Yes, we all have to something to say.

She fought the good fight and died.

In some ways, however gross that sounds, she has been relieved of pain. It also brings the death penalty on the table for the creeps who did this unspeakable thing. They took a life in cold blood. Now, pay for it.

It kind of knocks the new year mood for a loop as our first response is one of horror and sorrow and then, inevitably, how it affects us. Because there is nothing more selfish than the individual in the human race. Even in grief we first think of ourselves.

But even as we sympathise with the family and can never really share their trauma what is shocking is the comment made by a lady scientist who has said that the victim was mutilated because she resisted. If she had just taken the rape she would have been saved.

Are you flipping kidding me? What could be more medieval thinking than that? Take it because you could have been saved. Even as the anger rises that anyone would advocate such an option the scary, frightening, mind blowing, sick to the stomach reality is she might have been. Saved. Less mauled. Scarred but alive. Such truth in the grotesque.

But as a strategy or a recommendation from a member of the scientific community it is unconscionable, trivialising and beyond the line of intelligent acceptance. We have to be savages when we say, look lie down and take it and don’t fight back.

Fight back. Get the government to license pepper spray, come to the rescue, don’t watch silently, mute spectators are accessories to the crime. Learn the martial arts. And remember one lesson that this 23-year-old martyr leaves behind. All this blarney about reverence in India for womanhood and Ma and Sister is so much claptrap.

Good bye, young lady, we are sorry, so sorry the country and its system betrayed you and so did we with our hypocrisy and our cowardice. You and a thousand others every day.

Damn it all to hell.