I am miles away from Bangalore. I don’t know these women who have had to put up with the horrifying incident of mass molestation on NYE.
But I know how horrifying it must have been for these women- to be in the know that these men will get way because other men will stand up to the perpetrators and shove #notallmen down their throats; that politicians will speak nonsense implying it was somehow the woman’s fault and cry murder when asked to explain.
They’ll say they have been quoted out of context and that will be all that we’ll hear about it. Everyone will go back to their bloody business while the sale of pepper sprays goes up.
With every step that goes forward in empowering women, we jump back disproportionately.
If every woman started telling others the numerous incidents that make her uncomfortable throughout the day, we’ll call them whiners.
But we already do that, nai?
And somehow, men will get to joke that, ‘you’re not even that pretty’.
Do you know what is the foundation of that comment?
A beautiful woman. A rowdy young man.
He stalks her. But the woman does not mind. She smiles coyly.
He blocks her path. She blushes, and her friends giggle. Now her friends, have you noticed, are average looking women. Average in the sense of the prevalent definition of what is pretty. Since they are not that appealing to the eyes, they are not bothered.
Now he sings around her, tries to touch her and grope her while she swoons.
He gets to fight the bad guys and the prize you see, is the lady.
She is equivalent to a trophy.
Because, she is an object.
So when a woman complains about blatant sexual abuse, she is given the ‘youre not even that pretty’ treatment.
Our movies are bullshit.
They normalize stalking,objectify women and trivialize sexism.
Young boys are never taught ONCE, neither at home nor at educational institutions what consent means. No government puts the safety of women as a priority in their manifestos because no government thinks it is necessary. Our politicians protect the perpetrators by saying that our imitation of the west is to be blamed. We don’t imitate the west in making our movies and television series. I wish we did. We could learn a thing or two. We dont imitate the west in enforcing inalienable human rights. We dont imitate the west in technological and scientific progress.
And when it comes to clothing, suddenly women do. And only women do.Men dont do that.The shirt and the trouser and the jeans and jackets are all Indian heritage.
Why dont we simply declare rape to be the fundamental right of each and every man? That will end all the confusion. You have the right to rape a woman if she is sane or unconscious, if she has clothes on her body or not, if she is a 5 or a 50 year old, if she is someone you know but for the absence of a vagina or breasts or both.
Because gradually, she is going to be held responsible. What was she doing travelling with a male companion in a bus at night?
What was a single mother doing in a bar if not being promiscuous?
It is an insult to women to throw #notallmen in their face.
Have you never been groped in a crowded public place?
Have you never had your ass pinched?
Have you never felt fingers sliding down you t shirt?
Have you never been whistled at or eve teased?
Have you never been scared that it is getting dark and its a ling way home?
Congratulations!
For you are a man.
Category Archives: blog
Being a Man
Men keep looking over their shoulders when they are walking alone down a road at night. And so, as a rule of sorts, they tag someone along. They choose to stick to the routes that may take longer only because they are well lit and have more people around.
The pepper spray or safetypin usually precedes everything else in their wallets so that it is easily accessible. Now most men, dress conservatively if they can help it. They want to avoid getting raped. But I have talked to some men who confirm that the type of clothing one wears has nothing to do with someone’s intention of molesting or assault.
Surprising isn’t it?
In spite of these precautions, almost every other day men are groped in crowded public places. Hands feel for their man breasts from behind as if their body is everyone’s business but theirs. Once in a while, an elbow sticks out and to dodge that they have to literally swerve from the pavement onto the road. Gradually, they become accustomed to the cat calling, the obscene gestures and lewd remarks, the occasional flashing of genitalia.
Men have to be wary of casual conversations because they don’t want their politeness to sound like an invitation to have sex. Also, they shrink themselves as if their whole existence is a delusion. Sometimes, in order to protect themselves from sexual predators, men have to assert that they are someone else’s property: that they are taken.
Yet what is thrown in their faces when inspite of all of that, they don’t manage to avoid getting raped, assaulted or molested?
They had it coming.
But men will deny all of this.
‘What?
This is bullshit. We don’t have to do any of that.’
Yes. YOU don’t have to.
So why do you insult women with #notallmen ? It doesn’t even matter if 99 out of 100 men are feminists. If that ONE man sexually abuses me, I don’t see how it becomes a lesser vice.
Culpable
A drunk woman is raped because you do not need verbal consent when the woman is unconscious.
A drunk woman saying ‘no’ is raped because she has no idea what she is saying. She is wasted, anyways.
A woman wearing a shirt is ogled at because when she is out in the world trying to reclaim it, that is just collateral damage.
A girl is molested inside her home because,
Well because the objectification of women is complete. It has reached an absolute conclusion. A woman, is a pair of breasts and a vagina and for a man to prove his superiority over her, the ultimate act is to rape her. To have her in the knowledge that she has been entered into, that her dignity has been shredded and fed to the lust of men and that it was more about coercing her into submission than the false pretence of ‘craving’ for her. We have come a long way through film, media, television,internet and print to create the image of the woman as we know today: Culpable.
And not only that, we went ahead and let the perpetrators roam scot free. We gathered up the honour that a woman’s kin have and place it between her legs. There. Perfect.
Now we can go about explaining why she deserves the blame. How can one vouch for the character of a woman who goes to a nightclub? How characterless must a 4 year old be? Give me a number; a threshold beyond which it is okay to rape, assault, attempt to molest a woman. 2 points for the lipstick. Another 2 for the shade. 5 for a short skirt, 1 for a saree. 3 for heels, 6 for make up.
Imagine this, every minute, somewhere in this world a woman is being assaulted. Someone is trying to molest her, someone else is trying to beat her into submission. Every minute of every day. And for crying out loud, we call the bluff on these women. What does the world do? Slut shame them.
You were out alone. You deserve it.
You were out with a man. You deserve it.
You, are culpable.
Clothes
I’ve got,
Memories amongst my clothes.
And a strong smell of napthalene:
Hidden amongst the folds by my mother.
I have,
Around the corners of my favourite sweaters,
Some warm days to live by.
Days when I waited for the sun to rise on my twenties,
And never set.
I keep holding on to old faded shirts,
Signed in part by friends that disappeared,
And time which flew.
I have the rusty iron creaking at the hinges,
Of our almirah,
Where we have plenty of clothes,
Waiting to be touched again,
With the regretful feeling of nostalgia.
Outgrown, abundant.
Aparajita Kumari
A new year
Time flies like never before. I was a child and I suddenly am a woman today. It feels like it happened in the blink of an eye but yet the milestones were excruciatingly slow.
I couldn’t wait to grow up. And being an adult is okay. But we want to stauly here- young, with money in our pockets and stamina in our bodies. Yet it is time that we lack.
And I ask myself, what difference have I made by existing?
And every year becomes a struggle to add something to that difference.
Even then, the days shall become weeks and the seconds become years- a miniscule microscopic dot on the canvas called time.
Let me cheer you up though, with happy tidings. Let us hope that this timeline of 365 days shall see us on the other side- young and vivacious- so full of energy and ideas.
The Journey Chapter 2
Aparna jumped down on the floor of the compartment when the rattling became noisier and the her knees wobbly. Her brothers Ravi and Aman woke up too, startled by the unusual swinging of the compartment.
Aparna pressed her eyes to the window pane, it being the middle of nowhere on a cold January night.
More people were up, roused by the commotion now reaching them.
Aparna squinted her eyes to get a clearer view but was unable to. It was dark outside and her eyes were taking too much time in adjusting to it.
Her eyes fell down and she noticed that the train was not moving straight ahead.
It was also moving too close to the wilderness.
She stood transfixed there, crouched over the window when she realised that the train was no longer on the tracks!
‘We are going to die.’ She shuddered and her heart beat so fast as if it would burst out of her body.
Ravi tugged at the emergency brake trigger to no avail.
Aman held her by the shoulders and pulled her away from the window.
‘Its dangerous! Stay here,’ He made her stand right in the middle of the space between the berths and started pulling bags and other objects from the top berths to avoid getting hit by falling objects if the compartment overturned.
‘Don’t panic. Can you hear me, Didi? DON’T PANIC!’
He knew she was in a shock.
A thunder was heard from some distance away and Aparna looked at Ravi, dismayed.
‘THE TRAIN HAS DERAILED!’
An elderly passenger shrieked in horror.
Journey
Chapter 1
Aparna lay on the stiff seat, trying to feel warm and sleepy under the prickly blankets the railways provide you. But however hard she tried, she couldn’t get herself to fall asleep. ‘Ravi?’ She whispered in a hiss to her youngest brother who was on the berth below her.
He didn’t answer.
Irritated, she picked up her phone again and started watching animal rescue videos. Maybe that could get her to doze off.
An hour later, she still was wide awake, though anxious.
‘Something doesn’t feel right.’ The train was moving at a leisurely pace and almost everyone in the compartment was oblivious to the normalcy of it.
The sound of the train on the tracks caught her attention. She started wondering why as children they are told the train makes a ‘chhuk- chhuk’ sound.
‘Not even close.’ She rolled her eyes.
A constant whirring and thud swept into motion by metal wheels on tracks.
And a crack.
A strange crackling noise that added a predominant rumble to what she was attentively hearing caught her attention.
It made her gasp. She didn’t care to whisper anymore.
‘Ravi?’
‘RAVI! AMAN! Get up. Wake up!’
Shrinking Women
I walk,
Down alleyways and passages,
Corridors and lanes,
And roads,
As if I am one person too much,
Occupying more space than I exist in.
So I make myself small,
Pull my hands in
And hold them folded,
Against my body.
I stick to the straight line,
That becomes fine while I walk.
And I envy that fiery stride
You take.
Step after step moving forward in silent determination,
You hold your head high for the world to see
And though you hinder me not,
I,
Unsure of my gait,
Tone it down.
And I jump in my skin,
When I hear footsteps behind me,
Or voices that I know for sure are talking about me,
Or eyes that I know are burning a hole in my clothes,
To see what lies underneath.
Is it skin?
Is it fresh meat?
I don’t know.
I gather myself up,
Shrink a little,
Trying to dissolve into thin air.
Evolution
I don’t understand.
An automatic machine gun makes a whirring sound in the far fetched background.
I don’t understand the struggle, the mad scramble for power. And I sincerely want to know how wars keep raging on if no one stocks their infantry, when no one takes sides with the bad guys. Yet they infiltrate the strongholds of the opposition and devastate entire cities.
Mortars and shelling, continuously. People caught in a crossfire run across the street from gloom to despair and not to safety.
Why did these houses now razed to the ground bother to keep lawns?
Why did that little girl who now lies unconscious on a hospital bed with sharpnels inside her legs bother to go to school?
Why bother, at all?
We are shutting down the borders. We don’t want them in. I’m sorry. I’ll retain my criminals inside and you do that too. We shall all be happy and peaceful then. We shall be the race that makes it to the end- the aboriginals, the hispanics, the blacks, the privileged whites, the caucasians, the Christians, the dalits, the numerous people having a million identities. We shall overcome- together and on our own.
Humans- and the sheer accident that gifted us rationale. Amongst all creatures, us. And what did we do? We condescended to demarcate little pockets of land for other creatures to thrive in only because someone defined an ‘eco system’. Keep the cats to contain the rats. Keep the dogs to restrain the cats. Empower men to agree to empower women.
I don’t understand.
Yet leave me to myself even when I don’t understand what you believe in. But no, you go ahead and teach me obedience. Listen to your elders because they are right. Listen to yourself and you are schizophrenic.
You hold a machine gun in your hand and it gives you an exhilaration and it does not matter, if on the other side of the wall is a woman who thinks she needs to lose weight, or a little boy who is constantly bullied in school, or a man who is worried his colleague might be promoted while he may not. It does not matter.
You were poor because they destroyed your city. And you were told some tasks are larger than life.
You’ve got a hit. One dead.
Civilians injured.
Five dead, three injured.
Numbers that are larger than what you ever hoped for.
I don’t understand your lies, world. You tell me I need to look beautiful, I need to aspire to be wealthy because all good things to those who can spend. Sell me the products that you’ve curated for me so that I spend my salary away over objects that dont make me a better person, only a better consumer.
While I watch a debate on who is funding those men on my new television, and watch entire cities getting buldozed, I can only think of the time when everything would be grey. And a strange thought enters my mind. I think, the creatures that we put behind boards reading ‘sanctuary’ and ‘wildlife park’ will survive what we do to one another. Guess who is going to have the last laugh.
Not the man behind the machine gun having no uncertainty about when the next cache was arriving, but the apes that lazily dozed off as it watched homo sapiens worshipping nature and muttered to itself, ‘And become that? I’m good.’
Our First Computer
Getting a computer was a big deal. In fact, ours was the first house in the mohalla to get a computer- not the sleek ones you see now a days, but the bulky set. Word spread like wildfire and people came from the neighbourhood to congratulate my proud father and have a look at it.
And that is not even the strangest part.
The fact that I remember distinctly is that they opened their shoes and sandals right outside the room, as if it was a sacred relic. No, they didnt believe it was another God. Anyways, people will believe that too. I read somewhere that indigenous people of a certain place who saw the aeroplane for the first time began worshipping it. So was true of fire, and rain and earth much before religion took mythological forms.
The reason they did that at the threshold of the room was that we believed the dust on the soles carried computer virus. At least that is what we were told and we told to those who questioned the veracity of the premise. Belief is such a fragile thing, yet, entire kingdoms rest on belief. Today, when I think about it, it seems so silly, so incredulous. But I am sure that when I muttered,’Open your shoe outside otherwise virus will come into the computer.’, there was something unmistaken about what I thought to be correct. I was told. And without doubting, I took it to be true. Strange, almost all indoctrinations start like that. A child is given tidbits of information that ought to be self sufficient and is expected to take it in, unflinching.
Having a computer was a privilege then although it was nothing more than a box with some games in it. I almost always used it to make paint files and word documents that had no purpose.
Father had a cabin built for keeping the computer to give it the altar it deserved. And believe it, it was kept locked inside it.
We sold it later: when it stopped being a privilege and became the new standard by which people measured their status in society. There was nothing great about a computer anymore.
We sold it to someone who was one of the have nots and I think, people from his neighbourhood must have visited him that day. Although, it was almost like telling him to eat cake. What use could it possibly be to that man? What knowledge can the little girl gain from it from drawing paint files and trying different wallpapers? Yet he wanted to buy it because he too, was drunk on the future. The victim of entire debate of generic statements that range from ‘time is changing’ to ‘technology will take over’.
Technologies hinder the development of the human potential that has reached its peak today and is set to stagnate. We were evolving before we started inventing. I remember the meme about the evolution of man where the modern prototype turns back and asks the others to go back because ‘we fucked up.’
The computer, lies forgotten even though the very first memories of our childhood includes it, like the video game or the walkie talkie.
I look at it today, with a disdain because I dont wish to acknowledge the revolution of sorts it was when it first arrived, stacked at the back of a carrier auto and when we were dying over concerns that the bumpy ride must have cracked the glass.
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