For the last couple of days, it is with an eerie sense of foreboding that one turns on the TV...every news channel is oozing with their bit on the Noida killings...each one narrating the harrowing tales of children,caught, abused, killed and abused again. The thought itself is so morbid. The reality, unforgiving.

I had nothing to do with any of the victims, most of us don't...but the wretchedness of the whole act can send jitters down the spine of even the most heartless of humans. But it did no such thing to the accused. I catagorically use the word "humans" here, for, to me, the accused don't even deserve to be called that. To call them that, is an outright insult to what we stand for, or have ever stood for.

There was this magazine that I picked up the day before, quite oblivious to its contents, but not totally unaware of what I thought I should expect. And unmistakingly, the article I was dreading most, was there. Normally, when the same issue is ranted endlessly, it tires itself out because of the sheer monotony that it inflicts on the reader, and you, quite mechanically move on to the next page. And that is what happens to me more often than not. But not this tme. I did quickly turn the page over, but not because I did not want to read it. It was more because, I could not. Those pictures, shrieking out the heinous acts behind them, were more than what my sanity could take. It still cannot. And I am yet to find someone who can.

Losing a child is always painful, but to lose it to the unsatiable thirst of such a fiend, waiting, ravenously for his next prey, is unthinkable. There is pain when you reconcile and accept the truth..and this is one truth no mother would like to accept...to see her child disappear into the dark alleys of nothingness.