Spontaneous outburst of anger

Those wide and bright eyes, the innocent smile and the purple dress continue to haunt humanity.

The rape and murder of the eight-year-old girl in distant Jammu & Kashmir has triggered unprecedented anger among Malayalis, in the social media and beyond.

A hartal call on the social mediaimpacted life in different parts of the State on Monday.

K.R. Tony, a Kerala Sahitya Akademi award-winning poet, has pledged to donate the entire amount he would get through the royalty of his books, including those to be published, to the family of the murdered girl.

“I don’t want to live,” Tony wrote in his Facebook post.

Balachandran Chullikkad poured out his outrage in seven lines in English, reproduced here with the victim’s name removed.

Several Malayalis have expressed their anger on the Facebook page of Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti. Many of the comments were in Malayalam.

A Kannur-based journalist named his daughter after the murdered girl though he belongs to a different religion. A woman posted a video saying that she would not celebrate the festival of Vishu, which was on Sunday.

“That girl is my daughter too,” she said, her eyes moist still.

A young man who tried to justify the murder and posted on Facebook that it was better that she had died before she turned a terrorist has had to pay dearly: a case has been registered against him and he has lost his job.

Poignant messages

There have been poignant messages across the social media that have been forwarded by many. One of them is by Krishnan Balendran, who heads the Department of Forensic Medicine at Government T.D. Medical College, Alappuzha.

“It was late in the evening that I read The Hindu and came to know about the Kathua incident,” he wrote on Facebook. “I cried. I didn’t commit suicide because I am in love with life and with a person.”

“For the first time in my life, I am scared of forensic medicine,” he wrote. “Some doctor must have done a post-mortem examination on that girl.

“He should be taken care of: he has access to sharp surgical scalpels.”