DEATH OF AN ANGEL

Do angels ever die? No they are eternal and immortal. Yet they come down to earth and suffer in human form, leaving the earth as martyrs and leaving behind a guiding light for humanity.

The 23 year old girl, yet unnamed, who was gang-raped in New Delhi and tortured, on Dec 16, and who suffered for 12 days in hospital has finally left her body and gone to her eternal home in heaven.

God has taken her in His own embrace to free her from the pain that she was enduring and which she would have to endure all her life if she had survived.

Her suffering and her death have opened the eyes of India and indeed the world to the indignities and atrocities being perpetrated on women the world over, and of the need to change the mental outlook of men towards women. Indeed no rape case has received so much attention in the world as this one, perhaps because of the enormity of the suffering involved, and the because of the tireless efforts of the world media to get the message across to the people of the world.

When will men give women the rightful place that they deserve in society, when will they cease to look upon them as sex objects?

With the death of the girl and her pending last rites in New Delhi, the politicians and leaders are appealing to the people to "maintain peace" in order to give peace to the soul of the departed. The TV channels are telling us that "security has been tightened" in the capitol where they show policemen with guns in the streets. It will be a fine welcome to the dead body of the girl when it is taken out in a funeral procession.

India being the largest democracy in the world, must follow the letter of the Law as laid down in its own constitution. And under the Law for rape a minimum of 10 years imprisonment would have been all that the rapists would have got in the courts.

But now that the girl is dead, the crime will fall under Murder and the rapists can now be convicted for murder and be given the Maximum Sentence for Murder.

It took the Death and martyrdom of the girl to bring this about.

What will stem the madness that seems to grip the people of the world with the ending of 2012?

First there was the news of the terrible shooting in a US school in which 21 children were shot dead by a demented man, and then there was news of the rape of this young girl in New Delhi by demented men - and rapes and atrocities that continue in every part of the world.

If this rot continues unabated, would we not be right in saying that it is in fact the end of the world?

Maybe not in the Hollywood style of volcanoes, meteors and sonamis, but certainly the moral death of the world, the death of the moral conscience of a human being?

If it were not for the righteous who are still upon earth, yes, we would say that this was the end.