Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright

Stop Blaming The Tiger.   Today, a man was mauled to death by a tiger in Delhi Zoo. Any loss of life is sad, and so it was in this case.

But the current blame game that is ongoing within and outside the media conveniently overlooks the most important being in this case – the tiger, for whom one must feel nothing but pity.

The Bengal Tiger (panthera tigris) is one of the world’s most endangered species. There are currently fewer than 2,500 of them worldwide. They have officially been classified as endangered by the IUCN, but are still hunted by poachers worldwide for their ‘exotic skin’, among other things.

Found primarily in the Bengal region, the tiger is the national animal of both countries in that region – India and Bangladesh. Shamefully, there have only been sporadic forces of activism to protect this beautiful animal, which continues to be killed by unaware villagers, townsmen, poachers. All from the same species of animal – homo sapiens. 

Homo sapiens, which are apparently the only species capable of having governments, laws, upholders of these laws, compassion and empathy, choose seemingly to exercise absolutely none of these even though heart-rending stories of animals being killed are aplenty. Snared in wire traps. Poisoned. Hunted in cold blood for their hides, for the use of their bones in traditional Oriental medicine. A quick read of the stories on tiger poaching is enough to break even the stoniest heart.

Although carnivorous, tigers are not known to be man-eaters, instead preferring to prey on herbivores within their ecosystems, such as several subspecies of deer and buffalo. It is very rare for a tiger to be a man-eater, a fact endorsed by renowned naturalist and famed protector of the Bengal tiger, Jim Corbett.

The more one reads about this incident, the less one is inclined to blame the tiger.

Taken out of its natural habitat, the tiger is in a small enclosure not even a tenth of the size of the forest it is used to. While the enclosure may seem ‘large’ to the human eye and human standards, it truly is not. Second, it is simply not the tiger’s natural habitat, and it is unlikely the tiger will feel particularly comfortable or at home there. Zoos are a concept that I completely abhor; putting live animals that cannot resist and do not know any better on display for human pleasure is sadistic, cruel and entirely unnecessary.

In this still-slightly-unfamiliar environment, the tiger is put on display, for people to watch, ogle at, laugh, scream, yell and seemingly attract attention. Reduced to a circus show (which, in my opinion, should also be entirely outlawed. At the very least the use of animals in circus acts should be completely banned) with spectators watching it go about its life. A Truman Show for the poor animal.

Indian public etiquette is nonexistent, to put it mildly, be it at a swimming pool, a railway station, an airport, a government office, a restaurant, anywhere. [An article on this is currently in the works.]

The same goes for zoos. Honestly, as abhorrent as public etiquette is, I would much rather humans inconvenienced each other than hurt an animal, something that makes my blood boil. People throw stones, pebbles, food, popcorn, the works at poor, confused animals in spite of signs in multiple languages telling them expressly NOT TO DO SO. But who cares about instructions?

And so cue our strapping young man, king of the creatures, selfie-clicking enthusiast, who attempts to climb the barricade to the tiger’s limited area. Hoping to get its attention, he walks towards a tiger that is at a fair distance, 500-600 metres away, shouting to attract its attention.

The tiger comes towards our selfie young man, our social media maven, who by now has realised entering the tiger’s area was not a smart idea. Cue Darwin award, please.

Ill-informed ‘spectators’ begin to throw stones at an already scared tiger who perceives this man as a threat to his territory. Territorialism is animal instinct (unfortunately, humans do it too, for reasons that are not instinctual, sadly), and I assure you a pet dog would do exactly the same were its territory threatened. Many pet dogs are quite capable of mauling a person to death as well.

Now scared and confused, the tiger attacks the man in its enclosure, mauling it to death. To the tiger’s mind, it has eliminated the threat to its territory – it did not eat, prey on, or generally ‘use’ the human that entered its enclosure for anything; it merely eliminated the threat it felt, a natural animal instinct. I also assure you if you were to barge into my home and throw stones at me, or threaten me or my family in any way, I would attack you too.

In the blame game, eyewitness dramatisations have tried to blame tiger and zoo. While the tiger could have been better cared for, the fact remains it was IN A ZOO. OUT of its natural habitat. Not protected, as it would be with its pack, but alone, in a physically limited area, threatened by a human looking to encroach upon what it knows as its own ‘home’.

In his quest to click a picture, this man went TO the tiger, attempting to attract its attention – surprisingly, neither common sense nor the human instinct for self-preservation seems to have worked for him.

At that point, it is unfair to blame either zoo authorities or animal for someone intentionally needling an animal, needlessly provoking it, turning it into a spectacle for human entertainment in a tiny space.

While sorry for the loss of life, I find that I feel sympathy for the poor tiger, rather than the man who lost his life. I wish painful deaths to those who poach. If you willingly hunt an animal in its own natural habitat, ousting it from its home, killing it in cold blood and with the utmost cruelty for money and perverse pleasure, an animal that neither knows nor understands humanity, you are a disgusting blot on the human race, which, by the way it has been acting recently, has not been all that great to itself.

These creatures may be large, they may be equipped to protect themselves. But against the awful weaponry and ammunition the human race has designed and continues to use with reckless abandon, these animals are well and truly defenceless (when the men throw down their spears).

A strong advocate of national parks and sanctuaries, I believe entirely that animals should be protected in their natural habitats. 

For this, we also need to look at our green laws. Large sections of forest have been continuously razed, displacing entire biomes and ecosystems, and every last bit of flora and fauna. Forest and wildlife protection are an absolute need of the hour, and I hope the new government makes note of these facts. An open request to the new administration: please look into the existing wildlife protection laws. Please help enact new laws to protect our natural wealth.

In the quest for financial and infrastructural development and national monetary wealth, let us not forget the abundant natural wealth that we need to preserve, to foster, to nurture, to protect from man, from ourselves. In a race to build factories, economies, in the rush to lead the pack of nations hunting to be economic superpowers, let us remember to protect the animals that cannot protect themselves anymore.

Large wildlife belongs in its natural habitat – in which case stringent measures need be taken to actually protect these beautiful creatures from the species from which they suffer the most significant harm.

Us.

Homo Sapiens may not be such a wise man after all.

Let’s Play a Game

That game would be victim-blaming, female shaming, target naming, scapegoat framing. All of them sides of the same multi-dimensional terrestrial entity known as misogyny.

There have been several high-profile cases in the public eye and national media, each of them an instance of one or more of the above. Most recently, a certain extremely famous national starlet, recently in the news for her latest film release, was featured on the front page of a national daily in what can only be described as the most crass, appalling way possible, in a tweet that has since been removed. [It described ‘OMG, Deepika’s cleavage!’]

Some attempted to pass it off as a ‘marketing ploy’, ‘strategically placed’ to market Ms. Padukone’s new film. While I appreciate that film marketing can often stoop rather low, the use of the female body in the basest of attention-seeking ways was beyond repulsive.

Fortunately, in an extremely positive move for not only herself but for women across the nation, the star in question did not stay silent, instead choosing to respond to the article in kind.

Historically, in India, women have been taught and conditioned, generation by generation, to be ‘ashamed’ of their bodies, that their bodies are something to be ‘hidden’. It is a regression to the ideals of a woman’s body being a ‘gift’ to be given to one man and one man only: the woman’s husband.

Regressive, misogynist and attempting to not only impinge on but entirely destroy a woman’s self-will or own right, this sort of ideal continues to persist in 2014, and unfortunately not only in rural pockets of the nation.

Worse still is that it is because of these years of being repressed and pushed down that women have begun to believe these ideals too. That their bodies are to be ‘kept pristine’ and ‘gifted’ to one man, that their virginity is a prize that goes to the ‘highest bidder’, in a way like the mizuage of the geisha of old Japan.

Most Indian women, unless from specific socio-economic strata and levels of education, are neither free nor comfortable with their own sexuality, because they are brought up and taught not to be; that it is something they should not possess, or ‘preserve’ for the man. Openness, self-belief, one’s own mind, opinions, thoughts; all repressed in the repression of the expression of their sex, of their womanhood, and of their personalities.

Breasts existed, but they were meant to be covered. Hidden in their entirety. In existence for mankind to look.  This ideal persists in the behaviour of men in public to this day, even in the most cosmopolitan of areas. Even in the least low-cut of tops, cleavage and breasts will be stared at, ogled in the most vulgar way just because, in a way that many men here seem to consider their birthright.

In personal experience: I was walking down a street to find an auto-rickshaw to take me home from a friend’s at 9 a.m., not by any means an ‘ungodly hour’ in our great ‘Indian culture’. A man on a bicycle drove past, shouting ‘arre khulla hai, aam dikhte hain!’ – roughly translating to something too disgusting for me to want to explain, but I will try “It’s open, I can see them mangoes”.

I was wearing a regular t-shirt.

While it is entirely irrelevant what I was wearing, a lot of the Indian public (men, women, ‘upstanding, educated’ members of society) use  the way a woman is dressed as a reason to lech, ogle, or take it further to molestation and rape – everything from end to end on the spectrum of sexual harassment.

The star in question, however, questioned the publication, letting them know she was a woman with breasts that she was not ashamed of, a first for women in public in the country.

And in an extremely heartening move, the country stood behind the star, who has since gone on to publicly admit how violated she felt after the tweet. The publication responded with a rejoinder that only worsened the situation, but the actor stood her ground.

However, women, whether in the public or private eye, are rarely spared the ignominy of being taken apart like this, judged for their situations, their sexuality, blamed for being the victims in this Circus de Chauvinism, with the trapeze acts of the tabloid media.

A former actor, an incredibly talented young woman who has been in a few films before, was recently found to have been involved in what was described as a ‘high profile’ prostitution racket involving ‘rich, high-profile industrialists and businessmen.’

I appreciate that there are countries where prostitution is legal, but I also believe a very small number of women currently choose willingly to engage in the profession, at least in South-east Asia. Trafficking is a very, very real, very pressing issue that needs to be dealt with, and unfortunately most women, sadly of all ages, are forced into prostitution. Until that issue is even slightly alleviated, which does not seem like a reality in the current situation, and in consideration with several other factors, this will not  happen in my opinion.

In the press, however, really all over it, was the name of this starlet, which, although it is open information, I choose not to repeat out of respect. Not the ‘high-profile rich businessmen’, the ‘industrialists’, the men who paid the prostitutes,  because their ‘identities needed protection’,  because they were ‘not to be exposed’, because ‘their family lives would be ruined’.

The young girl whose acting skills and life fell by the wayside, the young girl who was forced into the flesh trade. Her name was emblazoned across publications, headline news, lurid details all over the media. The men’s identities were hidden, protected, secret as they continue to be.

The excuse? The men deserved privacy, according to members of the public and press. The men paid a ‘premium’, and deserved to be protected. The men had families, they said, that would be broken by this revelation. Their lives would be completely altered, they said.

Do none of these apply to the young woman who was the obvious victim? Does she not have a ‘life that would be completely altered’? Privacy that she deserved, a family that would be affected? The judgement that invariably seems to follow? Yet it was HER name, not theirs, emblazoned across headlines, it was she who was blamed for being forced into the sex trade.

Finally, there is the recent case of Suzette Jordan, who was the victim in the horrendous Park Street rape case.  She was on her way home from an event, and brutally raped in a car by her attackers. Instead of protecting her, taking down her complaints and pursuing her attackers, police and ministers dismissed her, lambasted her character.

Due to the fact that she had been drinking (shock, horror, only a man is supposed to do that in India!), she was dismissed as ‘characterless’, a drinking single mother? “Devoid of morals”, they called her. The chief minister of West Bengal, the capital of which is Kolkata, where the rape occurred, dismissed the case as a ‘sajano ghatana’, or a made up story.

Suzette was accused of being a prostitute, and that the ‘deal had gone wrong’. She was merely a single mother going out to a discotheque.

What ministers, police, lawmakers, locals, the chief minister even, failed to understand was that it was a violation of her personal rights. Even if she had been a prostitute, no person had any right to do anything with her against her own wishes. The so-called ministerial diaspora thought that was the ‘excuse’. Suzette’s family were judged, her daughters stared at.

Recently, Suzette and her fiance visited a Kolkata restaurant for what seemed like a routine meal. They were however refused entry by the head waiter, who labelled her the ‘Park Street Victim’, and refused her entry on that basis. She was sent away from the restaurant after being derided and shamed by the management.

Yet again, the second time for Suzette, the victim, it was she who was blamed. The first time, for being raped. For being ‘loose’ and ‘going to a disco’ and ‘drinking’, things the “aadarsh bhartiya naari” is not supposed to do, haye haye!

This culture of shaming the woman, this idea that it is the woman’s fault, needs to stop. The ideal of the man needing to exert and assert his ‘power’ over the woman, which is what rape really is (it’s not sex!) needs to end. This sexism, this easy selling of women’s sexuality needs to stop. Women need their own right over their own sexuality, not permission from anybody else or the right for them to do with it as they please, for games to be played with those who are helpless.

Women are not men’s to be sold or bought in any way, shape or form. They own themselves and everything that comes with it. And that is something they should be proud of, not need to hide behind closed doors out of fear.

Fingers need to pointed, publicly and legally, at the true perpetrators of the crime, not the scapegoats who can be easily framed, not those whom it is most convenient to blame.

Sadly, when the wheel of fortune is spun, the arrow of the blame always lands squarely on the woman. We need to stand up, as many have recently done in each case, protesting against this blame-the-woman culture, and change the way the wheel spins entirely.

A Womb with a View

On Ectogenesis and What it Could Mean For Society

Ectogenesis refers to the “growth of an organism in an artificial environment”, outside the body of its parent.

Recent developments and scientific research have meant that ectogenesis in humans could become a reality in a realistically close time frame, one that could have ramifications for current generations; as soon as the next 20 to 30 years.

Research has extended beyond theoretical hypothesising and macro-testing.  Mammalian testing has shown positive results, which holds significant meaning for future endeavors involving humans.*

Experiments on smaller mammals have, in light of their limitations, been successful†.

The potential effects of this research are gargantuan, and could change the course of human life entirely. Several significant effects come to mind, and are significant from both feminist and scientific perspectives.

First, the mass availability of this scientific method would spell the end of ‘non-viable uteri’ ; with the creation of an artificial gestation container, the conditions provided to the foetus by the uterus and other components of the female reproductive system can be externally created and regulated. Constant mechanical monitoring will minimise intra-pregnancy risks or accidents that are simply down to sudden chance. Pregnancy losses due to accidents would be entirely negated, as would possibly any other uterine issues, foetal nutrition, placental detachment and a host of other issues those in Obstetrics and Gynaecology could explore in more significant detail.

Mechanical monitoring and constant, programmed adjustment of conditions could also be more reliable than its manual counterpart, as the aspect of human error would then have been largely removed. This would also remove the ‘biological clock’ aspect of conception, pregnancy and childbirth, although detractors may have issues with the ‘age’ at which it is ‘suitable’ to be a parent, and the limitation of the physical strain on child-rearing is a possibly significant issue.

Homosexual couples, for example, gay men who wish to conceive naturally, would no longer be dependent on surrogacy to have a child. Ova, donated either anonymously or with the consent of a loved one, could be gestated with no physical strain or dependence on a third party. This also solves several other issues related very closely to surrogacy.

Ethics and legislation surrounding surrogacy are rather nebulous, and the potential issues are enormous. A very real example relates to the surrogate, who may not be the egg donor, desiring to keep the child she has gestated. In this event, while legislation may or may not be available, dealing with the potential issue of a surrogate going rogue, or developing an attachment to the foetus, a desire to keep the child might prove difficult to deal with, an issue that has occurred in the past.

Surrogacy and the selection of a surrogate mother is an arduous, tenuous process inundated with extensive paperwork, which leads several people to seek surrogate mothers in countries where legislation is more lax and human life more abundant, and, consequently, less valuable in terms of legislation. Women from these countries, including India and Thailand among others, are paid money to be surrogates. Human life is commodified, these specific lives reduced to wombs-for-hire, and several of the women in these countries are trafficked, leased out as ‘wombs-for-hire’, receiving a negligible chunk of the sum paid to their ‘lessors’ for those with access to funds, reduced, as it were, to characters from a dystopian world straight out of the mind of Margaret Atwood.

The existence of external wombs would pare down significantly the quest for ‘wombs for hire’, although this could be over a longer time frame because the technology will be expensive in its nascence and not entirely widely accessible to begin with. However, it could help combat a significant social evil.

The possibility of extra-body gestation also opens up several avenues for women who wish to have children in view of their careers. Pregnancy would no longer be a physically taxing stretch of life that forms an encumbrance on work, physical activity or any other task a woman wishes to undertake, and no longer cause a pregnant pause in careers, which could then progress as normal as they do for men.  This could result in a move towards more equanimous parenting, beginning to break patriarchy-imposed barriers which are ‘reinforced’ using ‘nature’ and ‘biology’ as excuses for inequality. Women would no longer be necessitated, forced to stay exclusively within or around their homes, as further and further excuses for the justification of gender inequality are eradicated.

This scientific development could have the potential to help break glass ceilings.

The effects of body issues, dysmorphia and changes are significant, even on non-pregnant women, and entire industries function off these aggressively marketed, purely appearance-based products. This could put an end to the significant medical and physical effects of pregnancy on a woman’s body, therefore affecting neither her physical health nor her mental health, by way of impacting her body image.

However, is the philosophical issue largely surrounding the ideal that childbirth is attributed saintlike, magical qualities even though it is merely a biological process common to every mammal in existence? It is not ‘sacred’ in any form of the word; this is merely a human endeavour to make fantastical that which is not.

The oft-repeated ‘wisdom’ of the patriarchy, in order to cause the virtual imprisonment of the female within the home, has been, across geographies and socio-economic strata, the avowal of the basic reproductive differences between the sexes, the need for the mother to be the ‘primary provider’ simply because  ‘science’ or ‘biology’ dictated it.   That the woman was meant to be the bearer of children for the family she married into, which continues to be the widely, nay, primarily held belief in several developing and developed countries. The familial and societal pressures in these countries cause a Handmaiden’s Tale-esque scenario, with an actual alienation in the minds of the women who go through these experiences between their bodily choices and the decisions they are forced to take, the societal pressures to have a child that one may not necessarily desire.

While these scientific developments may blur some ethical lines, they elucidate and outline far more clearly some others that could help science, legislation, the structure of society and the human race at large, in a multitude of ways, although they may bring with them some potential issues that will need to be discussed and examined in far greater detail.

The termination of pregnancy and related issues would need to be analysed. Although ectogenesis, as a deliberate scientific process, is entirely intentional, the potential for the desire to terminate the pregnancy is entirely possible.

Considering Roe v. Wade is based on the ‘viability of the foetus outside the mother’s womb’ to adjudge the potential for termination of pregnancy, this issue would need to be explored in greater detail in the future, as a foetus potentially growing in a ‘pod’ is entirely viable ‘outside the mother’s womb’.

 

If ectogenesis becomes a reality, science will dictate a new reality, one that, to me, heralds positivity in terms of biology and sexual equality.  Pregnancies would be easier, safer for both foetus and mother, and natural childbirth more accessible across society.

Women need not be primary caretakers anymore, and the reality of ‘househusbands’ that John Lennon imagined, of men being the principal caretakers of their children, taking over more traditionally ‘female’ home duties’, or becoming ‘mothers’ in the historical sense of the term as they take over the majority of caring for their children, a task previously relegated automatically to women, irrespective of career, choice or personal desire.

Our world is changing every day, from the bottom up, and should ectogenesis become a reality, the dichotomy of a gender-based societal division of roles would cease to exist, or at the very least pare itself down on a long enough time frame. These roles would affect significantly patriarchal societies that consider women mere tools for reproduction, should human ectogenesis become a reality, the kind that is widely available to those who wish to use it.

 

As of now, external wombs are still experimental, so until further study and work,  the term ‘Human Ectogenesis’ is up for grabs. Perhaps a collaboration among Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler and Phil Collins?

 

 

*Japanese professor Dr. Yoshinori Kuwabara of Juntendo University has successfully gestated goat embryos in a machine that holds amniotic fluid in tanks.

 

† Over a decade ago, Dr. Helen Hung-Ching Liu, Director of the Reproductive Endocrine Laboratory at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at Cornell University, engineered mouse endometrial tissue (the tissue that forms mammalian uterine lining) to an extra-uterine framework or ‘scaffold’, as described in her research, successfully growing a mouse embryo to term.

Although human trials are not permitted for ethical and philosophical reasons, Dr. Liu grew a human embryo for 10 days in an artificial womb, with the goal of developing, someday, an external womb. Legislation, however, permits a fourteen day cap on this sort of research.