Protesters hold a rally in Mumbai on Thursday to condemn the killing of Gauri Lankesh. Pic/Atul Kamble

Gutted. That's what many like me have been feeling since we heard the news of Gauri Lankesh's brutal murder at her doorstep by still unidentified armed assailants. When it isn't necessarily serving as an adjective, the word gutted is used to describe the process of removing the intestines and other internal organs from an animal or a fish in order to cook it. Another functional meaning is to "remove or destroy completely the internal parts of (a building or other structure), an example being, "the fire gutted most of the factory", Google informs. Synonyms include devastate, destroy, demolish, wipe out, lay waste to, ravage, consume, ruin, leave in ruins, wreck, raze, level, flatten. The first thing I did the next morning was call up my journalist best friend, who, like Lankesh, is a ballsy reporter. She hadn't quite slept the night before, since she heard the news. We met later in the evening, over dinner with a mutual friend at a new Manipuri restaurant in Delhi, so we could exchange notes about what we felt. I told her about how I'd run into an old journalist and writer friend at the press club meeting that afternoon to mourn Gauri's killing, and how, when I was asked how I was, I responded saying, "Pissed," while when I turned the question back at him, he said, "Alive". That was the general tone of our evening, this compensatory feeling that stemmed from the knowledge that we could so easily be targets, but at least for now, we were alive.