post 2016 I ended up realising that deepest soul of this nation or, if not this nation, at least Purvanchal is composed of rape. While common people get severe repression and deprivation from even basic monogamous intimacy. Rape, I ended up realising post 2016, is a currency in Purvanchal just that it is hidden from the common eyes. If I would have to define Purvanchal in one word, it is deprivation. The region has weaponised what was once merit of Purvanchal, its community, it's love, now all have been weaponised into psycho-metaphysical designs to torture souls of people. A lot of kids, boys and girls both, grow up with the scars of sexual abuse and are silenced due to shame. Since exploitation is intimate in Purvanchal and it operates as a family, though incestuous kind, women are victim blamed for their own exploitation and silenced through intimidation and blackmail. I have seen this shit up close and personal and I ended up realising this shit is not related just to sexual exploitation, for the majority there it's a unending cycle of suffering victim blaming, blame shifting and credit stealing. Something bad happens to you, it is because you did not fast on this particular day. In the past decade I ended up realising how closely connected rape and religion are in Purvanchal and coupled with severe repression and it takes a lot courage to talk about that. Unfortunately above rape and religion is politics and mafia and this is an arrangement I hadn't imagined in my wildest dreams, of course above them are industrialists, corporations and simply speaking, the rich. The government, well, I couldn't even find it in the picture.