An old woman bashes a bunch of puppies to death because she cannot stand the noise they and their mother are making in the neighbourhood.
Visuals of a man killing stray dogs in Delhi go viral.
A mother elephant and her babies are stoned randomly on the Wayanad-Mysore NH.
A man is beaten and tied to a train grille for sipping water from a bottle that does not belong to him.
A dentist is lynched in Delhi.
Pregnant whales are butchered in Japan.
Acid is thrown on a stray monkey.
Sangita Vaich, a teen volleyball player is hacked to death by stalker near Kolkata.
Two cattle herders are lynched and hanged in Jharkhand.
Women scholars are threatened with rape by policemen and a male scholar beaten within inches of his life for cooking food because hostel facilities had been shut down in the Hyderabad Central University.
You can discuss all these incidents within varying political, cultural, social contexts but the underlining theme is the same. It is becoming harder for some of us to include a variable (human, animal or intellectual) in our reality if it inconveniences us at a primal level.
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We cannot share the world with animals because their needs impose upon our sense of entitlement. Or with people who are not like us because they break the illusion that our reality is the only one that counts. Or with anyone who says, ‘NO.’ Just about anyone who represents something we fundamentally hate. Yes, hate. Because the rage we see erupting in seemingly regular people in our neighbourhoods, roads, train compartments and highways does not come from a place of inclusion, of acceptance.
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Hate speech is also a great recreational sport in both political podiums and in social media. A recent report said that political candidates with hate-speech cases against them are three times more successful in elections compared to those without a criminal record and that as many as 70 members of Parliament (MPs) and members of legislative assemblies (MLAs) have hate-speech cases pending against them. They won still. Ever wondered why? Because we like our leaders to say things we secretly feel but can’t.
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Hate speech is a compelling weapon to encourage mass assertion of a majoritarian view. Watch the almost vulgar expressions of glee on the faces of Trump supporters when he verbally swats minorities, dissenters and anyone who does not fit into his idea of a chest-thumping, grunting, white America. Some people want his version of American greatness so much that they groped a 15-year-old female protester and sprayed her with pepper water at one of his rallies.
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Closer home, you will find many leaders who want their version of politics to be a template of a one size fits all nationalism and they have supporters who are willing to go any distance to support them. There are armies of trolls out there, waiting for an excuse to unleash bitter, vicious and sometimes violent abuse on their victims. Most of these social media haters have no real names. They do not argue logically. They just want to intimidate and humiliate and release pent up angst.
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And just about anything can trigger them. The news that a Royal Bengal Tigress, Netravathi, at Pilikula Biological Park, had given birth to four healthy cubs, attracted these comments among many others:
“And this is a fuckin news. We started valuing Tiger’s life way more than human’s.”
“Come on its time to hunt.”
So yes, something is misaligned in the way we, the so called regular people are processing life.
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Many years ago, I read a news item about how a man irked by his neighbour’s tree poured acid in its roots. A friend whose neighbourhood had a glorious Kadamba tree was shocked when a man living next door to her, chopped it down. I had wondered then just how a tree could evoke this intensity of hate in two human-beings but then they in a way are indistinguishable from governments who allow mining and deforestation in eco-sensitive zones. Check out the statistics about waterbodies and green cover in your city and you will know that they have shrunk alarmingly over the years. This too is a form of violence that we allow and have come to accept.
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Recently, Dr Saibal Jana who serves the poorest of the poor in Dalli-Rajhara, a mining town in interior Chhattisgarh was handcuffed and led away by a policeman to prison. Why? No one knows but this is a man who treats labourers and miners at the Dalli-Rajhara’s Shaheed Hospital, which he founded along with Binayak Sen, farmers and miners in 1981. He is known to never turn away a needy patient. The fact that his arrest was not splashed across mainstream media platforms and there was no collective outrage, the kind we see against a cricketer’s glamourous girlfriend if he fails to score big in a crucial match, shows that we are okay with injustice, with suppression as long as it is not too close for comfort. As long as it does not affect India’s match winning abilities.
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The root of this apathy is our inability to let go of comfort zones. Be they physical, emotional or intellectual. We do not want the marginalised to show up at our party and ask to be treated as equals. If a tree, a dog, a woman, a cattle herder, a student or a doctor challenges our territory, real or imagined, we react. And sometimes with hate and violence. But perhaps we are seeing so much upheaval because real change is underfoot. Because what was accepted and unchallenged in the personal, social and political realms till now, is now increasingly being met with a counterpoint.
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So in a country where environmental concerns are routinely sidelined by industrial and political gain, we have the story of Jadav Payeng, now known to the world as India’s Forest Man who started planting trees in Majuli, a far-flung northeastern island in the 1970s to protect the shoreline from receding. Payeng’s forest measures now more than 1,400 acres and hunted rhinos, tigers and more than a hundred elephants have moved in. That this was done by ONE man, with nothing except a desire to save his land, shows that the power of love is alive and well in this world.
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Take the case of Abhishek Ray (read his story in The Better India) , a music composer whose passion for wild life and environment conservation made him do something unthinkable. He bought a hill, adjacent to the Corbett National Park, and turned it into the Sitabani Wildlife Reserve.
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Aabid Surti, a National Award winning author and artist is on a mission to save every precious drop of water in Mumbai by plugging drips in homes for free. He has saved more than 1.5 million litres of water and counting with his singlemindedness.
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Boyan Slat, a Dutch teenager has been working on a plan to clean up plastic waste in the ocean since 2012 and his idea will kick off a possible environmental revolution. Yet another individual story of a transcendent love for something larger than the self vs the pervasive culture of consumption and greed that sends endless streams of toxic waste in our oceans.
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Think divisive politics and Donald Trump and you will also remember a certain Justin Trudeau whose cabinet, policies and personal statements endorse humanism, diversity, inclusion.
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Think poverty and street children we drive past everyday and you will remember the “Free School” under the Metro Bridge in Delhi where a grocery store owner Rajesh Kumar Sharma teaches scores of poor children.
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Think terror and you will remember how after the recent attack in Lahore, an endless stream of blood donors for survivors created an assimilation of faiths that defied both fear and hate.
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Hate is easy, sloppy, lazy and blind. And it self-destructs sooner or later. And it ends when we end it. By rising above it. Plugging a dripping tap, creating a wild life sanctuary, planting hope and a forest, rescuing the planet one ocean, one endangered animal, one child at a time. And letting an inconvenient tree shed its flowers and leaves right into our balconies.