To revolts, revolutions and revolutionaries.

I pity my belly fats, my overgrown chin. I wish I had a body like that of some Bollywood star. But today I have cried. I have cried for that nameless girl, those nameless women who have died because of rapes. Rape. A word I knew of nothing until I realized why mothers wished daughters weren’t born, why my father wanted me home before a certain time, why it was “not right” for me to wear anything that showed my knees, why it was wrong to laugh too loud, or walk too upright with pride. I thought it was because my parents loved my older brother more.

I was wrong after all. They didn’t love my brother more; they loved the world a little less. They didn’t trust me less, they “un-trusted” the world more. But after all who is to blame I ask. And I find the answer in me. I am to blame. And so is everyone. I read about the gang rape case in India but what struck me the most was the way the couple laid naked on the ground till the hotel sheets wrapped them. We are fighting for humanity right? Or are we fighting for righteousness? Or maybe we are fighting for justice? No, I guess we fight merely for fighting.

I learnt about that in my psychology class, about the bystander’s effect. The people watched them with cruelty, with pity, with judgment, with indignation, with indifference. I wish someone had watched them with compassion. The victim (though I referred to her as a victim here, I wont hereafter, she was no less than a martyr to me) suffered injuries that doctors know of better than me, the trauma that psychiatrists know better than me, human rights violations that social workers know better than me, and injustice that people know better than me. But what about the suffering of a simple human being (irrespective of sex, gender, race or class) that she faced? No one really cares.

It is not India alone. India is only a geographic place on the earth. I am an Indian, no more than I am a consumer of some respected brand. That’s what I feel about belonging to a nationality. It feels like I am obliged to feel respectful if I am granted a scholarship to study abroad in another country, or to be forced to not share my opinion because I don’t “invest” in India. No, I don’t feel Indian because for me that feeling is as strange as a Sitruti (a Himalayan flower that belongs to your India that you might have known nothing of until you used your favorite weapon Google, just like me). My point is that being an Indian or American or African doesn’t assure you that you wont face challenges related to oppression. But then on the other hand I was born there and so I have to follow the sanskriti (culture) that I grew up with. Yes, culture. India has a beautiful culture. Women eat last. Women serve the men. Women don’t show their faces. Women don’t go to temples when they are menstruating. Women should not speak loudly. Women shouldn’t wear anything too revealing. Women should not roam around late. India has a beautiful culture. We celebrate festivals, we have family unions, we don’t believe in divorces, we don’t believe in individual voices and we definitely don’t believe in political change. We believe the martyr who was gang raped should not be named hence, supporting the idea of shame attached to it. This might have been aggressive but each and every word was a reflection of my observation of the Indian culture.

I am addressing issues that are probably looked over again and again, only to be ignited by another incident in the near future that will outrage the country. A teenage committing suicide, a girl rope-tied to a tree to be raped by men, gang rape on a moving bus are all signs of something equivalent to animalistic behavior. Killing these men, castration, making laws that gives women the right to kill their offenders, or making laws that will ensure safety are practical methods that I completely approve of. But what I fear, and every woman or man, old or young, one ethnicity or other should fear is “what if the animalistic behavior comes back?” Very few among us are looking for long term solutions. Yes, short sighted solutions are faster in application, quicker in results and are readily observable. Long term solutions are often overlooked and not carefully thought out.

One of the long term solutions could be directed towards media. Media, that is undoubtedly India’s face to the world, needs to refocus their attention on the kind of movies that are being made. As I am talking more specifically about women here (who could have guessed?) the issues are also pertaining to women. A woman half clothed dancing in front of drunk men, a not so very rare sight seen in typical “item songs”. Its not about her clothing, or about the men being drunk, or she dancing solo, it is all the factors put together that makes me wonder about the ideal image of a woman. The culture that we brag about portrays women as objects (because they for certain don’t qualify for humans) and men as animals, and this is readily accepted (if not appreciated) by the society through such movies and songs. The popular hits are the songs where women are completely disrespected and readily enjoying it (alcohol being poured on their body, wearing handcuffs, being touched by “men” as in plural). One might think that I am being hypocritical by including the issue of clothing, but it is important to understand that my claims are far from the issue of clothing. My claim is not about what a woman wears, but how she is perceived after she wears it. My claim being that women’s clothing becomes an issue when we make it one. The good old story of two monks, where one experienced monk helps a woman to cross a river by holding her in his arms was asked by the inexperienced monk that how he could go against his own beliefs as a monk and touch that woman. And the monks reply, “I left her on the riverside but you have carried her in your thoughts until this moment.” It is the mentality attached to the clothing that is the issue, not the clothing itself.

So firstly, educating boys and girls together by talking openly about pornography, sex, and sexual intercourse and related safety measures is a necessity. (How about making a movie on that, include all your amazing actors.) By attaching a taboo to things that are only natural to human life we make them appear as if they are wrong. Secondly, making the women appear weaker in comparison to men in the movies or making them look meeker (the ones always in search of one true love) is not helping either. There are two categories of women in movies, the first that silently suffers, the other that inflicts suffering. There is a third category, the one that forms a bridge between these two seemingly extreme categories (people who are real). How about repeatedly making movies that alarm people about their behavior (not only focusing on women issues here but issues related to human attitude)? Of course movies and media can do only so much. Taking that into consideration it is important to be creative, looking at absolutely everything, even slightest of comments that degrade human value. I totally agree with the quote, “But again, truth be told...if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.”(V for Vendetta)

It is important for the parents themselves to be educated. Coming from my personal experience, because supporting “wearing-short-clothes” is not a sign of “western thinking” or adapting western ideas. My issue with clothing is that it represents and subtly puts sign out there for everybody to see that “women” are objects, especially in Indian culture. Sadly I can back this up with an example that happened only a few months back in my home. My mother screamed at me when I was getting out of my house in “shorts” to a shop that was probably 30 steps away from my door. She threatened to not let me in if I step out. I could have called it her way of showing me she cares and her idea of protection. But that was not it, it was the locality, it was the society that she’d have to face, it was the men who would glance at her daughter slyly who she was afraid of. It was all of it, and even more. She was afraid for me but not as a mother alone. In that moment she was a “citizen” (representation of what society believes), face of the middle class (and I am sorry I didn’t bring this earlier as it is a major point to be noted), a woman who has at some point been ridiculed and put down for being a woman (maybe her personal insecurities) and as a daughter herself. I wish in that moment instead of shouting back at her I would have taken time and talked to her instead. Maybe talking would have completely helped. Or maybe not. Parents need to support their daughters and sons equally. In order to be able to provide for them they need be educated (not literate) as individuals and more open minded. My mother supports me wholeheartedly, and even though she might not readily accept my behavior as a rebel, she for certain finds herself, just as I do sometimes, in me.  

India is diverse in its varied lifestyles. However, seeing the culture in Chennai and Pune, and to find the comparison yielding similarities makes me question that claim about diversity after all. We all are responsible for our actions equally. At one point or another we have all degraded human value on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender etc. But it doesn’t mean that thoughts can’t transform. To start one needs to take a step, INDIVIDUALLY. As a man or as a woman, one needs to address one’s own weaknesses. For instance, the animalistic behavior the men showed when they raped these women and girls could have been stopped earlier, only if they were taught the meaning of valuing human beings (especially themselves) ‘prior to that moment’. They were animals not because they were drunk, but because they thought it was their right, because they thought it was ok, because they didn’t see the difference between a woman as a slave and woman who gave them birth, because they didn’t see the difference between being human and being an animal. Education (REDEFINE THIS), media (REDEFINE THIS), politics (REDEFINE THIS), compassion (REDEFINE THIS) and fighting for a cause (REDEFINE THIS) put together might lead to some change.

Hope is not lost.

The girl who was gang-raped in Delhi died on my 19^th birthday. When I was celebrating being born, she was mourning for not having lived. I wrote this for her. For everyone who died before her.
I will be too much of an optimist if I say that all the gang rapes or rapes will stop immediately in India. So instead I will be hopeful that each of us realizes our individual/unique responsibility in this struggle and ask ourselves ‘why rape’. I want to quote a man who changed my anger into finding-solutions, my fears into resolves, my negligence into appreciation and my disheartened attitude into hope. “A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, can even enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.” ― Daisaku Ikeda, The Human Revolution.  I realize it more than ever that it starts with each and every one of us, absolutely every day and every minute.  

*These are my personal views and they could be subject to complete objection by another person provided they support it with their beliefs and valid evidence/experiences. I hope you bring them to my notice, so that I can improve and broaden my way of looking at issues such as these.  Please let me know if there are certain things that you find irrelevant and unobvious. I have attached some personal experiences and opinions because I am not a critique or even a writer who writes to differentiate between right and wrong. I wrote this in order to support my views against any form of oppression that devalues human beings. I took rape as only an example here.