Being Indian: Silence v2.0

Recently I had the most prestigious opportunity of meeting a man, only about a year younger than me. We had a lot in a common, which is rare. He had lost his mother recently as I have and he also suffered from frequent panic attacks. So we got along very well and texted often which progressed to speaking on the phone during his breaks at office. Amidst one such conversation, he told me about how he hated Tamilians. How they were pseudo because they listened to Justin Timberlake. And in this conversation as he went on to demean an entire race, he mentioned how Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna and Lady Gaga should all be put in one room and bombed. Since I hate music fanaticism, I was left flabbergasted and went on to pose the question,

“What about the men who were responsible for the Delhi gang-rape?”

“Oh I don’t give a shit about that!”

I gasped on this end of the phone line and we went on to discuss many many other things. Rape, homosexuality, racism and sexism.

I’d love to give you a transcript of what that conversation went like and I by no means intend to quote this man out of context. I continued to rationally interpret what it was that this man meant.

“I don’t care about rape. It doesn’t affect me. But listening to Justin Timberlake does, so yes, I want to see that end.”

“Gay people are so unnatural. They don’t need to do that. Why should they do that when women are around?’

“Any man who listens to Justin Bieber is not a man, he is a woman”

“Tamilians are just assholes”

The slurs continued. At his end he continued to laugh every time I revolted against everything he said. The conversation ended when I frustratingly hung up the receiver when he said,

“Gays should stay away from society. They should be banished…”

I met this individual in a pub and I really thought I connected with him. He studied in the best of schools in the city, had knowledge of every rave in Goa and was quite the brand-whore. He had no dirth of access to knowledge. But yet, in our first conversation he thought that I was just kidding about the Shiva lingam being a phallic symbolism. He called it blasphemy. This brings me to the most infuriating thing he said,

“You are a blasphemer, and that’s worse than being a rapist or a murderer”

I couldn’t believe what I was listening to. How can renouncing a religion be worse than forcing one to have sex without their consent, taking a life or being so judgemental of one’s choices that you’d rather have them leave society than change your uninformed opinion.

In our following arguments, he went on to say that

“Gays should be quarantined and if they try to leave, they should be shot on sight”

We argued until my throat went bad, until I was left alone in the dark crying and wondering how I ever encountered such a heartless individual. In all of that chaos, he very plainly asked,

“Why do you care? I think people have problems that they should deal with. I am not gay. I have not been raped and will never be raped. I don’t think anyone will abuse me. Why should I care? You should only worry about yourself. People should worry about themselves. You shouldn’t care about these gays or rape victims, how does it matter to your life?”

It does. I have been silent for long. And I know this silence has bought me much pain and misery. Some of it, I still struggle to digest.

Five years ago, it was a regular night in the university town I studied in. I was out with some friends and was looking forward to the barbecue party at home. There was this one guy, Vinay (name changed), a friend who I bumped into at the pub I was out at. I invited him and his friend to the barbecue.

The barbecue was great. The chicken was tangy and tender and music was live and peaceful. Vinay and I bonded over our love for music and I invited him over to my room to see the posters. And within minutes the tension unfolded and we kissed. Things got heated.

It had only been fifteen minutes since it had begun and I realised I wasn’t ready for where this was headed. I told him that I wasn’t ready and in response he pulled out a condom. I told him I didn’t mean protection, I just wasn’t ready to do anything more. My memory after this seems to be missing a few frames. I remember being slapped and his hand against my mouth. I remember his other hand clasp on to my neck as I tried to bite his hand off my mouth. I felt powerless and angry. But as a skinny tiny person, I couldn’t do anything to let go. I couldn’t stop this monster from overtaking me and putting on the damn protection. The last thing I remember is being slapped really hard across the face.

I woke up some time later naked next to him. I ran to the several corners of the room looking for my clothes. I could still hear the loud jam outside and the laughter. I asked him to get out of my room. I could feel pain in several places. I thought of the short story I wrote when I was seventeen years old about a woman who was raped by her husband on her wedding night. The veins pulled together. Things burned. I was not a virgin but I could feel something was lost that night. I put on my t shirt and sat in the corner of the room in the darkness and saw his silhouette leave with the little source of light from the living room. I cried for hours into the morning.

The next morning, I texted him saying I remembered what happened and that what he did wasn’t right and that I was going to tell.

“Complain if you want. My dad’s a high powered lawyer. Nothing will happen.”

I called a couple of my closest friends and told them what happened. One said, I deserved it for inviting him to the party and one, that I deserved it for kissing him. My roommate asked me the same afternoon, suggestively,

“How was last night?”

“It was kind of rough”

I responded.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone what had happened. I blamed myself for a long time. My thighs hurt for weeks. I couldn’t go to the toilet without it burning for almost two months. I had visible cuts around my vagina and bite marks on my stomach. I tried to tell some people but they never believed me. A year later, it came back to hit me when I saw him again. And I had a meltdown and told people. My sister, my friends, everyone. They all wondered why I of all people chose to be silent about this. They were angry with me for being silent and I was too.

I still am. I can’t see the current me walking away from this in silence and taking defeat. I’ve met him on a few occasions after that, some of which ended with me violently punching him. I thought with every punch, I’d let go. I thought when I’d write this, I’d feel better. And I just realised I don’t.

So mister, it does matter to me. I know how it is to choose silence. I know how it is to be blamed for something that I will carry for the rest of my life. I am that woman who has been raped or that homosexual who has been ridiculed – they are not all in the newspapers. They are not in cities far away, they are not in villages in secluded farms. They are you and me. They are next to you on the bus. They are in the table next to you drinking coffee. They are having a drink in the bar with you. They are voting with you. They are talking to you. And all in the silence of the shame you contributed to.

Being Indian: Silence

Today, I wanted to write. And then I wondered how many times I was going to rant about rape in this country. How many times I was going to emphasise on the fact that every day I feel a little less safer in this country. My social networking pages are clogged with statuses and photos asking for capital punishment for those six men who gang-raped a girl on a moving bus. The incident has even moved those apathetic people who, most of the time, have no idea what is going on in their country. Many of these posts claim that we Indians are passive and don't really get out on the streets or express our anger towards these atrocities. Little do they forget that all this while they are the ones who have been passive and oblivious to the many attempts that citizens have made to voice their dismay in light of the growing incidence of rape in the country.

The heterogeneous nature of these posts amazes me. There are a few ideas that are dominating, the most prominent being those in favour of capital punishment and castration. How is that a solution? How is such a violent punishment any solution? Dig a little deeper and you will find that in Delhi, the abundance of this crime is due to many loopholes in the system and society. Only a small percentage of it is contributed by the lack of a more trusting judicial system.

I have always opposed the use of death penalty but what is most wrong with this method is that what people want is to get rid of the criminal rather than the crime – to get rid of the problem at hand rather than the root of the problem. Instead, what we need is to rethink our ways of education and outlook. There is so much that contributes to a society that flourishes with sexual violence. Our outlook is outdated and largely dominated by judgement. The men and women who contribute to stereotyping another as “easy”, stripping them of dignity without more than just a glance. Those who will question the attire, the place, the caste, the family life and the choices of the survivor of such a gruesome crime. The society that prohibits its men and women from interacting with each other until a certain age and then throws them into a bed with a complete stranger. The naive society that glorifies its stronghold on the lack of sexual expression and yet considers Bollywood item numbers as glamorous and ultimately wonders why there is rampant sexual violence.

The worst part of this entire episode is that we have all gone on a man-hating, woman sympathising spree. We are talking about violence against women. About the safety of women. About how this entire thing is about the way our culture treats women. At this point, it would be the most obvious thing to also question and stand up for the the safety of and the violence against the men. But this is where I believe we are all lost. It is not about men and women. It is about a crime against humans, a black mark on humanity itself. No human being, regardless of gender, should be treated like this.

A friend of mine put up a very interesting status on the issue suggesting that Delhi rapists must stop raping because they are giving feminists a reason to get things their way:

“I guess it should be made official. Delhi – The most dangerous city in the world for women! Heinous, atrocious and merciless monsters dwelling in the place. Time and again hearing the same news again and again. Thank you Delhi rapists, you're giving the feminists exactly what they need – stringent laws meant for women against men. Laws where even false accusations count in any other safe city or any part of India because of what happened in NCR/Delhi. Bravo, bravo! Thanks to Delhi rapists, the threat of feminist laws would be the order of the day for the entire nation's innocent men. Sentiments from an anti-feminist.”

Firstly, this guy has got the meaning of feminism completely wrong. Feminism is the belief that men and women are equal or gender equality. I understand there are feminists out there whose ideas are simply repulsive but to completely misunderstand the word feminism is sheer stupidity. I agree that the literal term may be misguiding but a little research will lead you to discover that feminism is not pro-woman and anti-man, rather it is adhering to standards of gender equality. Sexual violence is not a women's rights issue. It is a human rights issue. Completely and wholly a human rights issue. The more we exclude the plight of men and focus on a woman's rights in a society like ours, we encourage exclusion. The only way forward is inclusion.

I'd like to keep up with the composed and tempered style in which I have, in the past, penned down my frustrations but at the moment, nothing seems to shake off the anguish that has filled me with this incident. What irks me more is the overwhelming response. In the past we have had the death of Keenan Santos and Reuben Fernandez, the many incidents of rape in Delhi leading to an imposition of a curfew, the gang-rape of a student in National Law School Bangalore, courts not recognising marital rape as a crime, khap panchayats blaming chowmein and countless similar incidents. Did it take this one girl and her friend's brutal torture for you to wake the fuck up?

While I am glad that this incident has finally pushed the media to relevantly deal with and question on the subject, I fear that this too shall pass like the many instances of sexual violence that we have seen on the news. I fear that these stories will come and go as fads for us to exercise armchair activism and at the end of it we too shall contribute to it. What happened to that girl, her plight was not only in the hands of those six men. It was in our hands too. Our society is but a reflection of our thoughts. How often do we walk through the streets, get felt up and walk away in silence? How often do we see other people get teased and molested and walk away in silence? If we don't do so now, at some point we have contributed with our silence. At this point I urge you to not lose the anger, wake up and scream. No more silence.

In the words of a friend, it is not the end of the world we are approaching, it is the end of humanity.  

Being Indian: Clothing and Rape

With discussions about women's clothing inviting trouble making the rounds, I remember an incident from a few years ago. I went out for a drink with a large group of friends. I wore a comfortable pair of old knee length shorts and a t shirt. My shorts were a bit weathered and torn and one of my friends thought it would be no big deal to slide his hands up one of the tatters. He was wrong. The same night, I neatly folded my shorts, put them away and never wore them again. They gather dust in my cupboard but I miss them. They were the most comfortable pair of shorts I owned – old, filled with memories and a gift from a friend. That night this guy thought that since my shorts were torn, I was easy. And It wasn't just him that made that connection. My then boyfriend also said “Of course, with those shorts, what did you expect?”

I'll tell you what I expect. I expect that when I wear something, or smoke a cigarette in public, or go on a night-out with just my girlfriends, I am in no way asking to be touched. I wear the kind of clothes that I do because when I look in the mirror I feel good – I feel confident, comfortable and most of all, I feel me. It is my own right to choose what I wear and how I express myself. Be it a pair of shorts, jeans, three-fourths, a bright red kurta or a silk saree. What I wear in no way translates to permission to grope me.

Yes, of course it would have made a bigger impact for me to begin this piece with an anecdote about how I got felt up in a kurta or a burkha. But the focus isn't what I'm wearing but what happened. My thigh was grazed by fingers without my consent. And the fact that I was wearing a pair of shorts shouldn't be considered as evidence in this case.

In this whole discussion about the relation between clothes and rape, where do men stand? We are assuming here that regardless of what women wear, men are like hungry dogs. Salivating over every mini-skirt and spaghetti top that passes by. We assume that men have no self control whatsoever. And with that we assume that the only way to fix the problem is by telling women what to wear.

I understand that by what I've just said, you assume that I only blame this on the mindset of men. While actually the problem lies in the way all of us think, refer and talk about the things we see. A large part of this very thinking is enforced by women - Mothers who tell their sons and daughters that women dressing a certain way Is wrong. When you publicize your judgements about a woman's clothing on to your children, you endorse molestation. It's that simple. The only way that this relation between clothing and rape is going to stop is if we stop labelling people based on what they wear. If you tell your son that a certain woman is dressed inappropriately, he will think the woman is easy and that touching her without her consent won't be wrong.

This is not a feminist issue. It is a human rights issue. Men are also groped, molested and raped. Every man I know has been groped by men and women. Nobody likes to be touched when not asked for. Touching somebody without their consent is simply an inhuman thing to do. Period.

I am forced to return to talk about sexuality. The lack of sex education in this country causes us to repress our sexuality so much that the so called “eve-teasing” is so common that it is expected. As a woman, I can safely say that I get cat calls, felt up or flashed at least once a week. That's over 50 times a year. And this is one woman's experience. And at the end of it, it doesn't matter what I'm wearing.

Today, I'm ashamed to say that I am from Bangalore City. The first city in the world to cancel SlutWalk. A global movement that was cancelled simply because the Bangalore Police succumbed to the protests from right wing groups. Instead of protecting the thousand citizens that wanted to walk for safety of their men and women, they cancelled it because right wing groups protested. What does that say about our police? That when I'm out on the streets in the night, wearing a pair of jeans and a t shirt, I will always be the victim and I will always be the cause. My safety along with so many others is compromised.

Regardless of all these people who make up the terrible world we live in, I see hope and therefore applaud the vice chancellor of Bangalore University to say that what this city needs is a change of mindset. That is what will stop victim blaming. Educate your children, let them know that nobody asks to be touched without consent – their clothes don't, their habits don't, their lifestyle doesn't. A sexual act without consent is wrong. There are no two ways about it. What we need is for people to start treating each other like human beings. Nobody asks to be raped – and most importantly their clothes don't.