Under Age Rape Victim Needs Sensible Laws - Sign The Petition!!

Mumbai:  The baby born to a 13-year-old rape survivor in Mumbai on Friday died at a hospital in the city on Sunday. The teenager and her family went ahead with the delivery after the Supreme Court gave them a go-ahead to terminate the pregnancy. Doctors said, at 31 weeks, it was too late to abort.

Doctors at JJ Hospital said the baby was kept in the incubator and was doing fine after the Caesarean-section delivery. But soon, the newborn developed complications and died on Sunday.

Laws in India do not allow medical terminations after 20 weeks unless there is a threat to the mother's or baby's life.

The 13-year-old's family discovered she was 27 weeks pregnant only last month. Her mother then moved the top court for permission to abort her daughter's pregnancy. A man who used to help her father run his roadside stall has been arrested on charges of raping her.

Noted gynecologist Dr Nikhil Datar was assisting the family with their petition. Last week, a bench of three judges led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra allowed the girl undergo abortion. Her lawyers called the order a "big relief". "How can a 13-year-old become a mother?" Justice Misra had observed before passing the order. 

The teenager will remain in the hospital for a few days until she recovers. Doctors, however, say the pregnancy and child-birth at such an early age are going to affect her psychologically and that she needs counselling and support.

A 10-year-old rape survivor in Chandigarh gave birth to a baby girl last month after she was not allowed by the Supreme Court to abort. Another 10-year-old rape survivor in Haryana, however, was allowed to abort her nearly 21-week foetus in May.

Source: NDTV

When you google for Child rape victims in India, there is a whole list of them to go thru and many suffering the same situation quoted in above news (ref: NDTV). Poor little children who hardly can understand the meaning of rape and sometimes could not even elaborate the situation to their parents have been suffering from this cruel crime. I totally understand the situation that government is trying, law is being enforced but still these kinds of crimes are happening every now and then. We do not take this situation seriously ever until and unless someone from our dear ones are victim of this crime. 

A friend of mine once told me that she was the product of her mother’s rape. Staring at her reflection in the mirror, she wondered aloud, “Which are the rapist’s parts?”

Although rape is profoundly traumatic, relatively little has been said about the lives of children born from it.

After birth, the children’s lives don’t get any easier. Researchers Elisa van Ee and Rolf J. Kleber identified the post-partum period as a significant mental health risk for children born of rape.

Looking over the news quoted above, I deeply feel the pain and grief of the parents of those little victims. Not only the child has faced the sexual assault but is also going to keep facing the trauma there after. This is really a sad situation that parents have to keep fighting with the laws in those cases for going thru the abortion. Its seriously not that I am anyway against the laws of our country, but Abortion Laws and Laws of Abortion after rape should be way different and specially when the case is of an underage victim. The victim has a whole life of herself which is already in danger with the mental and physical trauma, where law must not in any situation force victim to make that child be born. Doctor’s should have the right to decide if situation permits, the child could be aborted in case of Underage Rape Victim. My personal request to all my readers, please sign this petition and tell our government to please think about this serious issue on a humanly ground and enforce a particular law for the same.

Sign The Petition Here: Under Age Rape Victim Needs Sensible Law

Enslaving Mothers & Crushing Children's Independence

The internet came into my life at the age of 15 and in my drawing room when I was 19 and it set me free. 

Once online, I let it all hang out. I typed questions into google.com and found a whole lot of knowledge out there, some questions that I wouldn’t dare ask out loud to the family doctor were answered easily by google, then those questions which out of blue appeared on my mind and previously I had to think whom to ask are now answered by google, starting from home maintenance to recipes and much more, google had it all. I had no curfew and went where the feeling took me. I chatted up strangers with foreign names and forgot about them just as easily the next morning. The experiences I had online felt like an adventure not a community-wide scandal-in-the-making.

Outside roamed nosy neighbours, vigilant uncles and aunties. Outside, I was a demure superhero cursed with protecting, through sheer, visible blamelessness the never-sleeping beacon of the family name. On the internet, though, I could roam wild and free of scrutiny in a way that I had outgrown with pig tails and bloomers. I could be anonymous, independent, alone.

The internet was an infinite grassland of possibilities, limited only by my own limitations. I published my first set of poems by creating a geocities website and then poetry.com, then on an online journal, befriended editors of a print magazine through email. I was on my way to being heard, and to sharing my voice and it was then becoming my most powerful hobby.

Then, almost before I knew it, the smartphone was here, and the long form of communication had an alternative which was new and exciting. 

Unlikely relationships bloomed and ebbed in privacy and over once-insurmountable distances. Instant messaging changed boardroom into bedroom and flipped it the other way around too. Everyone was accessible and everything was within reach.

One decade of smart phone and one child later, everything is different, because my smartphone has been taken over in a way that makes me feel not so smart anymore.

Always on call

There’s such a thing as too much communication, conversations I can’t simply put a polite end to and leave. My WhatsApp, for instance, stays on silent, because my child's school chat groups registers up to 40 messages an hour at times. One could argue that the tool is only as sophisticated as the user. By that measure, my gripe ought to be redirected to that peculiar form of obsessive compulsive disorder that many mothers operate with. What are we doing, 30 women between the ages of 25 and 45, discussing how to paint a paper cup black? (Thirty-five messages, seven pictures exchanged.) Why aren’t our children – future fund managers, teachers, doctors, artists, and lawyers (or so we hope) – figuring it out for themselves? Why request a picture of today’s grammar assessment, after it’s already been administered? Why ask questions about what the portion for tomorrow’s test is, when at 1am, our kids are in bed, and we should, potentially, be thinking of other things?

Why has being a school mom turned into a relentless, 24/7 activity? The “mom chats” are the first set of messages I see in the morning. The last thing I see before I switch the phone off for the night. If this were a national security warning system, I’d say we were always on Red, perpetually on High Alert.

I know why. Or at least I can make a good guess, and like with all blame games, I’ll pin this on a conspiracy theory. It’s because schools have exceeded their boundaries, and think nothing of seeding hysteria in parents, on the grounds that constant, heightened vigilance improves the child’s performance at school. Schools are no longer places to park your children, for half a day, while you work at home or in an office.

Schools expect your participation, rather than your child’s. The logic is simple: you are far easier to discipline and far easier to shame or scare. What’s more, there has been such little protest from mothers, that schools have come to expect all our attention and all our time. Again, arguably, it has much to do with our inability to just say no. 

Right to privacy

How do schools maintain control over mothers? They use the internet to keep us permanently connected to the mainframe. School apps know how to put you in your place – after all, this is a partnership, as the school authorities keep reminding us. I sign in to an app, because, well, my seven-year-old don’t own smartphones (yet). And then the fun begins – I start monitoring and checking everything that’s up there, like a good mother must.

Passport photographs of the children in school uniform required, at an evening’s notice? No problem. Can do. Size two, four, eight, and fourteen paint brushes in both round and flat bristles? Sure, I can find them. Science assessment tomorrow? Got it. No need for the English prose notebook, but carry English grammar next Monday? All right, I’ll pack my child’s bag accordingly. Four lines about the monuments of India? Okay, done. Five potatoes with a black marker to be brought in? Sure. Hindi poem recitation tomorrow? On it.

We are on it. We are so on it that we put home-schoolers to shame. We give our children no real space in which to mature, no real sense of responsibility, no real shot at failing, and learning from failure – because, as mothers, we seem to have internalised that their business is our business. We are raising sons who are used to throwing up their hands, sons with moms who sort out every detail of their lives. We are raising daughters who learn a woman’s domestic role is being the scheduler of other people’s lives.

We put our lives on hold for theirs. Schools encourage this by shrugging off their responsibility, their part in the “partnership”.

Attend a parent-teacher meeting, and chances are, you will be told to go through and sign your child’s books every day, checking to see if the day’s work is complete. In my case, that is roughly seven books a day, every day, for two children each. If I have a query, there’s always a WhatsApp group with 30 mothers. They’re always on call, like me. Who wants to be a mom in a WhatsApp group of supermoms?

I dared, at the last PTM meet, to raise my hand and ask politely about my child’s right to privacy. Shouldn’t he have a right to manage his own affairs, and learn from his errors?

I confess I didn’t dare to ask about my own right to some space and time.

Have schools used technology to target mothers specifically? In principle, either parent can download the app, or check on the website. Yet, curiously, in a decade of parenting, I have yet to see a father post a query on the WhatsApp chat group.

The internet which once set me free is now a leash that keeps me eternally tethered to my duty as a child-raiser. There are days I look at my phone with such loathing that I think its monitor heats up in embarrassment. But then, I give in. After all, how can my daughter go to school tomorrow without carrying two pink foolscap sheets, which it was never her responsibility to remember? What else am I doing with my time that’s so important, anyway?

Being a mother was once my dream and pride but now what I am doing as a mother is just a relentless job and that's all just because I got to keep my child up with the moving fast pace world of the school. But excuse me!!! Really? Am I really keeping her up or just overprotecting my child and raising her to simply keep looking towards her parents for any of her needs? 

We all need to ask this questions to ourselves before we simply follow the trend and keep pushing ourselves and our kids towards it. Think again, you are an educated and self dependent person, think if you would have been raised in the same way by your parents.. would you still could have been so independent? 

Tears...

They burn as they trail down my cheeks. 
No one understands. 
No one cares to know why. 
These are my tears to shed alone. 
My tears to wipe away. 
They flow and know no end. 
They hurt and feel no relief. 
Every tear can tell you a story. 
Every sob has its owner. 
They burn from deep within. 
The scars they leave are very deep. 
They are my tears. 
I can use them as I please. 
They can burn me hurt me and destroy me but they are mine.

They burn me let me cry. 
Let me hurt. 
Leave me be. 
Your words can’t console. 
Your words bring no cheer. 
It’s my emptiness and loneliness, 
I don’t want to share. 
You feel nothing and know nothing of these tears. 
Let them flow, let them set this place on fire.

I can no longer hold them back. 
Leave me be with my tears. 
They are not yours to shed or yours to wipe. 
Does it pain you then look away. 
Turn away, walk away. 
I need to release and let them burn. 
Be free from all of this. 
Be free from all theses confines.

It’s the last of them now. 
My eyes can shed no more. 
The aching, the longing, the fear, 
the anger, the burning is gone. 
Maybe just hidden for now. 
They are my tears that I shed. 
They are my fears that won.

Goodbye for now, my tears. 
I know we will reunite..

I have cried a lot and actually really want to cry a lot more but now I am numb, I just don't feel anything. I don't even remember when did I last cried my heart out. As a child I use to dump my face in my pillow and cry out loud, for my voice to not go out of that pillow or room for hours. Most of the nights I slept crying, half of my pillow use to remain wet till almost morning and then my tears knew to not be noticed by any tress passers, so they would dry out before the sunrise. This was one of my favorite habits to let my deep hurts flow in the salty water from the eyes. From early teens till my 30s I kept this habit as my best friend, stress reliever and the soul keeper. But now I cannot cry anymore..

Even when I am upset, I distance myself from everyone or hide up in the comfort corner of my house where no one would bother to find me. I don't know if shedding tears was really relieving my stress or not but today when I want to cry and still I cannot cry, I feel more weak inside, I feel numb, I feel dead inside. 

Tears are nothing but the words that mouth can't say nor heart can bear. And now I miss them the most, my heart is heavy and I have no words to say but still why my tears aren't flowing?? Why???

Life Is Hard!!

This article isn’t necessarily to complain and have a woe as me feeling, but just to say that life isn’t always going to be sunshine and rainbows. If life was always sunshine and rainbows, then I wouldn’t be writing this article. I’m not going to lie and say that I haven’t thought life was sunshine and rainbows, but that was before I stepped in the age of maturity. As a child I chased big dreams, big enough for this world ever to be fulfilled. I dreamed to smile every minute of the life and as they said smile is contagious, I would spread this smile to everyone I meet and be it spring or summer, rain or winter, there will always be smile around on my face and on the face of people around me. ‘Aah!! What a beautiful that world could be’.

But reality is far more different than those cute childhood dreams. Everybody wants to be happy in life. We all want to live a perfect life. We want that great job or a successful business. We want to be married to Mr. Right or Mrs Perfect. We want to have great kids. We want to have friends that stick by us come rain or shine. We want to be able to have all the material things life has to offer and have all our problems just disappear.

Everybody wishes for good life. It may be at different levels. One person may define a good life one way and another may describe it another way. For one person a good life may be just having three meals a day and a roof over their head. For another it may be having a huge mansion and a couple of million dollars in the bank. For one person just having a life partner to live with is enough for life. For another his life goes on finding the rare gem of true love in his partner. For one person just having 2 kids is enough. For another having the kids that are toppers and best sports person as well as all-rounder and disciplined would be good. For one person just having a peaceful private time is more than enough. For another a huge connecting social circle and lots of friend to hangout is good.  This definition of good and perfect life is different for each and every person and at times it changes for you even as the life goes on to different stages.

There are different levels and meanings to what a good life is. But whatever you definition of it, there is perhaps one thing that you may have in common with many other people. You might want that good life stress free. You would like to have it without having to work so hard or struggle so much for it. That is a normal human expectation. Nobody likes to struggle through life.

Unfortunately, that is also what may be stopping you from having that great life. The thought of all that work, all that planning, overcoming hurdles and resistance is enough to make a lot of people give up before they even start. It can all seem too overwhelming, and for many it all just doesn’t seem be worth it. It’s like being drained of energy just at the thought of running a marathon. Before you are even at the starting line the thought of all that running just scares you and tires you so much mentally you just decide not to go for it. It’s just too hard.

One of my favorite books is titled “The Road Less Traveled” by M. Scott Peck. The first sentence in the book is: 

“Life is difficult.”

Now, if you pick up a book and the first thing it tells you is “life is difficult” you may just think “is this book going to get reassuring and encouraging after such a start?

But, as Peck goes on to explain, once you accept that life is hard, it no longer becomes an issue that it’s difficult. He says:

“Once we know that life is difficult- once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult.”

In life you will have difficulties getting anything you want. It is very rare to get anything in life without some degree of effort. Only if you win the lottery will you have everything without effort, and even then you would have had to go out and buy the lottery ticket anyway so it’s not free at all.

Life is hard – your boss will not always be the nicest person in the world. Your job will have challenges that you did not foresee. Your workmates will sometimes be a pain. You won’t always get the salary and recognition that you want and deserve at work. Your clients may not be the nicest people in the world.

Life is hard – your kids won’t always be the ideal kids you want them to be. Your wife or husband may not be as perfect as you thought they were when you married them – in fact I can guarantee you they are not. Your home may not be the ideal place you would want it to be. You may not the perfect wife or husband that you once thought you were.

Life is hard – running a business is not as easy as you thought it would be. No one is lining up to bring money to your business, even though you are a really nice person and your business has great products to offer.

I could go on and on with these examples, but the bottom line is that “Life is hard.”

I don’t mean to say in all this that you don’t deserve a break. I am not saying that you are not justified in thinking that you deserve more than what you have gotten from life and the world to this point.

I am not saying that you are not justified in feeling the way that you feel. I know you have had it tough at times. I know that at times you feel that it’s all very confusing and just too hard. I mean you have worked very hard. You’ve done all that you possibly could in your life whether it is at work or at home. But things just don’t seem to have worked out as well as you had planned or hoped. It all just seems to have gone wrong and you don’t know or understand how or why.

But that’s okay. It’s normal. That’s what being human is all about. That’s what life is all about. Life is hard. Accept that.

Once you do, you will feel better about your circumstances. Then you won’t think of your situation as anything but what is common to every human being. Then you will think of your situation as a part of life. You will no longer beat yourself up about how bad things are or how you are not doing so well in one area or another. You will realize that you are only human. You make mistakes just like everybody else. You are not perfect just like everybody else.

But don’t stop there. Accepting that life is hard does not mean that you accept every circumstance and simply go with the flow.

You see, there are two sides to this story. There is another side to this coin. On the one side of the coin is where you have the words “life is hard” inscribed, but if you turn that coin over you will five very small but powerful words. They read:

 “You can make it better”

That is one of the beautiful things about life. You can make your life better. You have total responsibility for what you do and how you respond to the fact that life is hard. As the now cliché saying goes:

“If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

Accepting that life is hard comes with accepting that you have the responsibility to make it better. 

Not only do you have the responsibility to make it better, you have the ability and the power to make it better.

You can make it better – become a better employee and someone worth giving more responsibilities at work. The promotions and the better pay are sure to follow one way or another.

You can make it better – learn how to raise better kids and have a happier home. Become the good husband or wife you would like your spouse to be.

You can make it better – learn how to turn that business around. Gain the extra skills you need to run a successful business.

You see, the only person you have any control over is yourself. You cannot change other people. Let’s take the example of marriage for moment. Notice that I did not say you should turn your husband or spouse into an ideal spouse. I said you should become the ideal husband or wife you want your spouse to be. Then, once you become such a person you may have several choices as to how to relate to your spouse.

Firstly, once you are as near perfect a spouse as anyone can be your husband or wife might see the difference and also decide to change for the better or they may just change naturally as a response to your new attitude. Secondly, if they don’t change, perhaps you will have reached a level of maturity where you are content and satisfied with who they are and their faults no longer bother you. Or thirdly, in some cases, such as in abusive relationships or in relationships that are a risk to your health, you may reach a level of self acceptance and courage where you are able to leave that abusive or unfaithful partner.

Whatever the case may be, this example illustrates one other important fact about teh fact that life is hard and taking responsibility. That is:

“You always have choices”

No matter what situation you are in, you have a choice. No matter how bad things are, you have a choice. No matter what you think you can or cannot do, you have a choice.

Now it may not be an easy choice, by any means. It may be a very difficult choice and the road you decide to take may be a tough one. It may push you way out of your comfort zone. It may mean that in the initial period your life may get even harder than it already is. But it is a choice nonetheless.

A lot of times you will actually find that the choices are not as hard as you thought they were. You may just have shut off your mind from seeing those choices and possibilities because you thought you had no choice. Once you become open to the idea that you are responsible for your life and that you have choices, you will find that you are no longer stuck just because life is hard.

At that point, life is still hard, but you have the final say. Your life becomes more meaningful and purposeful.

To The HeartBreaker...

Dear HeartBreaker,
 
Hope you remember her. The girl who loved you more than herself, the girl who made you her entire world despite knowing that she was just another contact on your phone who you texted whenever you got tired of your busy life.

May be she was good for your ego, maybe she was some kind of an achievement or a trophy that you could brag about in front of your friends, maybe she was a placeholder, maybe you liked knowing that someone was always available to answer your calls regardless of the time and situation, may be you liked seeing someone trying that hard for you.

There is a whole sea of ‘maybe’s where she is standing right now drowning in her thoughts, questioning her own identity. And she is the only one to be blamed for this because she decided to continue swimming even after hearing the forecast of the coming storm but her mistake was that she considered you as her life guard. You can call her insane for doing what she did, just like what everyone else is saying about her.

Her friends shouted, "Are you blind? He doesn’t love you and never will, why can’t you see what he is doing to you?" Little did they know that she was not blind. In reality, she was a coward, coward enough to accept her mistake.

When you entered her life, she was so terrified to let her guard down, she used to build some kind of a wall around herself so that no one could hurt her, you came and promised her that you will be there to help her and slowly you broke that wall brick by brick. She started to believe that you were her savior.

She finally told you her darkest secrets and let you see her deepest wounds. She told you that she was getting addicted to you, to your presence, to your company, your words and she didn’t want this addiction to turn into love. She suggested that you guys should maintain some distance. But you denied and she trusted you and the timing of her life. You remained at the top of her chatting list. From sweet morning messages to good night texts, you shared every tiny detail of your day with her, you discussed new songs and the lyrics you loved the most, you two talked about sweet nothings all day, all night.

By holding your hand she let you in, without realizing that you were slowly becoming her life. You shouldn't have made her fall for you when you knew that you weren’t going to catch her.

She tried her best to not fall for you but her destiny tried it’s best to make her do exactly that. You always said the right things at the right time till one day she finally realized that you were literally the person she always wanted to be with. With this realization, she switched on her self-destruction mode.

Soon you started changing and she stood there puzzled about your behavior. Your long texts got shorter by the second. Everything about her that you previously admired now irritated the hell out of you. You didn’t have time for her anymore and she started blaming herself, thinking that she may have done something wrong.

She kept waiting day and night to hear from you and you were too busy to hear her break down on the phone.

She kept losing herself every time you didn’t answer her call, every time you chose someone else over her. She was always available for you and that bothered you so you chose your plans over her always. She fought with everyone who said anything bad about you, losing her friends she kept defending you just to be called a "fool" by the end of it all.

Today she is feeling sick and really tired, tired of thinking why she believes that she could be 'someone’s sometimes' but could never be ‘someone’s forever’.

The journey of loving you was never easy for her, she kept giving up on her self-respect because you were too stubborn to let go off her, your attitude or even your wish to be a PlayBoy. Finally the day arrived when her biggest fears turned into reality. She came to know about your truth, what you were and that love was just a word for you, not a feeling to be lived for.. And she was just a time pass, knowing that was enough to tear her apart in a thousand pieces. Nothing can be worse than knowing that all the words world said about your relationship was true and all that you believed was a dream... that the best thing that ever happened to you is the biggest mistake of your life. She still wondered if it would have hurt any less had you just left without her knowing or seeing your true face. The girl that believed Love to be the biggest gift of mankind, now is forced to believe it as unforgivable sin.

Every night she cried herself to sleep trying to figure out what went wrong, she still blamed herself for everything. She screamed, why wasn’t she good enough, why her love could not change you to a better person, why all her efforts went in-vein... In all this sorrow and times of trouble she shouted your name out loud but you were nowhere to be seen. You made a soul die. She loved you, she loved you more then anyone else in the world but now it’s time for her to close this chapter and burn the entire book.

One thing I can promise you, you will look for her in the people you love. One day she’ll be the one not answering your calls, one day she’ll just scroll down your post and status because they’ll not matter then or maybe she doesn’t even have to do that because you’ll be in her block list. You’ll search for her hand whenever you feel lost. You’ll miss her voice when you badly want someone to listen to you.

One day you’ll miss her, her texts, her attention, her efforts, the way she apologized after every fight even if it was not her mistake because for her there was no point in winning an argument over you. You will miss how she cared, her love because it’s rare what she had offered you.

There are a lot of people like you and the day you’ll meet another you, you’ll want her the same way she did.

One day you’ll hear songs that will make you miss her and you will change it as fast as possible. You’ll regret everything and you'd wish you could apologize. And she’ll not be there looking at her phone screen for hours and hours, waiting for your one text to fix everything.

I promise, you’ll realize it but that will be too late because till then she'd have unloved you with every fibre of her being. She'll walk past you not even noticing your presence. Today she realizes her worth, she knows she shouldn't have to cry herself to sleep. She doesn't deserve it.

Now she’ll not settle for mediocre love, for one-night stands or friends with benefits. No not again. She’s worth so much more. She wants someone to love her the way she loved you. She wants to be the reason for someone to want to be a better person, the best that they can ever be.

Now she knows you can never be that someone. So losing you is not actually a loss for her, she had lost someone who shouldn’t be there in the first place but you have lost someone who did everything to keep you in that place.

I'm sorry for your loss, my friend.