I am pasting here, the editorial written by Tehelka.com's editor-in-chief Tarun Tejpal.
http://tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107Tarunspiece.asp
The ugliness and brutality of the whole carnege has never failed to hit me hard enough. The Tehelka coverage made me stop many times over to breath and to think and to delibrately stop lest the force knock me over.
I think it is important for these stories to be told. And for all of us to read them. We may not be able to understand what drives men to such brutalilty. We may not be able to understand what justification one man can give for burning another in cold blood or for raping women and killing children. But we must be aware that such things happen. We must force ourselves to face this uglyness if ever we are to purge it. May god be with the the victims. We the people of this country have let you down. I will try to do at least the little I can to prevent this from happening again.
Read. And Be Afraid
TARUN J TEJPAL
IN AUSCHWITZ the exposed-brick barracks sit in neat rows, in a calm so deep it must necessarily rise out of death. The tidy paths cut each other at right angles, and the trees are stately and still. The sweet boxy buildings could be town houses, or school blocks, or military quarters. Or killing factories that smoothly sucked in human beings, separated them from their clothes, their hair, their gold teeth, their reading glasses and their children, and then processed them in a furnace. The electrified barbed wire fences that run in straight lines held up by concrete pillars could have kept out unwanted intruders, or kept in helpless innocents. The Nazis believed in the differences in men, and believed in the extermination of these differences. The imagination can never fully get around the horror of Auschwitz — and adjoining Birkenau — where in less than three years the Nazis gassed and incinerated nearly one-and-a-half million men, women and children, many no more than a few years old. In a world full of memorials to our creativity and genius, this is a memorial to the darkness that ever lurks in the heart of men.As you walk through those surreally peaceful double-storey blocks, you will invariably find yourself tailed or led by a crocodile of teenagers — scrubbed shining, brightly attired, speaking in hushed voices — winding their way through a byway of history to which they — and each one of us — are deeply connected. Round the year, ceaselessly, the Jews ship out their children from all over the world to show them the beast that resides in us all. By their own long suffering they understand that the battle of life against death is the battle of memory against forgetting. That to not look the beast in the face is to have the beast on your back all the time. There is nowhere in India that you can take your daughter if you wish to level her with the beast of Partition, the beast of the 1984 Sikh riots, the beast of a hundred communal and caste massacres, or the beast of Gujarat 2002. Because we do not remember, we repeat; because we do not look the evil in the eye, it dogs us all the time.There is nowhere in India that we enshrine our cruelty so that we can look at it and be dismayed and be afraid.Well, read this special issue of TEHELKA and be dismayed and be afraid. Ashish Khetan’s extraordinary six-month investigation — one of the finest in the history of Indian journalism — peels off all kinds of masks, and shows us the beast in us. For five years since the carnage, we have heard charges and counter-charges. We have heard the victims, the government, the police, the judiciary, and the civil rights groups. Now for the first time hear the story of the killings from the men who did it. Put to rest your doubts about the foetus that was pulled out from its womb; about the systematic slicing of Ehsan Jafri’s limbs and torso; of the raping and chopping and burning of women and children; of law officers who turned on the victims; of the collusion of the police and the government.
Read it and be afraid.One problem is we live in an age of spiralling hype and sensation.An age of cheap spectacle in which the indulgences of sports and cinema can be so easily deemed landmark and historic. An age in which words like chilling, appalling, inhuman, outrageous, have all lost their charge. We are all desensitised viewers set upon by a turbofuelled media. Image is chasing image at such blistering speed that we dare not hold on to anything — lest we burst. This issue of TEHELKA, perhaps, can be a kind of litmus test. Read the following pages and see if you rediscover the meaning of some words — barbaric for one; for another, heartbreaking. Read it and see if you can still be made afraid.
http://tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107Tarunspiece.asp
The ugliness and brutality of the whole carnege has never failed to hit me hard enough. The Tehelka coverage made me stop many times over to breath and to think and to delibrately stop lest the force knock me over.
I think it is important for these stories to be told. And for all of us to read them. We may not be able to understand what drives men to such brutalilty. We may not be able to understand what justification one man can give for burning another in cold blood or for raping women and killing children. But we must be aware that such things happen. We must force ourselves to face this uglyness if ever we are to purge it. May god be with the the victims. We the people of this country have let you down. I will try to do at least the little I can to prevent this from happening again.
Read. And Be Afraid
TARUN J TEJPAL
IN AUSCHWITZ the exposed-brick barracks sit in neat rows, in a calm so deep it must necessarily rise out of death. The tidy paths cut each other at right angles, and the trees are stately and still. The sweet boxy buildings could be town houses, or school blocks, or military quarters. Or killing factories that smoothly sucked in human beings, separated them from their clothes, their hair, their gold teeth, their reading glasses and their children, and then processed them in a furnace. The electrified barbed wire fences that run in straight lines held up by concrete pillars could have kept out unwanted intruders, or kept in helpless innocents. The Nazis believed in the differences in men, and believed in the extermination of these differences. The imagination can never fully get around the horror of Auschwitz — and adjoining Birkenau — where in less than three years the Nazis gassed and incinerated nearly one-and-a-half million men, women and children, many no more than a few years old. In a world full of memorials to our creativity and genius, this is a memorial to the darkness that ever lurks in the heart of men.As you walk through those surreally peaceful double-storey blocks, you will invariably find yourself tailed or led by a crocodile of teenagers — scrubbed shining, brightly attired, speaking in hushed voices — winding their way through a byway of history to which they — and each one of us — are deeply connected. Round the year, ceaselessly, the Jews ship out their children from all over the world to show them the beast that resides in us all. By their own long suffering they understand that the battle of life against death is the battle of memory against forgetting. That to not look the beast in the face is to have the beast on your back all the time. There is nowhere in India that you can take your daughter if you wish to level her with the beast of Partition, the beast of the 1984 Sikh riots, the beast of a hundred communal and caste massacres, or the beast of Gujarat 2002. Because we do not remember, we repeat; because we do not look the evil in the eye, it dogs us all the time.There is nowhere in India that we enshrine our cruelty so that we can look at it and be dismayed and be afraid.Well, read this special issue of TEHELKA and be dismayed and be afraid. Ashish Khetan’s extraordinary six-month investigation — one of the finest in the history of Indian journalism — peels off all kinds of masks, and shows us the beast in us. For five years since the carnage, we have heard charges and counter-charges. We have heard the victims, the government, the police, the judiciary, and the civil rights groups. Now for the first time hear the story of the killings from the men who did it. Put to rest your doubts about the foetus that was pulled out from its womb; about the systematic slicing of Ehsan Jafri’s limbs and torso; of the raping and chopping and burning of women and children; of law officers who turned on the victims; of the collusion of the police and the government.
Read it and be afraid.One problem is we live in an age of spiralling hype and sensation.An age of cheap spectacle in which the indulgences of sports and cinema can be so easily deemed landmark and historic. An age in which words like chilling, appalling, inhuman, outrageous, have all lost their charge. We are all desensitised viewers set upon by a turbofuelled media. Image is chasing image at such blistering speed that we dare not hold on to anything — lest we burst. This issue of TEHELKA, perhaps, can be a kind of litmus test. Read the following pages and see if you rediscover the meaning of some words — barbaric for one; for another, heartbreaking. Read it and see if you can still be made afraid.
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