Be careful when you see your kids tormenting upturned insects and causing pain to puppies and kittens. It might be a sign that they love torturing and one day they may inflicting it on you or other human beings without seeing much wrong in it.
Mai invited me to join a FaceBook account dedicated to Junko Furuta, a 16-year-old girl who was held captive for 44 days (then succumbed to the torture) by 4 boys and raped, tortured and mutilated in every conceivable manner. To add insult to injury, those boys remain free now, so that they can carry out the same act upon someone else.
Torture and brutality are an obsession. Psychiatrists say they give a high to the mentally disturbed. The victim is totally at your mercy; you can do anything to him or her, and anything means anything, there is no limit. Two English movies come to my mind (fortunately, no such movies are made in India, and again, fortunately, they don’t even have a market for such themes): The Hostel and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In The Hostel, the perpetrators visit a torture site just as you may visit a brothel. A victim is bought, you are given a room, and you can do anything to the victim. A thriving market is shown where unsuspecting tourists and locals are brought to the place and then captured. It is a totally sick movie, but I don’t know where I read, that some of it is reality, and this is where it becomes a true horror.
Among living forms only humans inflict pain for pleasure and entertainment, may be because human thinking is more complex compared to animals. We can associate unlimited feelings to a single act. More than pleasure and entertainment, it is the feeling of unlimited control over another human being. People torture animals too, but an animal cannot beg for mercy, you cannot humiliate it, you cannot devoid it of dignity because in our perceptions such characteristics cannot be attached to it.
So to say torture is human, is misleading. Torture is very human because this act is perpetrated by only humans.
The case above makes it more important to denounce torture, no matter how justified it seems. Torture is torture, there is no good torture or bad torture, because the person inflicting it, whether he or she is your hero or villain, does it for the same purpose: total control over the existence of another human being.
Whether you call it a beauty or a tragedy, nobody knows when you can become a target of torture. If something exists around you, there is a great chance you may become its target. You cannot discuss the pros and cons of torture when somebody, even if a policeman, is inserting a rod into your anus or breaking your ribs with blows. Talk against it when you can.
But then how to punish the perpetrators? I have no idea. Do you?
