A typical morning in any household probably consists of the delicious aroma of 'adrak ki chai' and everyone at home struggling to have the fresh and crisp newspaper first. Same is the case at our place, but I intend to do away the possibility of such a thing completely. I've started dreading reading the headlines these days...and why..
Last week it was this, and this week it is this! The string of disturbing news refuses to cease and I cannot help but silently pray for my son's well-being everyday. He's still small, but it won't be long before he'll be abreast with some or the other 'situation'. How will he take it? What will I be able to do to save him from such 'jungli' people who're let out in our society in the garb of learned men?
The elders in our family always told us, mornings are the best time of the day, when you're mood and mind is fresh and delightful. I need to differ from them now. I want to break my habit of heading for the newspaper every morning, 'se every other day it carries some or the other crime committed against women or children, which makes me shudder and go hug my son in his sleep.
What kind of people are we turning into? It is said that people who commit crimes are always instigated, provoked or are suffering from some kind of illness. When such crimes happen so frequently, and in any part of the world, does it mean that the level of 'sane' people is seriously dwindling?
I know running away from the situation or shutting myself off from it completely is not going to serve any purpose. But I'm scared, very scared. What kind of world are our kids going to see when they grow up? We take so many pains to teach them proper mannerisms when some b******s out there can't even be called humans!
I'm sorry for such a digressing and accusing post. Guess it's the paranoid Mom inside me who's reacting very strongly.
When I was young the ‘SEX’ word was a taboo and anything pertaining it essentially needed to be spoken in whispers and hushed tones. That was the time when sex education was not a compulsory part of our curriculum and cases of sex abuse against children were not very frequently seen or heard of. The world has changed a lot after that, and unfortunately, for the worse.
Apart from coping with the increasing competition, the pressure of better performance and the burden of their parents’ expectations, one more thing that kids have to face nowadays is the sexually explicit overtures of their family members, friends, neighbours and teachers. There’s not a single day when the newspaper does not carry some story about such a crime being committed against some minor. There are two such accounts that I’d like to share.
1.K belonged to a typical upper middle-class family. Her family consisted of her parents, a kid sister, grandparents and one uncle. Everything was going fine until a far-off relative of hers, another uncle, who found a job in their city came to live with them. From the day he entered their home he was overtly nice to her, giving her presents and not losing a single chance to touch or feel her when no one was around. She was young then and too naïve to interpret his advances. He continued his lewd acts and she never objected as she had started liking him. However, as she grew older and came to understand that theirs was an incest relationship, she decided she should confide in her family about it and asked him to face the music with her. As expected, he begged himself out. He wanted her to continue giving him all the pleasures but he didn’t want the world to know about it! With help from close friends and maintaining deliberate distance from him, she finally came out of the ridiculous situation. Now she’s happily married to a wonderful man, and the pervert still keeps trying unsuccessfully to get lucky with her.
2.I remember I was some 10-12 years old when I’d first seen on television, the story of a 4-year old girl who was abused by her father, repeatedly. The girl’s mother had reported the matter to the police and got him arrested. She said that she’d found her daughter hiding under the bed afraid that her father had come home, while it was her. She took her close, hugged her tight and asked her what had happened. To her horror and sheer disbelief, the kid enacted what all her father had been doing with her on the pretence of giving her a bath or putting her to sleep. It was all very disturbing. The lady couldn't stop her tears while explaining what all her little baby had gone through. She'd been there all the time, but she'd noticed nothing, sensed nothing. She'd assumed that they were bonding, but it turned out to be a nightmarish experience, for both the ladies. I wonder how long it must’ve taken for them to come back to a normal life and put such a dark past behind them.
The whole day after that I couldn’t think straight. The little girl’s face refused to leave my mind. My stomach turned at even the thought of it. When the person who’s support to look after you, protect you, pamper you and love you turns out to be a sex-starved monster, what can one do?
The government is taking steps to create awareness in school-going kids by giving them sex education and knowledge about how to identify any untoward behaviour. As parents it is our job also to make ourselves approachable to our kids and making them confide in us. It is only when they feel we’ll understand and empathize with them that such crimes will be easily detected and the culprits will be caught hold of and punished.
It’s very heartening to see everyone speak up openly and uninhibitedly about the many rampant issues faced by women. These concerns have been around for some time and it’s about time we not only create awareness regarding them but also do whatever wecan in our capacity to put a check on them.
I'm Nu from Randomness had tagged me for the entry to this blog post at Indusladies on occasion of Women's Day. I've chosen to write on Relationships.
I’d like to define relationships as those complex alliances wherein all the associated parties are related, with or without their consent and will. They’re supposed to bring about a positive change in our lives and help us grow and prosper. But what happens when one such relationship becomes the saddest truth of your life, a weight that you don’t want to carry?
Let me tell you a small story about a girl, say S. S belonged to a conservative joint family. Her family consisted of her Granny, many uncles and aunts and a whole lot of cousins. She however was the only child of her parents. Affluence was not something that her family had been able to enjoy. Her Grandpa had passed away when her father was young, and Granny had brought up all her kids all by herself. Her father was the youngest of all brothers.
She was the apple of her parents’ eye. While living in a joint family it was not possible for them to cater to all her wishes, but they did all they could for her. She was a vivacious, chirpy and pampered little girl with many dreams. When she stepped into teenage, as inadvertently happens with most of us, she fell in love. The boy had all she could ask for; good looks, good family and a good job. But there was a catch. The guy was from another caste and hence an alliance was complicated. She endlessly tried to convince her family, but it all went into vain. Even her parents refused to take her side. Sadly, she couldn’t bring herself to rebel against her own family. The end result: she was married to another guy much against her wish and packed away to a faraway city.
Let’s see how life changed for her post-marriage. This girl who used to lighten up the mood in any room with her mere presence had become unnaturally quiet and gloomy after marriage. Her resentment for her family was understandable, but unfortunately her husband too never tried to make her feel loved and cared for. She tried to accept her husband, his family, his life, but it was easier said than done. There was a void in her life that refused to get filled up. While she was battling with all these problems, she had no idea that there was a storm just waiting to hit her.
To cut a long story short, she met someone. Let’s call this someone R. R came into her life like a ray of light. He became the friend she needed, the companion she desired. He listened to her talk about her life, her likes and dislikes, her music, her poetry, everything that no one had ever tried to know. He made her laugh again, made her want to live again, made her love again. Yes! She fell in love with him. Without her knowledge, but slowly and very surely he became a part of her life. I know this is not ideally what a woman is expected to do, but she did. Wasn’t it obvious?
You’d ask me what happened next, right? What followed was not something anyone had anticipated. She came out in the open about her relationship with him since she didn’t want to cheat her husband behind his back. The relationship with R was sacred to her and she wanted it to command all the respect it deserved.
What I wanted to portray with this story was that everyone in this world should be given the right and freedom to make their own choices. We cannot choose our family, our relatives, but we can choose our friends and our life partners. These decisions should be taken with the approval of all people involved or we’d witness another story like that of S. In this case S had the courage to stand up for her love and her desired life, but what about those not-so-courageous ones who feel trapped but still are a part of such a bad marriage?
I agree my choice of topic is different from the usual ones, but I strongly feel that we need to come out of the closet and accept things for what they are. Living in ignorance and fear of truth can only result in us living unhappily.
My Name Is Khan had put forward a thought about the world consisting of only two types of people: good and bad. Conceptually, and broadly speaking, it might be true, but we’ll all unanimously agree that there are elements of good and bad in all of us. When we are judging a person we do not know anything about, it takes only but one good or bad episode for us to be or not to be impressed by him.
I’m going to write about something on the same lines. It’s not something that’s never happened with anyone, but I’m going to talk about it in the relevance of the essentially good and bad people we come across in our everyday lives, when an assumingly ‘sober’ person displays his dark side and a visibly ‘mawali’ person turns out as the good one.
While travelling long distances in Mumbai me and A prefer to take the ‘conventional’ mode of transport, the local train. The travelling time is reduced to half since traffic is not a problem and baby A too does not seem to mind the ride. In fact he enjoys all the activity around, he even smiles at the hawkers and eunuchs sometimes, much to my annoyance. Anyway, coming back to our topic..
Since we were travelling together and it was a Saturday, A suggested that I enter into the general compartment with him, and I obliged. As luck would have it, the train only got more and more crowded with every passing station. A squeezed his way through the crowd, but petrified with the thought of me brushing against those men stinking of God-knows-what-all; I cornered myself near the door.
An elderly man was standing next to me and was supposedly carrying something in his hands. Gingerly he moved step by step near me and his hand touched me suggestively. I ignored it a couple of times assuming it to be a genuine mistake. However, not the one to give up on it, he was persistent. I decided to take him to task and reprimanded him while all the other stunned men stared at us incredulously. He got the message alright! All this while A didn’t have the slightest idea of what happened.
While coming back home the same situation stared at me in the face and A promised that this time round he wouldn’t leave my side even for a second. What followed, ironically, was something I hadn’t expected. A guy who looked like a typical ‘tapori’ saw me struggling for some space to stand, and very courteously indeed, left his place and offered it to me. The smile on my face that time was honest and genuinely thankful.
Eve-teasing is a crime that probably every girl has to bear with, but few have the courage to stand up to it or raise their voice against it. We choose to keep quiet in fear of embarrassment in front of others or scared of what else might follow. This in turn only encourages these perverts to take us for granted and continue their sleazy acts. I’ve always chosen not to take it lying down and would persuade every girl to think and act similarly.
These two episodes forced me to think about how deceptive appearances can be. We classify a person as good or bad based on what we’ve seen or heard about him, but it does not comprise his whole personality. Therefore, I beg to differ from Karan Johar and Shahrukh Khan on this idea. Only good and only bad people can exist only in a perfect world, and ours is what imperfection stands for.
Last week we shifted our house. Before shifting there are some minor rituals to be performed in the new house. After completing them, as I was waiting for the sweeper to come in and clean up the apartment our new neighbor barged into our house with full authority to , in her own words, ‘check on the new people coming in’.
She had a whole questionnaire prepared for me. Where did we live before this? Who all are there in our family? Am I a working woman or a house-wife? How old is my son? What does my husband do? Where is his office? And on and on and on…
Within a matter of a few minutes she managed to get all my basic details, which would’ve taken longer to summarize had I been filling up the application form for a passport. She even suggested a new maid to look after my son.
What did strike as something peculiar to me was that she assumed that we had a Marathi lineage. May be my fluent Marathi fueled that thought. She went ahead and told me that most people in our apartment are ‘apli manasa’, as in Marathi people. I had to politely correct her that we belonged to a Marwari family, after which she again assumed (!!!!) that we had some jewellery shop or something!
The lady tested my patience no end, but I managed to keep my cool. I can vouch that she looked a bit disappointed that I was not one amongst them. Within moments her language and tone changed from ‘we’ to ‘you people’. It feels very sad that we call ourselves a secular country and even then stress on the ‘caste’ part so much.
We don’t mind when we visit foreign countries and are called as Indians, but when we’re in India we’re not Indians. Here we are identified with our caste or religion. We see colonies and borders everywhere. We see people supporting only people from their own caste on various occasions.
How right is this? Isn’t it time we think beyond these petty things and look at the larger picture, our country?India’s been already broken down into many parts, are we waiting for another disaster to open our eyes?
