The TISS student

The recent crime against a meagre 23 year old student of TISS - Mumbai, has sent not only shock waves through the masses sentiments but also waves of fear through girls and women of the city at large.
Isn't it enough that we as girls/women have a thousand plus things to deal with on a daily basis already? And then comes the news that a girl not much diferent than us was brutally assaulted sexually by friends. Friends who she may not have known very well, but yet friends, who she innocently considered as safe to hang out with.

In a country that largely disregards it's girl child anyway (this is a fact seen even today in the mass of rural lands) and sometimes even in the bigger cities of India, girls have to anyway deal with a sense of fear in whatever they do and whatever they wear and whereever they go. It's very common for even a city girl of today's times to be subjected to lewd stares if she were to dress in what's actually a decent pair of western attire, this is probably the basic mentality inbuilt in the general masses. Forget western attire. Lewd stares in our own traditional wear is also pretty commonplace.

What irks one more is that, we deal with these issues all the time. But we anyway try our best to live a life fully by creating our own world of safety in which we build our friends and special friends and in which we make do with what we have by socialising amongst our chosen peers.

What do you do when the people you consider your own turn around and take you down and take every bit of self respect away from you.

A girl, a young student at TISS, an indian girl brought up in America, faced one of the worst if not the worst crime against her. This incident isn't an isolated case of it's kind. We read stories of this that happen around the country / world alot. However, it's incidents like this that take your heart and close it up in a way that makes you not want to make new friends or meet any new people. I mean, who knows if the next big scammer or pervert could be in the person your being introduced to.

It makes you somewhat paranoid. Paranoid when you do decide to have a night-out with friends. Because, an incident of this kind makes you want to stay alert, more alert than usual, no, you can't let go and have a good time, because you'd rather pay attention to the people or kind of people around you and your drink. It makes you fussy and scared. It makes you wonder secretly through various times of the day what that student at TISS really felt when she woke up the next morning only to figure out that her *friends* , a total of 6 of them, had raped her the night before.

Reading the news on this incident makes you think of the fact that you don't really know who your friends are.
Life's lesson has been to learn with every experience.
What about incidents like this? Does a victim ever heal? Does a victim ever feel safe again?

Life for every one is a book of issues that each is meant to deal with, live with, grow with. Or not, that's a choice.
However, any crime of this kind is downright disgraceful, unspeakable of, scary..and true.
It happened. Period.
But can we as people of the same city do anything to stop it from happening again?
Girls and women face smaller types of these incidents a thousand times through the year. In the local train, the local bus, on a local walk... it's a "push by mistake" if not a stare, it's a lewd comment if not a lewd pass, sometimes it's as bad as something one can't write about.
Respect is so dam hard to find these days isn't it. If only those 6 *friends* could be made to feel what it's really like to be in a girl's shoes.
What made them do it? We wonder. But can we really know?
Do they deserve to be punished? I think, yes. They should be somehow made to feel the exact same thing that they made their victim go through and then they should have the worst kind of punishment thrown at them.
Forgiveness in this case is not an option, they have destroyed a life. This is real. And a hard fact. Whatever the reason behind why they did what they did can never be a justification.
What audacity did these 6 young boys have, we wonder. Most of them came from good homes, good family back grounds. However, in cases of this kind, it's not influenced by where you come from at all. It's a basic feeling of thinking that you can just abuse who you want and get away with it. People in every strata of society do this. People in every strata of society are affected by it.
We read about it. We think about it.
Can we fix it?
How?
How do you fix it when the perpetrators of a crime like this were people you called friends. How do you fix it when the perpetrators are people next to you on a flight? How do you fix it when the perpetrators are sometimes members of your own family?
Can you fix it? Or can you at least try? We all wonder where we could possibly start.
From where or with who do we start?
Chilling fact is this incident and the brutal truth in it. The brutality of having to go on living, wondering...

One of my closest friends in reaction to this incident said to me: "i'd rather have been blown apart in one of the terror attacks in India than have faced a crime like this".

You know what friend?, so would i.