Tag: nirbhaya

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Event

Public symposium in Dadar observes Nirbhaya Day

Event at Dadar marks the day of the brutal gangrape of a paramedical student, an incident that shook the nation.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

Be it in their own houses or in public spaces, girls and women are facing sexual harassment and various forms of violence all over India. Some form of sexual harassment has become a daily occurrence for girls and women right from 28 days old to 70 years old. Rapes, prolonged physical abuse, molestation are all par for the course.

Then there was the brutal and horrifying gang rape of a paramedical student in New Delhi on December 16, 2012. This was a landmark event in India’s history, and it stirred the common man into revolt. However, the ground reality is that there is still a studied silence over how we choose to treat women in our country.

In commemoration of the brave soul that survived our memories despite her death a few days later after her gang rape, Men Against Violence and Abuse (MAVA) in collaboration with Beti Zindabad initiative of ActionAid yesterday organised a solidarity walk and public symposium in Mumbai. The walk started from Shivaji Park and ended at Vanmali Hall, Dadar West. Poorvi Bhave, anchor and actress anchored the succeeding event, which included plays by MAVA volunteers and the public symposium.

The symposium started with Sudhakar Suradkar (retired IGP Officer), Advocate Uday Warunjikar and Dr Ashish Deshpande (psychiatrist) along with Nirja Bhatnagar (Regional Manager, ActionAid Maharashtra) expressing their views and sharing relevant information on current affairs of the judiciary system and the mindset of society. A Q&A session for the audiences was opened soon after and it ended with the message that there should be zero tolerance towards violence against girls and women.

The events underlined the adage that a real man’s strength lies in respecting women and not in hurting them.

(Pictures courtesy Ravi Shet)

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Overdose

What happened a year later?

A young girl was brutally raped and a nation revolted. A year later, what did we achieve for that girl?
Jatin Sharmaby Jatin Sharma

One year!

One year is a long time. A long time when a country is still asking for justice and still questioning the faith and seriousness of a Government in punishing the guilty. One year is a long time if you have lost your daughter to devils who have invaded the streets because of a system where law is not feared much, or not at all.

One year from December 16, 2012, we are still waiting for lots of answers. From questioning the feasibility of a juvenile’s age in a crime, to questioning safety of women or bringing justice to the family that lost everything that fateful day in Delhi; we are still asking questions. Isn’t that what we as a country love to do? Just ask questions?

Will we ever be safe? Will we ever get good roads? Will we ever see the Indian rupee’s value rising? Will we ever become a superpower?

That’s all we do – ask questions. Even today we will see the whole country asking lots of questions. We will trend on Twitter with #Nirbhaya, even #IWantToBeNirbhaya, we will hold candle marches to show solidarity, we will write impassioned letters to editors of newspapers. And all of this, simply to ask questions. We will repeat the old story for a day today, and by tomorrow, we will be tired of asking questions and move on to something else.

India as a country has always just kept asking questions. And the politicos very well know that we don’t move beyond a few questions and a few more shouted arguments. They become more powerful with the number of questions we ask, because they know that our repeated questions (that lead to no answers) reflect a state of mind showing confusion, even despair. If you are the one asking questions, you always end it with a question mark. And the one who has the power to put forth a statement with a full stop is the one with the maximum power. India has let its leaders enjoy the power of ending our questions with a full stop.

Yes yes , I know people in Delhi have started a revolution. They have voted for a political party that has just made its debut, that is very clean. But please ask a question where you really need to ask. Till now, this party just had to attack others as they have never tasted power before. Now is the testing period for them. They are faring well. But to give you the facts, only 41 per cent youth voted in Delhi. People who voted for these Delhi elections are still the same people who have always voted. The voting percentage has risen, but the citizens have not. Mumbai also is very good at questioning, in fact it is the best at focussing on logical loopholes, but are we really up for listening to an answer or is it just that we love to hear ourselves ask questions?

It’s time to finally condition our brains to ask the questions that will get us the answers. We should not ask if a juvenile criminal is of a particular age. We should agree once and for all that any person who can rape a woman should not be considered a juvenile. We should not ask whether being gay is unconstitutional or not. We should just pressurise the Government to bring the change in the Legislature. We have to show a little display of the common man’s power more often, just like we did in Delhi by demanding for a cleaner party and getting it, too. Last heard, the AAP wants to amend the law and include the gay community now. Likewise, they can bring a hundred changes that we want, within the ambit of law and sound reasoning.

My point is, that any change takes place when we start providing the answers ourselves and not just keep asking questions. If you can arrive at an answer, your thought process is clear enough. And if you can dream of something happening, rest assured there is always a way to make that dream come true.

Imagine, if we all start thinking of the answers, we can do the thinking for the nation, too. Our politicians will have 120 billion options to choose from, rather than answering our questions with the answer that they think is best.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else. ‘Overdose’ is his weekly take on Mumbai’s quirks and quibbles.

(Picture courtesy post.jagran.com)

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Enough said

Some highs and some tremendous lows

This week has been an eye-opener on the state of the human condition in India. And it hasn’t been pretty.
Humra Quraishiby Humra Quraishi

This has been a strange week, to put it mildly.

Still reeling in the capital city over the Chhatisgarh Naxal attack on the State’s top Congress brass, we are now waking up to a detailed five-page letter on why tribals in the country are angry at the establishment. Space constraints bar me from producing the entire letter, so let me just write the operative part of the communication.

The letter was written by a Minister in the Central Government, V Kishore Chandra Deo, Minister for Tribal Affairs and Panchayati Raj. He has written to the Governors of the Schedule V Areas, in which he mentions, “The main challenge that is staring at us today is the explosive situations (sic) that are prevailing in the Schedule V Areas of our country. These areas are inhabited largely by people belonging to the Scheduled Tribe communities, forest dwellers and other marginalised and deprived sections of our society.

“It is, therefore, not a matter of coincidence that we are today faced with a situation which is threatening to strike at the very roots of the basic structure of our polity, and has  become a threat to our national security…The root cause of this situation is, however, result of continuous exploitation, oppression, deprivation, neglect and indifference for decades.”

And so on.

Recently, Roli Books launched Incredible Ascents to Everest, which captures “extraordinary stories of ascents – from a blind man’s success to a sherpa’s record 21 climbs. From the oldest, two weeks before his 77th birthday, to the first person to ski down the Everest. From the first solo ascent without any supplemental oxygen to the first double amputee to scale the Mount Everest…the extraordinary stories of ordinary men and women who have risked their physical, emotional and financial well-being to make the momentous and perilous climb to the top of the world’s tallest mountain.”

Jiah KhanBefore I could get more details of these men and women scaling the highest mountain in the world, came the news of Bollywood’s Jiah Khan and her suicide. News reports claim that she couldn’t claim with the emotional turmoil and the struggles of everyday life. It is sad to hear of the death of a young, reasonably talented girl, who I wish had seen the positives in her life and not given up the courage to go on. Some day, I hope many such Jiahs will learn to look past immediate disappointments and just live.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a symbol of mingled hope and grief. An exhibition titled Nirbhaya by artist N Swarnalatha was launched here recently, and it bears sketches and paintings of the human form exploited, molested, raped and abused. To quote from the brochure to the exhibition, “‘Nirbhaya’, her current body of work reflects her angst on the plight of the Indian women today. The series is dedicated to Nirbhaya, Vinothini, Vidhya and all the women martyrs who have taught lessons of bravery and self esteem worldwide…”

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Pictures courtesy www.warisboring.com, www.dayandnightnews.com)

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Overdose

Back to cool

Jatin Sharma yearns for a simpler time when our society was seriously cool, in every way that the word implied.

‘Cool’. This word has managed to grab the youth. Everyone wants to be ‘cool’. If someone commits a mistake; he is ‘cool’ about it. If something bad has happened to someone; he has to be ‘cool’ about it.

Premarital sex? It’s ‘cool’ to believe in it.

Live in relationship? It’s ‘cool’ to experiment.

Abuse an elder? ‘Cool’ if it was his fault.

But this ‘coolness’ makes me think. Are we ‘cooler’ than we should be?

Being cool is often described as being modern, something that a rebel does. But it may become problematic if we equate being cool with being desensitised, dead inside.

It is probably a reflection of the times we live in that we are cool with everything – an earthquake that shakes the neighbouring State to its foundations, a person on the street who met with an accident while we watched the car that struck him zoom away, a person who announces on a social media site that he is about to kill himself, a long relationship breaking up; with everything that should normally cause us to be really disturbed, but which doesn’t affect us for more than a minute.

Earlier, the incident of a bomb blast anywhere in the country would shake us up, but now we sit in front of our TV sets with our dinner and watch the visuals of carnage play on loop. We are also ‘cool’ with journalists jeopardising sensitive operations, and we don’t directly protest their actions, choosing instead to make fun of that journalist on social media.

I wonder – has our quest for ‘cool’ killed off every last human emotion in us? Recently, a ‘cool’ person that I know had to say this of the second big Delhi gangrape after Nirbhaya, that has had the country talking about the safety of little girls – “Rapes just keep happening, and the people are now bored. Woh Nirbhaya ke time pe ho gaya, now it’s boring to do that activism again.”

Because of this ‘coolness’, we are a generation without a spine or feeling. All we do is talk a lot about what others should do. Heck, we speak about stopping corruption but it is so ‘cool’ to be able to arrange liquor on a dry day. Even as we become smarter and acquire the latest gadgets the moment they hit the market, our sensitivity to others is dulled by our total indifference and lack of awareness.

I loved the fact that the earlier generation of parents were so ‘uncool’, their children would tremble if they did something wrong and automatically toed the line. But parents nowadays, probably in a futile attempt to reach out to an increasingly remote generation of ‘cool’ kids, are also trying to be cool, even doling out money to their children to buy exam papers.

I miss the time when our society was seriously cool – people stood up against wrongs and told it like it is. Our country had some absolutely cool freedom fighters and revolutionaries who would devote everything for a cause. We have now forgotten that helping others is cool, studying sincerely is cool, getting a job on merit is cool, respecting all elders is cool, and being able to tell the difference between right and wrong, whatever the compulsion, is very cool – everything, in fact, that constitutes humanity.

For now, I’m trying to make my peace with a distorted definition of ‘cool’ – where getting away with a crime is cool, where doing drugs is cool (but getting caught is not), hitting a person because he/she didn’t agree with us is cool, where being a total pig is cool as long as you have a sense of humour about it.

(Picture courtesy xn--80aqafcrtq.cc)

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