Once again we made the headlines. Yeah…India has been ranked as the most dangerous country for women in a recently conducted survey by international standards from Thomas Reuters Foundation. Our incredible nation has been ranked as the most dangerous nation for sexual violence against women for rape, assault, sexual slavery, harassment, trafficking, acid attacks, female genital mutilation, forced labour… Good lord, the list goes on…as the news spread, some has even questioned the authority and authenticity of the standards of the survey, knowingly or unknowingly ignoring the breakdown of moral standards that are happening in our nation, India.
Truly after 70 years of freedom, after all these wonderful years celebrating our nations vibrant and vast heritage, it’s time we found out what went wrong with us when it comes to women. India as a society, though not the first time, has failed its women. And trust me I’m not talking about ‘men’ alone. A nation or a society consists of both the sexes and both are responsible for its rise and fall. Back to the point, India a nation that depicts, women as a goddess and conqueror of evil has failed its women. What an irony!!! Why??? How did this happen??? How come a nation could fail its own legacies and heritage??? Because with all its wild vast wonderful myths and stories about women as goddesses and mothers, we were not respecting women, we were actually misleading our women. Most of us who promoted these wonderful stories of women did it not because we either loved or respected women…we did it as an atonement for what we did and what we didn’t to our own women. Even in our myths, we see the pattern of diluting facts when it comes to the harassment of women. We made supernatural excuses and explanations for not telling the truth about our women’s condition. Was that our own self-righteousness or hypocrisy that held us back from telling the truth??? Whatever it was, the same prevented us from admitting the first step of our failures. Missing the true reasons we went far… We even tried to scale what women want using a man’s brain and got lost. Losing to the wonders of the creator in making men and women different in such a way that one needs the other for perfection, we started to believe that women are always inferior to men and so must be treated. And so can anyone blame us if we don’t want to give equal rights to an inferior being???
And so we made the stupidest of all the chauvinists in the world just like some women who always portrait them as ‘victims’ these days. And as always deep down we knew it was not true.
Was that our guilt or our failures towards women as a society that prompted us to depict them as a goddess with supernatural powers who can overpower evil??? For deep inside we knew that we were all half-hearted, half willed creatures who while looking for God lost the nerve, for the devil did show up. The evil inside us was so untamed and uncontrollable and it freaked us to an extent so that we started to instil images in our minds that might help us to tame what we really have in our hearts. Facts or fiction, we thought that our fears and faith in evil ignoring the power of truth (something we still cherish unknowingly), could make us do just to our women and weak ones. But in the long run, neither fear nor faith gave the result. We started to fail not just our women but our children as well.
In fact, the faith in our fears actually did more harm than good to us as a society. Celebrating the death (which can either be a murder or a suicide) of a sexually harassed victim is one of the examples. Anyone with common sense knows that the death of the victim in a sexually harassed case would do good only to the assaulter. It’s good only for the violators. Knowing that willingly we promoted the idea of killing oneself rather than fighting against the injustice that was done to them. Willingly we taught that to our children making the victim’s pain double the amount which subsequently instilled the idea of having a girl child as a misfortune in our society. For in this era or in another era, we knew harassment against women was powerful men’s birthright and justice will never be done. So we taught them to quit rather than to fight. Something our female victims do even in this modern era when it comes to reporting sexual harassment or violence. They chose to quit rather than to fight and we as a society promoted it and thanked them for not disturbing our sleep in our fallen nature. Can someone blame the less fortunate people in our society for killing their unborn or newly born female child fearing all the horrible misfortunes their child could bring to them as a family??? We allowed it until it became a taboo.
This very lack of justice made us more unfortunate to an extent at which we all started to admit that deep down we too have the same criminal psychopath like nature and since no one could redeem us, the only way to deal with it was to believe that violence against women and children was something NATURAL in a society. Centuries later we still have the same easiness and cruelty of being silent and passive when it comes to women’s issue.
The saga of injustice didn’t stop there. It went on and on destroying the very foundation of our moral principles replacing boyishness and manliness with arrogance and disobedience. Just like we replaced being women or girl with helplessness and death like silence. It did more harm to our men by wounding our women. For, the enemy always knew where to strike and where it hurts. With the inability to accept the sufferings we inflicted on ourselves, we replaced the true sense of honour once again with shameless self-righteousness. Which in turn blinded our eyes, closed our ears and froze our hearts to that extend so that at some point, we all started to treat ourselves not as humans of intrinsic values but as things that can be used for pleasure. With our failing faith, how can someone judge us if we start using our own body for pleasure??? We gave our consent to the idea of using human bodies like using a thing. A good amount of hashtags and posts were shared on social media sites against sexual violence but none of them, not even our intellectuals pointed out the fact that pornography, soft or not promote the very same idea that drives the mindset of a criminal who is about to use another human body (dead or alive) with or without consent for their own pleasures. Not many will talk about it. Why would they??? Since the human body has no intrinsic value on its own??? Why would we stop dancing to the music of our DNAs???
Truly the future doesn’t look good. It looks like the play is about to go on and on until we discover a 1000 other ways to step on the weak that may be a woman or a child. For we still have the same stubbornness towards changes and dislike to anyone who speaks the truth about our grand old culture. It’s time we need to admit that if something has pulled down a nation like India into a level of war-torn countries when it comes to women’s safety, it’s our precious grand old culture, that we have been defending so passionately. It’s time we need to identify the factual and fictional elements from our culture. The payment for ignoring the truth about our own misleadingly glorified past has been paid by our own men, women and children. Our women suffered unjustly, our children got murdered in their wombs and our men lost their honour, all in the name of colour, caste and faith.
It’s time we put an end to it. It’s time we need to be intellectual than emotional about our culture and our ways. It’s time we taught ourselves and our children that being a man and being a woman is something that has to be respected and cherished no matter what colour we have and wherever we come from. It’s high time we admitted that men who govern his passion are the master of the world and who runs by it are nothing more than a slave. It’s time to accept that the desire for love is not a weakness but settling for anything less than love is unfair. Let’s redefine that manliness lies in taking responsibilities and enduring hardships for a noble cause rather than stepping on weak. Let’s talk more about being a noble soul and that is all about treating one’s neighbour just as oneself. And as last chance, accept the fact that human body no matter even if it looks deformed and different, it is of intrinsic value (for theists it’s the abode of almighty), not a plaything.
Let us be vigilant about the good, the bad and the ugly. Burn the trees that have failed its fruits, for no good tree will give a bad fruit and no bad tree a good one. It’s time we stopped doing nothing in the name of our past…….it’s time we built a reformed culture for a better future.
