One fine day you wake up. Go to school/college/work and call up your friends in the evening to hang out at a common joint. You have a good time and you go back home. That is pretty much the regular for most of us in metropolitan cities. You don't mind the glares that passersby throw on you when you do some shenanigans in the middle of the street, you put up with the almost-life-ending pushes in railway trains & obviously go on with the pathetic administration of your city. Not exactly bravado exemplified.
For once you do lose your cool, when a power-drunk goon shows his sick intentions bit too publicly and makes a point to get a woman just because she's with a man, near a place which isn't quite the desired location for a woman to be at. You don't retort, you're good to go. But if you stand your ground, be ready to face some consequences. Death included. Keenan Santos died, with his gut in his friend's hand, and Reuben Fernandes passed away from excessive bleeding. There have been many such massacres in small towns & cut-off villages, but this is Mumbai. Has to be a reference point! Not many same-strata citizens (read middle class) bat an eyelid.
Middle class parents do not sympathize with the victims, they say, "They shouldn't have reacted. And it wasn't their business being at a place where a 'potential threat' is always present." They want their children to be 'restrained' and not reactive. After all, they ARE their sugar-coated offsprings who should never get a spine. I've heard of "eve-teasing" in Bandra, claimed to be "The Queen of the suburbs". Has the fear of the coward attacker made the supposedly vigorously changing working class a self-doubting reclusive section of the society?
A guy with a gun shoots an aspiring model in a crowded nightclub ten years back, and we get a uprising & a movie about it. And a decade hence, we get a more brutal display of the same force by the same class. Is this what we're turning into? Our mentality needs some reality check, and a very quick one.
A candle won't be enough for a strong fire, a flaming torch is what we really need.
For once you do lose your cool, when a power-drunk goon shows his sick intentions bit too publicly and makes a point to get a woman just because she's with a man, near a place which isn't quite the desired location for a woman to be at. You don't retort, you're good to go. But if you stand your ground, be ready to face some consequences. Death included. Keenan Santos died, with his gut in his friend's hand, and Reuben Fernandes passed away from excessive bleeding. There have been many such massacres in small towns & cut-off villages, but this is Mumbai. Has to be a reference point! Not many same-strata citizens (read middle class) bat an eyelid.
Middle class parents do not sympathize with the victims, they say, "They shouldn't have reacted. And it wasn't their business being at a place where a 'potential threat' is always present." They want their children to be 'restrained' and not reactive. After all, they ARE their sugar-coated offsprings who should never get a spine. I've heard of "eve-teasing" in Bandra, claimed to be "The Queen of the suburbs". Has the fear of the coward attacker made the supposedly vigorously changing working class a self-doubting reclusive section of the society?
A guy with a gun shoots an aspiring model in a crowded nightclub ten years back, and we get a uprising & a movie about it. And a decade hence, we get a more brutal display of the same force by the same class. Is this what we're turning into? Our mentality needs some reality check, and a very quick one.
A candle won't be enough for a strong fire, a flaming torch is what we really need.
