{"id":842,"date":"2012-12-28T19:04:14","date_gmt":"2012-12-28T13:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/?p=842"},"modified":"2014-02-07T11:54:13","modified_gmt":"2014-02-07T06:24:13","slug":"i-cant-get-her-out-of-my-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/i-cant-get-her-out-of-my-head\/","title":{"rendered":"I can’t get her out of my head."},"content":{"rendered":"

We decided to share this extremely heart-felt article written by Indian actor and writer\u00a0Kalki Koechlin\u00a0three days after a 23-year old woman was brutally beaten and repeatedly gang-raped in a bus in New Delhi, the capital of India. While we are all shocked by the incident, we are also suddenly very aware that we need to empower women and give them autonomy over their bodies. Without this women become targets of intimidation and violence.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t get her out of my head. The TV, the internet, and the newspapers are constantly updating her status, and bit by bit releasing more and more details of her violent gang rape so that each day the picture in my head gets a little more gruesome. Maybe it\u2019s because I\u2019m living here in Delhi at the moment, and have myself been experiencing difficulty getting around at night alone, using cabs and autos, feeling that unnerving gaze as I wait on the road or walk to the corner shop, feeling like prey to an animal about to pounce. Maybe it\u2019s because of the increasing injustices against women I\u2019m reading about in the papers, the Guwahati molestation case, the rape and murder of Pallavi Purkhayastha, the girls who got arrested for their facebook status, and now, the Delhi outrage. Maybe it\u2019s because most of the women I know do not depend on their husbands, boyfriends or relatives to chaperone them wherever they go, most of the women I know don\u2019t have their own chauffeur driven cars, and most of the women I know are young, independent and attractive. Maybe it\u2019s because somewhere I know the scary truth that this could have happened to a friend, to a relative or to me. Whatever the reason, since I read about this Sunday\u2019s gang rape horror, I haven\u2019t been able to get her out of my head.
\nWhat do I do? What do any of us do? Apart from be outraged, talk about it, and write about it like I\u2019m doing? What else can I do? I\u2019ve been wracking my brain about what to do. Protesting on the streets, but who are we protesting against? Our government? The government we voted for? Our nation? The \u2018democratic\u2019 nation which each of us is a part of? Don\u2019t get me wrong. We must complain. We must make loud protests, we must put immense pressure on the authorities to take immediate action. Safety is not a priveledge for those who have drivers, those who stay in gated communities, those who don\u2019t venture out at night or don\u2019t take public transport. Safety concerns all of us. It is a basic human right. It has to change now, this minute. The streets should be safer at night, from tonight. If we have enough police to make sure our seatbelts are fastened and we don\u2019t cross red lights during the day, then we have enough police to be patrolling the roads at night. We need the laws to be tightened now, we need police to act faster, and catch the culprits more often so that the law can be taken seriously right now.
\n\"\"<\/a>But there is something else we can do, which can change the nation\u2019s attitude towards women, if each of us takes part in it. Each one of us individually needs to review how we treat each other and respect one another as equal human beings, no matter what our gender.
\nWe must in every cultural, social and political way, prepare the way for the modern Indian woman because she is not the woman that most Indian men grew up with at home. Mothers pamper, mothers cook great food, mothers stay inside. The woman of today\u2019s generation, may not know how to cook, may want to earn her own living and may choose who she wants to marry (if she wants to marry at all).<\/p>\n

Of course I\u2019m generalizing, but you have only to look at how the youth behave in front of their parents and how they behave with their peers to realize that there is a huge generation gap that makes for people to hide their true selves and change frivolously to suit the company in which they find themselves. So until we stop hiding under our social guises, the reform starts at home, with parents treating children equally and accepting their differences, and their choices. It continues to apply to schools and education, boys and girls should be treated equally, should be encouraged to work together on school projects. Boys should not see the girl as a strange, mysterious \u2018other\u2019 species only to be stared at and not talked to, wondered about, shown in small spurts almost teasingly, locked away most of the time and eventually conquered by the patriarchal system of marriage or simply by pure physical dominance. Then, of course, there\u2019s our entertainment, our television and our films, which often portray the ideal woman just like our mothers, perfect cooks and virginal beauties. And for sexual relief we are served the \u201citem\u201d girl, shown as property bought to entertain and satisfy men\u2019s sexual urges. Where are our real, present day women portrayed on screen? Where is the woman who goes to work, shares a place with her boyfriend, takes public transport and goes for a drink or a movie on the weekend? In our on screen fictions the \u2018modern\u2019 girl is rich enough to have a chauffeur driven car and the \u2018conservative\u2019 girl is so poor and pious that she doesn\u2019t need anything but a man as answers to her prayers. Where are our women vegetable vendors, cab drivers, construction workers, writers, artists, students or porn downloading youth? How often are they represented on our screens?<\/p>\n

So yes, we blame the government and the authorities, yes we put pressure so this girl gets some justice, so the arrests are made, so the attackers are severely punished. But what next? How to we prevent this from happening again and again and again? We have a lot of work to do. Countrywide, we have rape cases that are going on, girls as young as our own daughters, women as old as our mothers, raped by somebody\u2019s brothers, fathers and sons. We have an epidemic that has spread across the nation and cannot be controlled by law and order alone, but also by it\u2019s people. By each and every one of us.<\/p>\n

Bosses be sensitive to women employees and their complaints, take action.
\nColleagues stand up for the woman who\u2019s being objectified at work, take action.
\nTeachers, encourage your students to mingle and mature together, take action.
\nMothers and fathers, don\u2019t give special treatment to your sons (or your daughters), take action.
\nWriters and directors, make your stories relevant to today\u2019s men and women, take action.
\nActors, be brave enough to portray characters that speak their own minds and are not necessarily conventional, take action.
\nMedia, don\u2019t let us forget injustices quickly, take action.
\nPoliticians, be quiet and take action.
\nMen, respect women who are not like your mothers, take action.
\nWomen, don\u2019t let slide even the smallest eveteasing, take action.
\nNeighbours, don\u2019t ignore a cry for help, take action.
\nBystanders, for God\u2019s sake, take action.
\nPeople, let\u2019s not live in our bubbles until the injustice affects us directly.
\nTake action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We decided to share this extremely heart-felt article written by Indian actor and writer\u00a0Kalki Koechlin\u00a0three days after a 23-year old woman was brutally beaten and repeatedly gang-raped in a bus in New Delhi, the capital of India. While we are all shocked by the incident, we are also suddenly very aware that we need to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":4097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[270,284,278],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advocacy","category-feminism-vaw-srhr","category-ideologies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/blog-featured-image-logo.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O7nG-dA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=842"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1406,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions\/1406"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}