I Can’t Stop Thinking About Her

I can’t stop thinking about her, the twenty three year old girl who was gang raped and brutally injured in a moving bus in Delhi on Sunday night. The newspapers, news websites and Facebook and Twitter make the forgetting harder! A part of me thinks if I close my eyes and ears I can block it out, but I know I’m being silly. All this evil and badness is not going anywhere and I’m stepping right into it the moment I step out of my house everyday. And it’s because of all these barbaric acts of violence I’m forced to think that something is terribly wrong- is our social fabric in shambles? I think all of us need to pause and ask ourselves where we have gone wrong raising our sons.

Rape is a heinous crime, which is not only directed at women, but ultimately affects our entire society at large. Women have traditionally been regarded as nurturers, as caregivers and when a woman is violated, not only her home and family are violated, but so is the entire society.  It is ironic how in India, female deities are worshipped in the form of Durga and Kali and how real women in our society and harassed and tortured by the very men who probably fast for the nine days of Navratri, in honour of the Goddess Shakti.

Every girl growing up in Delhi will be familiar with a “chat” they have with their parents in their teen years; on how to be safe and how not to go to certain places at certain times wearing certain clothes- have we ever had a similar “chat” with our sons and told them how to respect women and not to treat them as just mere objects? Nine times out of ten, I’m sure this doesn’t happen in Indian families, primarily because our clouded mindsets tell us that it’s always the woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong clothes, what was the man supposed to do but to rape her!

It is very easy to blame the Guwahati molestation on the girl saying she was drunk, or the string of Haryana rapes on the fact that the boys there ate far too much chowmein! Times are changing, women are changing and its high time men realized that. Women refuse to stay quiet and bow down any more and it’s high time society comes together to address this serious issue and the government and law makers take drastic steps to ensure women can walk down the streets confidently, irrespective the time of the day or night or the clothes they have on!