Lessons from Nirbhaya rape-3rd Anniversary of Nirbhaya Case

Today marks three years since the gruesome Delhi gang-rape. While a lot of nonsensical and regressive statements were being made by those in power, the junta took to social media to discuss the shocking incident, what ails women’s safety in India and urgent steps that should be taken to curb crimes against women. Here’s our pick of some of the best advices and the lessons learnt.

Definite punishment 

From death penalty to public castration to pelting with stones until death – there have been many suggestions as to how to punish the rapists. Debates and argument haven’t helped to reach a conclusion about the perfect punishment that will act as a deterrent. However, what has been highlighted and need attention amidst all this is the need for a definite punishment. Granting bail to rapists and letting law take its own sweet time to convict and punish will only encourage the cruel minds to turn their intentions into actions. This was also seen in the latest Uber rape case, where the cab driver threatened the survivor of hurting her with an iron rod citing Nirbhaya’s example. 


Gender sensitization
What breaks a woman’s spirit more than the rape? It is the aftermath of it. The interrogation process that follows is rather humiliating with undertones of blame for the women involved. The need of the hour is to stop putting the blame on the women and posing questions like ‘what she was doing’ or ‘what she was wearing’, instead there needs to be awareness and sensitization programmes to better equip the doctors, nurses, police and lawyers to deal with rape survivors. Along with sex education in schools, young men in schools and colleges should also be educated about gender sensitization. Change in mindset is one of the most important aspects if we want to see a difference. 

Action
The rape cases in the recent past and the public outrage and media coverage that followed has forced the law makers to bring about stringent changes in law and set up fast track courts. However, the numbers of rape and sexual harassment cases haven’t gone down. Reason: While there are laws to protect women and punish the offenders, there is no string and strict implementation. We have been promised the set up of crisis centres, but the lack of funds ails their functionality. We have been promised increased police patrolling on the streets, but these are certainly not enough. The failure of justice and public safety system are hugely responsible for the crimes against women.


Safer transport system
Both the Nirbhaya and Delhi Uber rape incidents point towards the laxity of both the government and police in verifying the drivers of vehicles plying on our roads. Verification of drivers of all public as well as private vehicles should be made mandatory. All buses, trains, cabs should have CCTV cameras installed and GPS system so that they can be tracked. 


Speak up
Speak up against violence, however big or small; irrespective of the perpetrator, one that you know or a stranger. Nirbhaya lost her life but she has left us with this important lesson. And it is only encouraging that the Uber rape survivor too chose to go to the police. The increased awareness of what constitutes rape and the extensive reportage are encouraging women to take a stand and speak up against atrocities. 


Stand up 
When you choose to be a silent onlooker while a crime is taking place, you also become a part of the crime. Nirbhaya and her friend were thrown out of the bus without any clothes on them. They were lying there for help on that cold winter night but no one came forward to help them. It is this ignorance that helps the criminal minds to get their way. A lot of videos have gone viral in the recent past showing how a woman is being harassed on a busy street during the day with no one coming forward to help her. Do we expect crime to stop by merely being a bystander? We need to stand up against violence, be it for yourself, for one of your own or for a stranger.


It is everybody’s battle
It was the public outrage on social media, candle marches around the country, protests by NGOs and political outfits, exhaustive media coverage and follow-ups that put pressure on the lawmakers and the police to nab the culprits in Nirbhaya’s case. The same worked again during the Shakti Mills rape case and the more recent Uber cab rape case. India saw a collective demand for change. Let’s not let this fire burn out. Let’s not forget Nirbhaya as just another rape case. Let’s not only outrage over rape cases that go viral. Let’s collective demand what we deserve, safety for every woman in this country for a collective demand is the only way that change will be created.

A reply to Faisal Qureshi on his comment on India

Beta maine suna hai aap ek Pakistaani actor hain? Agar ye sacch hai to aapko itna to pata hi hoga ki movies mein acting ki jaati hai.

Showing Saif Ali Khan's previous movie clips and comparing it to the role in Phantom. Seriously? And you call yourself mature.

And I heard you talking about Hitting India hard in Cricket. Hmm. You should watch news more often, or is it banned too in PUKEistaan? Oh, I mean Pakistan.

You say that you are neither the ISI or the Army to say anything about terrorists in your country. But then again you are commenting on something which is the work of the Officials. (And then you call Arnab Goswami has lost his mind)

Being an actor you should be aware of the fact that movies are made for entertainment.

Zyada dil pe na lo beta.

And you talk about guts? if India starts to take any action, I'm afraid there won't be any Pakistan left on the World Map.

The movie's story is a fiction. It is a ficticious movie for godsake. Stop obsessing over it. There are so many movies that are made in Pakistan that defame India, but we don't react. Know why? Because we are mature and sensible enough. So shut it.

And don't forget that Pakistan was a part of India. We gave it to you. So don't you dare say anything about India taking your property.

You call Indians the wrong doers? Your country doesn't even allow the basic freedom to its citizens. Half of the sites like YouTube are banned. You ban all the movies. And you call us cowards? IRONY.

Now who's laughing?

I guess INDIA.

P.S. I think you should just stick to movies or TV serials or whatever it is that you do. Don't get involved in all this. It will be better for you.

On Women, Rapes and Medieval India

There’s something very wrong going on with the world we live in. No, I am not talking about the abysmal performance of the Indian cricket team, Sachin not retiring, or even global warming. This is about the increasingly horrid news stories we’ve been hearing these past few days.

There was a trauma center in the Indian capital where four people died in the ICU because its oxygen suply ran out. A politician who killed a cop for trying to stop him from molesting the cop’s daughter. A 14 year-old who raped a 7 year old girl. A man who got sent to jail for raping his own, gasp, daughter. And the latest – a young girl battling for her life after being gangraped in a moving bus, again, in Delhi. An assault so brutal that even doctors treating her are shocked. And these are all stories that get reported; there’s no telling how much more worse stuff is happening in our cities and villages.
Calling the perpetrators of these ghastly crimes as people would be wrong, for they are clearly not human. More like some abomination straight out of a science experiment gone wrong in a Hollywood thriller. Or results of a defect in god’s assembly line that their QA team failed to catch and discard.
Maybe somewhere down the line, the human evolution graph reached a local maxima (which probably coincided with people like Gandhi and Ambedkar), before starting its slow reversal back to prehistoric times, which brings us to today. Of times where a brother cuts off his sister’s head for bringing dishonor to their family. Of times where khap panchayats are going strong and people get killed by their own families for marrying someone the elders don’t approve of. Of people who get away with dastardly crimes because of flaws in our law enforcement, and others who try to pin blame on rape victims, because apparently men turn into animals at the sight of skin. If only their mothers had slapped them when they first made a crass comment about a girl, the criminal might have been nipped in the bud.
It’s all very depressing. There can’t be much hope for a society that can’t respect its women. It all probably starts from the environment at home, where husbands treat their wives like a servant whose only job is to bear boys, cook food, wash clothes, and get beaten up when they are upset. Because the pati is parmeshwar, isn’t he? Their boys grow up seeing this, and for them women are mere objects to be dominated and controlled. They then get into schools and colleges where they start off teasing and making rude jokes about their female classmates. The cycle goes on.
What is the way out? Outraging on Twitter for a week about the Delhi gangrape, and then forgetting all about it? Candle-light vigils outside India Gate? Baying for capital punishment/castration for rapists? Letting the Parliament not function for a few days, which seems to be how our elected representatives get work done?
I don’t know, and I doubt there is a simple answer. We definitely need better law enforcement, a legal process that acts as a deterrent and doesn’t let people get away despite committing heinous crimes, and very importantly, a political establishment that gives the matter its due importance, and doesn’t think that its job is done after a trip to the hospital and announcement of a lakh or so in cash to someone who got pushed off a running train by people trying to rape them.
Above all, we need a change of attitude. Men need to start treating their women with respect. Parents need to teach their boys that girls are their equals, and it is never acceptable to abuse them. Meanwhile, women need to learn some basic kicks and punches, just in case, and always remember that most men will not be able to stand straight after a kick in the nuts.
It might also help if they stopped showing all the regressive nonsense that passes off as real-life-inspired soaps on TV. The other option is that we start aborting the girl child, because clearly we as a society don’t deserve women anymore.

Do We Need Religion?

Should there be religion? If you are a good person, does nothing wrong to your brothers and sisters, loving, respects your elders, smart to do the right thing, generous to feed hungry, loves your parents, and above all praises God's gifts/blessings to mankind.

Wouldn't it be enough to have this ideal? If he/she feeds the poor, forgives enemies, teaches God's word, would you not admire that person? Would you still believe that he/she doesn't deserve to enter the gates of Heaven?

I always pray to God, I love my wife , I do not make enemies, I'm a Hindu but do not believe in the rosary. Did I hurt anyone? I love all God's creation.

Religion should not dictate who enters the Kingdom of God.

An Open Letter to Everyone Afraid of Failure

Dear recent gradu-queer and any queer on the struggle bus,

Welcome to this shit show called adulthood! (If anyone tells you adulthood is not some kind of a shit show, I give you permission to bite them on the nose for lying.)

Perhaps you've recently bid farewell to some university or college, with or without your sanity, self-esteem, and/or personal values. Or, perhaps, you've long ago hung up your cap and gown, or you left "higher" education without the pomp and circumstance. Or, maybe you never fit quite neatly into the post-high school narrative.

Somewhere in any and all of these options, you're supposed to have found a job or degree, and the world makes you feel worthless if you don't have either or both. It's fascinating how in the blink of an eye, people stop asking you what you want to be when you grow up and start asking "What are you doing with your life?" It's terrifying how both of those questions bind your value to dollar signs.

Especially if you don't have a career plan or degree trajectory mapped out, the "What are your plans?" question can sound more like a death knell than a polite inquiry into the state of your life.

That loaded question is kind of a death knell insomuch as it values your contributions to a capitalist infrastructure more than it values your personhood.

I am writing to you today to say your humanity — your individuality, your sense of self-worth, the life experiences that bring you to your next inhale, the way you chew with your mouth open, the way you own your truths (or don't) — matter far more than how conveniently you fit into an economic system that was created to oppress you. So with that statement in mind, I invite you to try failing.

As a Black, first-generation American dyke, I usually roll my eyes at the notion of failure. I pretend that I don't have time for failure (as if failure happens only when I make time for it).

I will actually go out of my way to chastise myself for failing. We queers may resist or fight the possibility of failure, especially if we're additionally marginalized by being a woman, or trans/gender non-conforming, or a person of color, or poor, or undocumented, or disabled, or any combination of the above, or any category I left out.

I believe that we bridle at this possibility of failure because we feel that in the eyes of the world we are meant to be failures. In that respect, we are failures; however I'd like to offer the solace that this failure is exactly what we've used to survive.

In "Capitalism, the Family, and the Anus," Guy Hocquenghem observes, "Capitalism turns its homosexuals into failed normal people, just as it turns its working class into an imitation of the middle class."

We queers grind against the System's norms for sex, sociability, family, power, love, consumption, and reproduction. We're construed as failures, but we're far from broken.

In this "failure" of our being, we create room for other imaginings of our futures and perhaps even as much as an anti-capitalist existence. In "The Queer Art of Failure," J. Halberstam insists, "The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being."

Think of all the ways you — and we, queer people — have continually created, destroyed, and rebuilt ourselves and our communities in the sacred act of honoring our humanity. How can you be anything less than magic?

So sit with me a moment and meditate on these two familiar questions:

• What do you want to be when you "grow up?"
• What are you doing/do you want to do with your life?

Sit with yourself, your love, your horrors, your victories, and your losses. Prioritize the answers to those questions that are not explicitly connected to a degree or career. Ask yourself these questions every day and all the time until you believe your failure. Your failure is usually the most honest parts of yourself.

We don't all have the same "access" to failure, and you would most certainly have to bite me on the nose if I said so. Society gives some bodies more permission to contradict the norm than others. Unfortunately, until you and I, and all marginalized folks destroy Capitalism, we'll probably need jobs and degrees to a certain extent.

Also, I'm no televangelist and meditating on the aforementioned questions with me will not guarantee you a job or degree. However, I want to invite you to push against Society's command to see yourself as worthy only when you serve the economic interests of the State. We're taught that we must run from anything that is seen as "not-success," even if that endeavor actually means standing still in the static of our own boring mediocrity.

Be mindful of the way you may compulsively sell yourself to others, of the embarrassed tone that may creep in your voice when you explain that you don't have a plan yet, of the way you qualify what you're doing with "just this job ..." or "only that class ..."

Please be gentle with yourself always. In spite of what they may say, most humans are still in the process of searching for life. You are a beautiful, perfectly imperfect person whose worth is not monetary. Failure isn't the enemy; fear of failure is.

Love,

A Fellow Failure

P.S. People with jobs, degrees, or both, let's think of other questions to ask people than, "Where do you work?" or "When do/did you go to school?" They're boring questions anyway, OK? OK.

The Burning Question to Arnab Gowswami

Dear Mr Gowswami,

I have been following you since quite a long time now, and have been a great fan of you. I believe you play an important role in our country, a role of highlighting the "BURNING QUESTION".
I also believe that you are a very honest journalist.
But, recently your focus on ‪#‎SheenaMurderPlot‬ has left me disheartened and hopeless. Is this really a burning question ? I wonder.
I am a common citizen of India, and I deal with day to day life like any other ordinary person. In my daily ordeal to reach office and to breathe fresh air I see so many "BURNING QUESTION", which I hope somebody at your position would raise.
I feel irritated when I person behind my car honks constantly at the red light and wants me to jump the signal. I see the traffic cop standing helplessly when someone breaks a signal. I then ask a question :
Is there a solution to our increasingly terrific traffic condition ? I then think of you.
Then I see most of people spitting on road as if it is a gutter, I see people dumping waste on road, with no sense of guilt. I then ask a question :
Is there a forum from where we can address this issue ? I again think of your show.
Then while waiting at a red light, when a little girl bangs on the window of my car and points at her stomach to make me realize, that she is hungry. I have another question :
Why are we still not able to feed every one, and if this problem is not big enough to be discussed at a national platform ? I remember then that you host a show that many in the country watch.
Then I see a small boy serving tea at a shop, who looks at the school going kids, not with any hope of being in that position.
For some reason I ask to myself how can I help him, and what is the correct approach to solving this problem of child labour ? I think you can collect intellectual people to answer this.
There are many other unanswered "BURNING QUESTIONS", which I ask daily to myself.
I think you have a responsibility towards the nation, this has come to you and people like you can actually change the way our country is running. Please think about these questions and let Sheena rest in peace.
I hope I haven't hurt you, but I hope I make you meet yourself.

समपूर्ण वन्दे मातरम् गीत

वन्दे मातरम्
सुजलाम् सुफलम् मलयजशीतलाम्
सस्यश्यामलाम् मातरम्
शुभ्रज्योत्स्नपुलकितयामिनिम्
फुल्लकुसुमितद्रुमदलशोभिनिम्
सुहासिनीम् सुमधुरभाषिणीम्
सुखदाम् वरदाम् मातरम्
कोटिकोटिकण्ठकलकलनिनादकराले
कोटीकोटीभुजैधृतैखरकरवाले
के बले मा तुमि अबले
बहूबलधारिणीम् मतरम्
तुमि विद्या तुमि धर्म तुमि हृदि तुमि मर्म
त्वं हि प्राणाः शरीरे
बाहु ते तुमि मा शक्ति,हृदये तुमि मा भक्ति
तोमाराइ प्रतिमा कडि मंदिरे मंदिरे,मातरम्
त्वं हि दुर्गा दशप्रहरणधारिणी
कमला कमलदलविहारिणी
वाणी विद्यादयिनी
नमामि त्वां नमामि कमलाम् अमलाम्
अतुलाम् सुलजाम्
सुफलाम् मातरम्
श्यामलाम् सरलाम् सुस्मिताम् भुषिताम्
धरणीम् भरणीम् मातरम्

सम्पूर्ण ‘जन-गण-मन’

जन-गण-मन अधिनायक जय हे
भारत भाग्य-विधाता,
पंजाब-सिन्धु-गुजरात-मरठा-
द्राविधू-उत्कल-बन्ग
विन्ध्य-हिमाचल-यमुना-गन्गा
उच्छल-जलधि-तरंग
तव शुभ नामे जागे
तव शुभ आशीष मांगे,
गाहे तव जय-गाथा
जन-गण-मन-मंगलदायक जय हे
भारत-भाग्य-विधता
जय हे, जय हे, जय हे,
जय जय जय जय हे

अहरह तव आह्नान प्रचारित,
शुनि तव उदार वाणी-
हिन्दु-बौद्ध-शिख-जैन-पारसिक-
मुसलमान-खृष्टानि
पूरब-पश्चिम आसे
तव सिहांसनपाशे
प्रेमहार, हय गाथा,
जन-गण-ऐक्य-विधायक जय हे
भारत-भाग्य-विधाता
जय हे, जय हे, जय हे,
जय जय जय जय हे

पतन-अभ्युदय-वन्धुर-पंथा,
युगयुग धावित यात्री,
हे चिर-सारथी,
तव रथ चक्रेमुखरित पथ दिन-रात्रि
दारुण विप्लव-माझे
तव शंखध्वनि बाजे,
सन्कट-दुख-श्राता,
जन-गण-पथ-परिचायक जय हे
भारत-भाग्य-विधाता,
जय हे, जय हे, जय हे,
जय जय जय जय हे

घोर-तिमिर-घन-निविङ-निशीथ
पीङित मुर्च्छित-देशे
जाग्रत दिल तव अविचल मंगल
नत नत-नयने अनिमेष
दुस्वप्ने आतंके
रक्षा करिजे अंके
स्नेहमयी तुमि माता,
जन-गण-दुखत्रायक जय हे
भारत-भाग्य-विधाता,
जय हे, जय हे, जय हे,
जय जय जय जय हे

रात्रि प्रभातिल उदिल रविच्छवि
पूरब-उदय-गिरि-भाले,
साहे विहन्गम, पूएय समीरण
नव-जीवन-रस ढाले,
तव करुणारुण-रागे
निद्रित भारत जागे
तव चरणे नत माथा,
जय जय जय हे, जय राजेश्वर,
भारत-भाग्य-विधाता,
जय हे, जय हे, जय हे,
जय जय जय जय हे