Sunday 26 January 2014

Today is Special

A faint orange glow
from her broken window
She gets up, says a prayer,
smiles at her little palms
And decides to try something
new with her hair

Neatly partitioned in the centre,
Two slim french braids.
Just like the girl
from the movie theatre.
It takes her longer
to get ready for school.
She irons out her brother's
uniform before her pinafore.
But the braids are important.
The popular girls
will finally notice her.

A quick kiss on mother's cheek,
she strides out with her bicycle.
Today, she is leading her class assembly.

Today is special.
There is a raatraani tree on her way.
She picks the fallen flowers,
still fresh, fragrant and moist,
And begins to arrange them in her braid.

"Hi, beautiful", someone calls from ahead.
She hadn't noticed the cycles parked
A little way off until just now.
She doesn't like the voice.
It makes the word sound cursed.

Laughter follows as she whirls around
to get back to her cycle. Her safety.
But they catch up with her.
She knows some of them.
That boy with the cut lip,
he works in the city.
His brother is in her class.
They smile at her.
She knows it isn't a good smile.

She pretends they aren't there
and continues to walk on.
Her mother taught her
to ignore such men.

One of them asks if she is
uncomfortable in her dress.
Should he help her out of it?
She wants to cry
But she walks.

As she gets on to her safety,
the city-boy says to the others - his whore
puts raatrani in her hair.

Pedaling on as fast
as her legs can carry,
she doesn't dare look back.
In her frenzy to get the flowers
out of her hair, her braids
come undone.

She must stop crying before
she reaches school.
She has an assembly to lead.

Saturday 25 January 2014

Right to dignity

(This post is a reaction to: http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/20-yr-old-tribal-girl-gang-raped-by-12-men-on-khap-orders-in-bengal/article1-1175776.aspx but consider this as more than just that. It is a sincere appeal to every woman)

Right to dignity
Right to my own goddamn body. Right to choose. Right to refuse. Right to emotion.

You have no right over me. No right to make any decision over the use of my body. I am a human being, you know. Not a home appliance.

Safe in my home, i don't have to think of these things. I take my freedom as a given, as a fundamental right - as it should be. But in the very country i live in, the very state, the very city, the very locality, the very neighbourhood, there are women who don't have that liberty. The freedom that is my everyday life.
Without realizing that i have done so, i have acknowledged certain boundaries to my freedom - certain unfair boundaries. Those which include wearing only a certain length of clothes, not travelling alone, not venturing in certain lanes. Minor hold-ups. Occasionally relaxed limits.

Do i ever worry of being molested? Of being cornered, of being raped, and spat out in some gutter? Mostly, I worry about mundane things.
But there are times - alone in a lane just opposite my building, in a rickshaw, in a bus, in a train - if a stranger stares at me, doesn't look away, i want to cry. I've become slightly bolder now. Stronger, even. But not strong enough - because i am not indifferent. It is not possible to be indifferent.

I have decided to learn self-defence in earnest. If i want to defend women in my country, i want to be able to defend myself. I want to never be scared of a man.

I want to defend the women in my country. I want every man to know that he would not be alive if not for a woman. I want every woman to know that, too. Know that she is powerful. Know that, if she decides to, there is nothing that she cannot do. Know that together, we can demolish all these khaps, skin alive all those men who have false notions of power. Together, we can put the fear of - not God - of women, of Maa Kaali, of Durga, in men. Stand up when you see injustice to a woman. Fight.

All men fear women. Some fools try to subdue, they try to scare us into submission. Lets show them we can break more than just their bones, more than just their hearts - we can break their lives, their pride, their ego, their will to live.

Women are disadvantaged not because we are less able, we are disadvantaged for two reasons -

First, men fear our brilliance - our potential energy to take over their whole lives. So they keep us in the dark for as much as they can.

Second, more important, more devastating and far more damaging -
We, women, don't stand up for each other.

The gang-rape wouldn't have happened if the women in the village stood as one to protect the girl. I said this to a male friend and it broke my heart when he said - what could the women do? This attitude. This thinking that women can't do anything. I can burn you alive, you idiot. The men wouldn't have dared to even touch a woman, let alone slap her, if every woman of the village refused to take bullshit from them.

The problem is, men are so scared of us, and we are so comfortably ignorant of our own powers, they haven't allowed us to realise what we are truly capable of.

Know this - nobody is allowed to even touch you without your permission. You can file an assault case on those grounds. Know your rights. And stand up for all the women around you. We talk of an anti-corruption revolution taking over the country. We need a women's revolution - an assertion of our rights, our demands. Lets fight for laws empowering women. I deserve respect - and if you don't give it to me, i will throttle you, choke you, till your eyes bulge out of their sockets, till your face is bursting with blood, till you cry to me for sparing your dear life. But i will have my respect.

Women of the country, lets do something. You, reading this at home or at work, under the pseudo sense of safety, you are as affected by the atrocities of backward, less-than-human, vile and lecherous men who don't deserve to live, as the innocent girl who took a crowded bus this morning and was groped, as the woman who was raped and then killed, as the woman who was stripped and gang-raped in public by low-lifes, as the woman who gets beaten up in the enclosure of a place she must call her home. We are all the same. Lets stand as one. Defend our own.

I want to live in a place where i know for a fact that if i raise my voice against a low-life mistreating me, i will have immediate support of all the women around me at that very moment. Is that too much to ask for?