Mediavists rape the rape victims!

Ratheesh Kaliyadan

Rape reporting becomes a universal phenomena among Indian media. Everyday you have multiples of rape reports! What happens is whenever such reports appear in media, the amount of rape reporting is increasing. Unfortunately our mediavists forget to keep ethical notions regarding the victims and their life.

Privacy is the paramount issue in reporting rape cases. The controversy ranges from whether to name the victim to how to handle the accused one’s right to be presumed innocent. The media coverage on  a sex crime, whether as the victim or as the accused, is to be opened up to merciless exposure of one’s past, one’s personality, and particularly one’s sex life. That is the way things stand today. “Why should the media treat the victim in the same way as the accused? Why should the media scrutinize her private life and personality? The victim committed no crime: it is not a crime to walk into one’s home, to jog in a park, to walk with a man on a beach, to go on a date, to pick up someone in a bar, nor is it even a crime to go to bed with someone other people might consider dangerous”.

Unfortunately this is what happens even today while our scribes try to expose the crime. The mediavist’s eagerness and competition leads to such a phase of reporting. Remember the slogan: “rape is not sex, it is violence.”  The phrase coined from the first rape speak-outs of the early 1970s. The ethical question should be raised in the narrow paths of media houses. It’s the duty of mediavists to rectify the ongoing unethical practices in reporting sex crimes. Stop immediately focusing on the private lives and personalities of survivors and victims’ in sex crimes. Raise the real questions: why rape, incest, sexual assault, and harassment happen at all to find out the reasons.

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UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AGAINST DEAN

Those who entered GGSIP University, Dwaraka, Delhi observed a silent protest movement by law students. They are making protest against their dean and the administrative sections.Being interested in the gathering of students, I approached them.

What happens here?

I saw a chart paper bearing some words behind a group of students sitting on the floor. It is written "HUNGER STRIKE." Hunger strike!
What provoked these students to observe a hunger strike in this fine morning?
The reply ends in a sentence. Our 'strikemate' is suspended.

Suspended! Why? The reason is also simple. A group of students lead a calm dharna inside the campus against the dean. Ashish Bharadwaj,IIIrd year Law student and the leader of the protest is suspended. The university authority released a circular. Not informed him or others.

What are the charges of the protesters? the law department in the university is one of the noted departments. But the department is not fulfilling all requirements. Bar Council directives are also not satisfied. They express that they have not even a Moot Court Hall. basic facilities like drinking water is unavailable. more over they firmly believe that the law institution reacts illegally  by amending university act to appoint the present dean as the dean. They say she does not occupy the minimum requirement of 60% marks in the qualifying exams.

My Times, My Poetry

D.Vinayachandran

My times and my poetry are unfamiliar to me with the unprejudiced metamorphosis and with the breaking of the boundaries of words. They become desolate monuments of silence and the unfinished rushes of the panorama of love. In the most material sense they cut across seven worlds, seven confessions and the spurt of mental process. Envisioning that the earth and the earthworm have poetry, ‘my poems and love are the dust that is resurrected after a quake, a few indistinct shoots are just sprouting up.’ It should recoup the butterflies and 'surumas' that are trapped in the dilapidated souls. My glass is sanguine. Ignorance of God is filled in it. In the mad rush of a nightclub we feed on a stranger. The ignorance of God becomes the ignorance of man. We fear not death; we begin to fear life.

I won’t be blind to the blank gazes of hunger, the tanned faces of war and the shipwreck of love. They are the ovens of poetry. Science says that time will end up before space and the cosmic rays that are as old as the big bang are spurting and so I have to refine my past to limit my future. Man has very limited information about his brain and even his genes. The ones who made loud declaration like ‘one world- great world’ are now prophesying multifarious universes. Among issue like dry water-taps, exploding bombs in the street and the whimper of the child who is forlorn amongst the mirage of the earth.... these anxious contemplations are poetry’s subtle nuances.

Here, because of time constrains and because of the evident multiplicity of poetry it is not possible to establish all these points. In the scorching summer we sit together with a fellow- traveller for a cup of Lissi. We walk to wilderness in the night hearing the cries of children deep dwelled in the earth before many a birth. We laugh seeing the bulldozers and the condoms blown up and flown by naughty children. We present a basket full of oranges to a lunatic.
What I should is to keep silence. Even if you are in hospital or in your garden turn to poetry. I who enact multiple faces on the street say only this:
Remember the treaty
Between the salt and the stars
Remember the betrothal
Between the seed and the rain
……………………………………
……………………………………

The sun will burn to ashes all that is devoid of love
The moon will drown all that is not a dream

There are hundreds of ways to write poetry in Malayalam. I cannot be a bonsai exhibition piece of imagism, which was once despised as a transitory ploy by our eminent critic M P Sankunni Nair. I need bit of a place. As in our land agriculture has to be recovered in words as well. The mangrove forest, ground water, the distance between heat and cold and the time between noise and silence have to be recovered. My poetry should be able to recover god, the dream that we missed in our hurry and it should also find refuge in the attempt to cure the ailing god. Poetry, after all, is not poetry alone.

Let me read out some of my short poems. As the shell does to the sea, as the tree sap to the woods, a fragrance that we alone distinguish… and as love these are an invitation to my pains….
( The speech at Thunjan Ulsavam 2011. Collected and Translated by K.T.Dinesh. Sri. K.T. Dinesh is Reseacr Officer in SCERT Kerala.)
Homage to the great visionary poet.....