Thursday, March 09, 2006

Liberated Women?

Sometimes while you surf the net, you come across a new piece of information, a site that tells you all you ever wanted to know about something, a blog that can express all you felt at some point, better than you ever can. Like this one:
Annie speaks.

Reading this one gave me the shivers, it took me back in time to the place where I was twelve or thirteen, walking across the row of shops that I had always walked across. Buying my school supplies from the same shop that I had bought from for years. Passing the same group of "loafers" I had just noticed laughing and teasing girls passing by only a few weeks back. I really didn't know much about eve teasing then, and when I felt my butt being grabbed, just for a split second I turned around, shocked and numbed. It was a strange feeling when there was nobody there. It almost, made me wonder if I had imagined it.

Sad? disgusting? sameful? I still feel like puking every time the memory comes back to me. Well read Annie's blog. It tells my story better. And probably yours too.

Blank Noise Project. Please speak up.

4 comments:

Rizado said...

i know exactly what you're saying. this one time i even caught the guy by the collar and slapped him, but bizarrely still went home and bawled cuz i felt so sick. the violation is too deep. anyway, nice blog :)

abeer said...

I think that you women should retaliate whenever you can. Agreed that its never easy to do so, but I think public sympathy will be on your side when they see a woman fighting back. And thats no small thing to have, especially in a city like Mumbai, where no one interferes if the goings-on don't bother them personally.
And the part in Annie's post, where she says,"While walking, don't think" deserves to be underlined and written in bold for you. WAKE UP!

Priyanka Nayar said...

@ Rizado: Thanks. I think each of us can so relate to these incidents. Sorry about it all the same.

@ Abeer: Yess! Have certainly conciously tried to cut down on my day-dreaming whilst walking.

Anonymous said...

Feeling horrible!! Everyone goes thru this... at the tender age of 13-14. I didnt even know why that man did what he did. It happened again in a local train when i was with my father. Again I didnt know what it was. I knew it was something terrible and I was hoping it was an accident. Whatever it was, I vowed never again to get into a general compartment.

It continued to happen in buses, railway stations - so frequently that I accepted it as a part of life.

Then I started having different experiences..... guys protecting me from other guys in crowded intercollege festivals; a stranger offering me the window seat just to save me from male bodies "accidently" brushing against me in a crowded BEST bus; another stranger offering me his hand on the eastern express highway to help me cross a ditch on that horrible 26th July night.........

BUT, I never could and never can trust these people...... I always thought they had ulterior motives. I kept thinking so till they had done whatever good they could - for a stranger like me - and had walked away before I could thank them. I wish someone could teach me how to trust males........