Exam Phobias and
Traumas,
And Nightmares and
Dreams in General
Shrikant G. Talageri
I cannot believe I am writing this article, and I must first reveal that it is a purely personal and unscholarly autobiographical-type article, so the reader can stop at this point if he/she wants: in short, caveat emptor. But an intermittently recurring nightmare (since the last 45 years at least) – and it occurred again last night – prompted me to write this article (which, I know, may lead some people to wonder whether I am finally losing it altogether), but having a blogspot at my service to record even whimsical truant thoughts and issues if I want to (and being on an article-writing spree in the last two months), I decided to set it down in writing.
The recurring nightmare is that I am in my final college year (or at least, I have not completed my final college year and have now decided, at this late date, to finally complete it), and the exam day is close, and I have not yet signed up for the exam (or else, alternately, I have not filled up the form, not joined college or not bothered to attend the college classes at all, not been able to procure the books and notes, not prepared at all for the examination, don’t know the examination schedule or center, lost my examination card, etc. – or all or many of these things together). And I am just not interested in sitting for the exam, and yet, for unspecific and unspecified reasons, it is imperative that I sit for the exam and pass it this very year, or else! Naturally, I am in quite a trauma about it, in my dream – but then I wake up, and for some minutes, I lie in bed sweating in terror and high tension wondering what on earth I should do about it and what would happen to me, until I suddenly realize that I have already passed my degree certificate (B.Com) examination 45 years ago in 1979, and there is no prospect of facing it again now. The relief is as great as the wonder that I should still be getting nightmares of this kind!
I wonder if this happens to many people even 45 years after the event, or I am one of the few people who get nightmares of this kind.
My nightmare last night went one step further than usual! Now, I was being interviewed by the college principal to see whether I (with my grey hair and advanced age) was eligible to sit for the exam and should be allowed to do so. For some reason, the college principal in my dream was a shrewd and cantankerous person (who in actuality had been the branch assistant manager in the Central Bank branch I was working in, in the year 2004!). And even as I was being interviewed I realized that I made a mistake for registering for the year, and that I was simply not interested in sitting for the exam, much less in studying for it. And then suddenly, a thought struck me (in my dream) and, although I woke up at that point, the thought continued to torture me for a few minutes: I had received two increments in my bank salary in 1979 on the basis of passing my B.Com. examination! Now since I had not really completed my B.Com, then I would be culpable of having committed a fraud on the bank once it was discovered that I had not deserved those increments. I also wondered vaguely how the bank had given me increments without my degree certificate. I would probably have to reimburse the bank for all the amounts I had been wrongly been paid all these years, and I would probably face criminal prosecution and an utterly ruined reputation!
I sweated in terror for a few minutes before I completely woke up and realized that it was nothing but that same old nightmare in an incremented form! The relief was great, as usual, as well as the wonder that I should still be getting that nightmare even now.
Having written this far, I will go back to the beginning of this story. I was in my higher secondary school, learning different alphabets as a hobby, doing linguistic research on the Konkani language (based on my first-hand experience as my mother tongue), wanting to do something substantial for my religion and culture, and even doing research of a kind on mathematics (see my following article):
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2019/09/my-tryst-with-mathematics_72.html
In short I was what could be called a “brilliant” student, getting very high marks and ranks without studying very hard, and in IQ and personality tests conducted by my school (St. Xavier’s High School, Dhobi Talao, Mumbai), the Catholic father conducting the tests told the class that he had never seen anyone getting “excellent” in all the seven IQ tests since many years as a student had done this year. To my surprise and pleasure, I was that student. But, the remark on my personality test was “needs some attention”. This personality test would now be called an EQ (emotional quotient, as opposed to IQ or intelligence quotient) test, and considered, possibly correctly, as more relevant for success in life.
But I sailed through my SSC exam in 1975 (it was the last academic year of the “Old SSC course” of 11 years, held simultaneously with the next batch of students who passed the “new SSC course” of 10 years at the same time as us) without much deep studying but with relatively flying colors (74% at that time was very high). [The Old Course degree college years were 4: First Year, Inter, Junior, and Senior (Final); while the New Course degree College years were 5: FYJC, SYJC, FY, SY and TY (Final)]
And then everything changed. The elders in every family at that time expected their children (especially “brilliant” sons) to take up Science and become Doctors or Engineers. But I never liked science subjects, and the thought of becoming a doctor or an engineer was totally unappealing to me. I was always interested in the Arts (or Humanities, as they are called in the west). But I was told that “only girls took Arts”! As a compromise, and because of my love for Mathematics, and my mistaken belief that Commerce was somehow connected with Mathematics, I chose Commerce, and immediately secured a seat in Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics, the most prestigious Commerce college at that time.
But then, as I wrote above, everything changed. In my very first year, there was a subject “Advertising and Publicity”, which, for some reason, struck me as so mercenary and unprincipled, that I not only lost interest in Commerce as such, but started hating it. This was compounded by the mathematical subject Trigonometry. We never had Trigonometry at the school level in those days, and I found the subject (which seemed to consist of learning a whole series of technical formulae by heart and applying them to different problems) dry and uninteresting as compared to the purer mathematical subjects we had in school: Arithmetic, Geometry and Algebra. I found I hated Trigonometry as a study subject. [This is surprising because my niece, who does not like Mathematics in general, liked Trigonometry very much even at high School level. And Trionometry is apparently Pure Mathematics]. I only liked certain accounting subjects which involved arithmetical logic and reasoning, but was put off by all the legal red-tapism which is a primary aspect of Accounting.
In short, I hated my Commerce subjects. It was too late to do anything about it, but I turned to my favorite subjects (Languages and Linguistics, Music, Religion and Philosophy, and other cultural subjects), joined the Bombay University library in the Fort area, spent long hours in that institution, and started detailed studies on every single aspect of culture with special emphasis on Indian culture. It was my ambition to prepare a Complete Encyclopaedia on every aspect of Indian Culture (in which I even at that time counted every culture within the borders of India, including the cultures of remote areas in every corner, including the Andaman islands). [Needless to say, although I acquired massive general knowledge in all these fields, it was not a task meant for a single person, and has never been completed even in part].
But this played havoc on my college life. I rarely attended the college classes, and did not touch my college text-books till the exams came close. The result was that I just managed to scrape through my First Year and Inter exams with “pass class” marks (below 40%). And soon the Junior B.Com. exams loomed ahead without any increase in my interest or dedication to my college subjects. I had already started getting jittery over my future career. I had decided to get a job (my father worked in a bank, Bank of India) so that I had a regular income, and carry on my cultural research on different subjects in full swing. But would I get a job on pass-class marks? I realized that when I completed my B.Com. exam, I would then have to try to get a job on the basis of my B.Com. degree and marks, which would be impossible (as I was sure to continue to just scrape through the hated exams), and that my only hope was to get a job before that on my high S.S.C. marks.
But the job remained elusive: I passed the Bank of Baroda recruitment test with flying colors, but failed to be passed in the interview (IQ vs. EQ?). In that state of tension, my neighbor (who had also earlier told me about the Bank of Baroda recruitment notice) told me there was another advertisement for bank recruitment, this time in Central Bank of India. I passed that also with flying colors, and when called for the interview, I was asked to start duties the very next day (11th April 1978). I could not believe my luck, and have always remained grateful to both my neighbor, Ashok Ugrankar, and to Central Bank of India, because I don’t know what would have become of me if not for this appointment.
I got my job just a month before my Junior B.Com examination (for which I had not done any studying as yet), and I was told I would get leave on the exam daya. This time, also, I scraped through with pass class. The final year, senior B.Com, I had to leave college (as I had got a full-time job) and enroll in the Bombay University correspondence course for the last year. I was sent (by post) detailed cyclostyled notes on the subjects concerned, and I continued my regular act of foraging the Bombay University library for books on various cultural topics even as I worked in the Central Bank of India during the day-time (fortunately, the first three years of my service were in an administrative department which was just 5-minutes walking-distance from the library).
Now (having already secured employment in a bank) I had even less reason to busy myself with my Commerce subjects and text-books, and I first opened the parcels of notes on “Economics” and “Accounting” (that I had received at the beginning of the academic year from the University correspondence course department) just a few weeks before the exams, and started half-heartedly cramming the syllabus. Even worse, I looked at my “Organization of Commerce” subject notes for the very first time on a Sunday morning (the exam for this subject was the first exam on the very next day, Monday) and had to try to cram everything on one day.
I need hardly point out that I fared very badly in the exams, and was full of tension regarding the results a few months away. Although (being employed) passing the exam was not a life-or-death issue any more, it was nevertheless a personal ego and reputation issue: I used to wake up sweating till the day of the result, in the certain expectation that I would fail and become an object of derision among my acquaintances. In the circumstances, and to my utter amazement and relief, I scraped through with pass class marks once more.
So there was really nothing to worry about (and whatever tensions existed were all the fruits of my own actions or inaction). But, now, more than 45 years later, I realize that the exam trauma that I went through remained alive in my subconscious mind, and keeps manifesting itself in these weird and strange recurring dreams (perhaps I should not call them nightmares: I sometimes get the genuine “horror” varieties of nightmares too).
All this long story may seem just an indulgent ego-trip on my part. But it actually has its moral lessons, and its social implications.
I was lucky, and have been lucky in most things. In my opinion, I have been extremely lucky in my parents and family, my home and neighborhood, my socio-economic (traditional middle class) status and culture, my school, my job, and my writing career, and have had an average reasonably healthy and happy life. And yet, things connected with exams and jobs still give me intermittent bad dreams from which I wake up sweating in terror, even, as in this case, 45 years after the event. Then I wonder how much more trauma and tension must result in the case of people who are much more unfortunately placed than I am in all these above matters, especially in the matter of studies and exams, or of jobs and having to earn a living, especially when the responsibilities of many family members lie on their shoulders. Modern life is getting more and more ruthless in these matters for the vast majority of the population, as socio-economic disparities widen every day in geometric progression, and life is one long picnic for an elite minority.
I can only pray my favorite ancient Sanskrit prayer:
sarve bhavantu sukhinah,
sarve santu nirāmayah,
sarve bhadrāṇi paśyantu,
mā kaścid dukha bhāgbhavet.
On the subject of nightmares and dreams, I will take the opportunity to set down some personal experiences, thoughts and musings on the subject.
1. The first is: what exactly do dreams represent? Are they conscious or subconscious remnants of the past which can only be explained by psychologists, or are they mystic omens of the future which could only be explained by people inclined towards such things? In the case of the above exam (and job) related nightmares and dreams, it can obviously only be the former. But can they also be the latter in some other cases? I don’t know if anyone has really made deep serious studies on this subject.
I have personally had one weird and inexplicable experience which seems rather mystical. But it neither had any connection with the past, not did it turn out to be an omen of anything that ever happened later. This happened at some time around the late nineteen-eighties. My father retired from Bank of India in 1986, and, for some reason (although he had lived his entire life since birth in Mumbai and in fact in the very house in which we still live) he became eager to go and settle down in out ancestral family house in Sagar town (Shimoga district, Karnataka) to enjoy a pleasant retired life (and purchased the rights of all our other relatives in that ancestral house). But, all their ties being here, my parents kept alternating between Mumbai and Sagar every few months (until my two nieces were born in 1996-97, after which their trips to Sagar became less frequent, and finally, after my father had a major heart attack when in Sagar, we sold the house in 2001, and they returned back). On one such return trip from Sagar some years after he retired, they were scheduled to reach Mumbai the next day, and I had a weird dream the night before. It was all about a pigeon which suddenly grew into a huge monstrous size and tried to get into the house to attack us, while we ran around the house closing all the windows. Finally, it started jumping on the roof to try to break in, but fortunately I woke up before it could do so.
The next day, we all went to VT (now CST) station to receive my parents. On the way back in the taxi, my mother started relating a horrible nightmare that she had which kept her awake all night long in the train. And, unbelievably, it was exactly the same nightmare that I had had, and probably at around the same time! We compared notes and were all agog to know what it meant. But it meant nothing, since nothing happened from that day to this day (nor had anything ever happened in the past) which could in any way be connected to that nightmare. The whole thing was totally inexplicable. Was it some kind of telepathic connection between me and my mother at that particular point of time? I will never know.
2. Another peculiar thing is about nightmares about ghosts or similar “horror” elements. I think everyone gets such nightmares at some point of time or the other. The frequency will obviously differ from person to person, as will the reactions to such dreams. In my case, every horror story that I ever read, saw (in films or on TV) or heard, used to come to my mind in the darkness of the night, and, shameful to say, I was never comfortable being alone in the house, or even in any room, at night: in fact, often, I was quite fearful. When I was a schoolboy, impressed with the powerful feats of rishis in Hindi pauranik films, who cursed or blessed with a flick of holy water from their kamaṇḍal, I remember deciding that I would become a rishi meditating in the Himalayas when I grew up. My mother used to jokingly say “first start by going alone to the toilet in the middle of the night, and then talk about going and meditating alone in isolation in the Himalayas”.
Strangely, this fear of being alone at night (in the house or room) persisted till 2002. And the two circumstances when I completely lost this fear are interesting.
The first time I found myself sleeping all alone in the middle of the night, and not feeling any fear at all was in December 1992 when I went to Delhi for the proof-reading of my first book, and stayed alone in a room above the Voice of India office. I was alone not only in the room and the floor, but even in the whole building, but I felt nothing (even when I consciously tried to remember the details of horror stories which always made me nervous at night)! I thought I was cured, but that thought faded out when I was back in Mumbai: it was back to old times. Strangely, this thing happened every time I went to Delhi, the last occasion being in April 2001 when I attended the HRD Ministry organized Sanskrit Conference in Delhi, and occupied a room alone in the Ashoka Hotel there. This makes me wonder: is there something in the atmosphere of Delhi (which has been occupied since thousands of years) as opposed to Mumbai (which is largely on land reclaimed from the sea), which has an effect on the tendency to what (I just discovered on google) is called “phasmophobia” (or fear of ghosts leading to night fears)? Again, I have no answer to it.
But my fear of being alone at night vanished completely in 2002. It was after my father expired in June of that year. I was so grieved by it (and later by the even more traumatic demise of mother in 2012 after years of illness) that I have never fully recovered. But, in some mysterious way, it completely cured me of my fear of ghosts, and of the idea of sleeping alone in the room, or even in the house (or in fact in any place), at night. On thinking over it, I realized that the subconscious (whether rational or not) thought that if ghosts do exist then it would be possible for my father to come and visit me, or communicate with me (and the ghost of my father could naturally only be a benevolent and protective ghost), transformed me subconsciously from a fearer of the possibility of the existence of ghosts to a desirer of the possibility of the existence of ghosts!
3. Another aspect of dreams is the degree of conscious connection between dreams and the morning after. That is, how much of a dream does one remember on getting up, and how long and how vividly does that memory last. At the same time, when in a dream, how aware are we that this is a dream and not reality?
I remember many of my dreams, or at least the gist of them, in differing degrees of detail. Needless to say, for every dream I remember, there must be thousands which completely pass out of my mind after waking up, or within a very few minutes after waking up. Nevertheless, I certainly do remember the gist of many of them, as this article will undoubtedly show. But clearly, it is different with every person. Whenever (not very often) I describe a particularly noteworthy dream or nightmare (to whatever extent I remember it) one of my two nieces always says: “how on earth do you remember dreams? I can never remember a single dream after waking up”.
At the same time, I sometimes realize in my dream that this is not real, but only a dream. This happens many times. but the greatest occurrence of such realizations is in dreams where my parents (one or both) are present. Somewhere in the middle of the dream, whether a happy one or an unhappy one, I suddenly get the realization that they (i.e. one or both of them) are going to die soon. This slowly turns into a realization that in reality they have already left us. Then I realize that this is a dream, and I feel desperately grateful for the dream, and equally desperately desirous that it should not end soon, and decide to take the opportunity to express my feelings to my parent(s). Shortly afterwards, I wake up in miserable tears.
In continuation of this consciousness of the dream being a dream, sometimes there are dreams within dreams. One dream that I remember vividly took place long ago, when my nieces were both very small. In the dream, I enter into a huge hall, where apparently a party is in progress, holding the hand of one of nieces. Suddenly, somehow, I lose my grip on her hand, and she gets lost in the crowd, and at the same time the crowd of people in the hall turns into a crowd of monsters. As I go racing around among them in sheer terror, calling out to my niece, I fortunately woke up and found myself lying on my bed. I was feeling relieved when suddenly I realized that I was in a strange room, and there were strangers lying fast asleep in the room. There was no horror element involved in this, except the bare fact that this was another dream into which I had woken up from a nightmare, and I struggled desperately in my mind trying to really wake up, until I finally found myself awake and remembering the full double-dream.
4. There are many dreams/nightmares which I get many times involving my house. Some of these are:
A nightmare where my house (never exactly looking like my actual house, but supposed to be the same) has become dilapidated and broken down, with huge holes in the roof. In these dreams I am always in a state of terror, despair and depression. In some of these dreams, an earthquake is taking place, and we can see neighboring buildings (again never exactly the actual neighboring buildings in real life) suddenly crumbling up and collapsing. I wake up just when the same fate is overtaking our own building.
In some other dreams, we have gone to our ancestral house in Sagar (which we had to sell off in 2001, but, again, the house in the dream is nothing like the actual one), and we have to sell it off, but the whole family is in a state of nostalgic sorrow about having to sell it off.
In another recurring dream, we discover secret passages, staircases, balconies and rooms outside our (actual Bombay) house, and are excitedly exploring them and wondering how we never knew about them before. Or else, the whole neighborhood has suddenly got completely transformed, with new streets, gardens and buildings, again without our having any knowledge of this.
5. Other dreams I often get (i.e. they are not one time dreams) are:
I am walking on a road alongside a deserted beach, and in the distance I see a Frankenstein-like monster standing looking at me, and waiting for me to reach him. I find that the road by which I reached there has disappeared from behind me leaving me stranded.
In one recurring dream, I have just reached the gate of my building, and suddenly see a tiger looking at me from the end of the lane. As he comes racing forward, I go racing up our stairs. Sometimes there is another tiger which has already preceded me into the building, and in some dreams I manage to reach my house and enter it and desperately barricade it from inside.
In another, more pleasant, but equally inexplicable, recurring dream, I step out of my window and go walking on air to the building across.
One common dream which wakes me up with a jerk is where I am descending some steps and suddenly a step is missing and I start falling.
I wonder what the psychological explanations are, if any, for such dreams, and, in fact, for dreams and nightmares in general.
6. Of course, there are many happy dreams as well, but they don’t rankle in the memory for long as strongly as unpleasant dreams. But my favorite recurring happy dream is where I have gone to a circulating library, and the librarian calls out to me that some new books by P.G.Wodehouse or Agatha Christie have come in stock. Or that Billy Bunter books have become available again. Reading “story-books” was an obsession since childhood (starting with Beacon Readers like “Kitty and Rover” and “Little Chick Chick”) and followed by comics and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s books on the Ramayana-Mahabharata or Vikramaditya). I was never (and still am not) interested in things like cricket, but I used to spend the whole day reading books from every circulating library in our surrounding areas, and could/can read the same book umpteen times without diminishment in pleasure.
7. I will end with a few musings which are not about my own personal dreams, but about nightmares in general.
Firstly, I remember a horror story I had read long ago in which a perfectly normal Englishman gets a dream in which he is a boy slave in a perfectly brutal society in some unknown land, where he is continuously overworked, half-starved with rotten food, beaten up on a regular basis by sadistic people. This dream then becomes a permanent dream. For years and years, everytime he goes to sleep, he wakes up into that “other” life, and every time he goes to sleep in that “other” life, he wakes up into this life. So much so that finally, he is terrified to go to sleep. I do not remember how that horrible story ended.
This makes me wonder, what happens if someone suddenly dies when asleep in the middle of a nightmare? Does he/she die here, but continue to live on forever in that nightmare, or does that nightmare also end with death in the real world? Simple logic tells us that only living people get dreams, so the dreams will also end as soon as life gets extinguished.
The real monsters are not the monsters and ghosts that appear in dreams. The real monsters are mercenary human beings. and nothing illustrates this more than the way in which monster human beings treat the question of “life”. At the moment, I am a staunch supporters of Trump and his team (Tulsi Gabbard of course being my most favorite of that team), and feel that they are the only bright spot n a politically dark world. This is not out of any illusions that Trump and his team are pro-India or pro-Hindu: they have been voted by the American people to be pro-America not pro-India or pro-Hindu, and unlike Indian politicians (or the Democratic party or the leftist and “centrist” parties of Europe) they are pro-America. But the one thing (apart from the Christian Fundamentalist aspects of sections of the Republican Party of America) that I just cannot accept or condone is the blindly anti-abortionist stand of some sections of the Republicans (I don’t know to what extent Trump and his team believe in, or will cater to, such extremist positions). These anti-abortionists want a complete ban on abortions: they don’t mind if resultant births ruin the lives of the mothers (whether rape victims or even thoughtless youths) or if this results in the birth of a severely mentally or physically handicapped child for whom life can turn out to be a lifelong living hell. All this in the name of the principle of “respect for life”, or on the principle that “since we cannot create life – only God can – we have no right to take the life of even an unborn child”, two principles which do not seem to turn the principled believers into staunch vegetarians!
Nothing illustrates this bizarrely sadistic, and often mercenary, pretence of “respect for life” more starkly than the story of a nurse in a hospital in Mumbai:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aruna_Shanbaug_case
Three very important aspects of this Aruna Shanbaug case (or rather Shanbhag, a GSB surname, and, in fact, as per Dr. Talmaki’s book on Chitrapur Saraswats, also the original Talageri family surname before, a few centuries ago, the names of Karnataka villages and towns were adopted as Chitrapur Saraswat surnames) are worthy of note (the third of this having to do with the subject of this article):
1. Every newspaper in India, and probably many prominent newspapers all over the world, reported this case as an exercise in humanitarianism, colleague camaraderie, and respect for life.
Just a few examples:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32776897
These articles stress, among other things, what the Hindu article says in its title, that this nurse “was taken care of by a group of KEM hospital nurses and doctors for the last four decades”, and pay tribute to the selfless dedication of these nurses and doctors.
Devendra Phadnavis, then CM of Maharashtra, (and this is not about him or about the BJP, but about the way in which this whole affair was looked at or represented by people in general), tweeted as follows:
My deepest condolences on the
sad demise of Aruna Shanbaug. It was painful to see her suffering. I salute the
humanity shown by KEM nurses.
2:13 PM · May 18, 2015
The disgusting fakeness of this attitude is self-evident. How many of these nurses and doctors would have selflessly and dedicatedly looked after a member of their own family lying in hospital in a coma for 42 years? And how many of them indeed would have been even working in the hospital in 1973, 42 years earlier, when Aruna Shanbhag was raped and passed into a coma, that they should have been expected to feel love and affection for her as a colleague, enough to selflessly dedicate themselves to her care through a period of 42 years?
This is not to underrate or downgrade the dedication of nurses and doctors in general. But in this particular case, clearly it was not the individual nurses and doctors who were responsible for this “selfless dedication”. The whole thing was a long 42-year scam in which the hospital authorities kept Aruna Shanbhag alive in a state of coma in order to exploit the whole story for international publicity and massive commercial gains (in the form of donations and contributions from people all over the world who fall prey to such fake sentimental stories).
So much for the “humanitarian” element in keeping people alive in a coma for years and years.
2. Another person on twitter immediately responded to Devendra Phadnavis’ above tweet as follows:
What about the rapist who is
moving freely. He just got 7 years of jail. Time to really relook at our Indian
judiciary system
2:18 PM · May 18, 2015
And here is the crux of the matter: everyone is so busy spouting empathy and sympathy with the victims in such cases, that they do not realize that it is equally, if not more, necessary to give such very severely exemplary punishments to the perpetrators of such crimes, that other similar criminals in future will think twice before indulging in their bestial acts. The villains here are in the first case the perpetrators of crimes, and in the final case the satanic legal system which actively encourages criminals to continue to commit such crimes. In the famous Nirbhaya rape and murder case (16 December 2012), out of the six people who raped Jyoti Singh (referred to thereafter as Nirbhaya) in Delhi, one was a “minor” (above 17 years but not yet an “adult” of 18)! Hence, although he was the most vicious of the six rapists, and the one who not only raped her but actually inserted a metal rod inside her body and pulled out her intestines, this “minor” was not hanged but “imprisoned” in a “reform facility” for a period of three years, after which he was released from this “imprisonment”, given a fake identity so that no-one would be able to identify him in future, and then let loose in some undisclosed part of India with this new identity, to continue raping, mutilating and killing other victims if he wanted.
In between these two villains (the rapist and the legal system) were the third group of satanic villains: the woke leftist “human rights” and “child rights” activists, who set up a shrill cacophony in defense of this rapist, on the grounds that he was “just a child”, and not responsible for his actions. See my articles below:
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2016/05/rapists-child-rights-left-and-right.html
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2023/08/suicidal-hindu-misconceptions-about.html
It is difficult to judge who is the biggest and most dangerous villain among the three: the rapist, the woke “human rights” activist, or the legal system.
3. But then we come to another point directly related to the subject of this article: dreams and nightmares. The hospital authorities who kept Aruna Shanbhag “alive” in a state of coma for 42 years and the people who glorified this as some kind of greatly humanitarian act, do not seem to realize that is not humanitarianism but extremely inhuman and satanic sadism which has no parallel.
When any normal human being gets a nightmare, he or she awakens from that nightmare after some time. But, Aruna Shanbhag did not wake up for 42 years. Does anyone have the faintest knowledge or idea of how many continuous unending nightmares she must have lived through during this period of 42 continuous non-stop years from 1973 to 2015 in a state of continuous sleep from which there was no awakening?
