July 2003: My first day of
college at Delhi University. The first day I sat in a private bus. The first
day I faced blatant molestation. The first day I encountered real fear.
I sat in the private bus going
towards Badarpur border; several passengers boarded the bus, which was
scheduled to start in a few minutes. A man sitting in front of me turned around
in his seat, and continued to stare at me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat
and looked away. The man on the seat next to me stared at my ankles. I wore jeans
that left my ankle exposed to such salacious scrutiny.
I looked back in the front, and
the man continued to stare. He took out his tongue and licked his lips. I
mustered all the courage I could in my 17-year-old self, and shouted “Bhaiyya,
aage dekhiye.” Brother, look in the front.
The man smirked, yet thankfully turned around. I bowed my head, praying to
become invisible as the whole bus stared at me.
August 2008: I wake up from deep
slumber on my window seat in a flight from Delhi to Guangzhou. I feel something
near my back. As I move to figure out what it is, the man next to me jumps, and
moves his hand. Turns out the foreign object I felt near my back, on the very
small portion of skin that becomes exposed when you wear jeans and a tee-shirt
and sit on a chair, yes that little sliver of skin, was the hand of this man
who sat next to me. I was rendered speechless. I couldn’t believe that the man
had touched me while I was sleeping. I didn’t confront him for I did not want
to be in the same cylindrical airtight tube for five hours with a man who had
felt comfortable enough to slip his hand on to my back, post an argument. I
quietly retreated to the back of the empty plane, and wrote a furious article
about how violated and angry I felt. The minute I got off the plane I called my
friends back home and told them this sordid tale.
Why am I telling you this? For I
have a feeling that you may not like what I am about to write next. And I need
to establish my ability to empathize before I commence.
I am writing this because I think
I owe it to everyone to put it out there. The recent CNN iReport by a
University of Chicago student about her nightmarish stay in India became one of
the most read iReports on CNN (it presently has 1,154,294 views). It
highlighted once again how India continues to be the epitome of hell for women.
Of course this struck a chord with many of us. Myself included. I am an Indian
woman. I have been molested often number of times to know what it feels like to
be violated. I have had long
passionate discussions with friends, and written scathing articles about the
sexist, patriarchal, and repressed ways of the Indian society that promote this
behavior of men, leaving women as a prey to their advances.
So no wonder when this
undergraduate American girl wrote her story, the world was furious, India was
furious, and yes, I was furious for the pain this girl had suffered. The fear
that she had encountered could be felt by every Indian woman who might have
ever ventured out on a dark street alone at night or driven home from work
after dinner. So appalled was I,
that I wanted to read more about this woman who had suffered. I read whatever
article I could find, saw whatever news item I could lay my hands on. Until I
stumbled upon her YouTube channel. She had many video logs about her stay in India, and of
course intrigued as I was, I started to devour them one after another.
In one particular portion of her iReport
on CNN she writes “Do I tell them about
our first night in the city of Pune, when we danced in the Ganesha festival,
and leave it at that? Or do I go on and tell them how the festival actually
stopped when the American women started dancing, so that we looked around to
see a circle of men filming our every move?”
So of course when I saw a video named “First Day in Pune (or How to get kidnapped by a festival)”
I thought it would shed more light about the horrifying nightmare she experienced.
Now I wish I had written this earlier, because the said videos have been taken
down, but in this specific video she talked about how she and her friends had
danced in Pune on Ganesh Chathurthi and how everyone had stared at her and that
had made her feel like a celebrity.
Nowhere in the video does she
talk about feeling violated or uncomfortable at the stares or filming she
alleged in her blog as unnerving. On the contrary she was excited, and smiling in
the video. I am not sure that is how one expresses feelings of fear or anger. I
know what it is like to be stared at, and as most women would agree with me, my
reaction would be of anger or fear, not the ego boost that comes from feeling
like a celebrity. These may sound like big words coming from someone who
doesn’t have any evidence. Particularly since Michaela Cross’s YouTube channel
doesn’t have these videos anymore (which makes me even more suspicious). But
what possible reason could I have for bringing this out in the open but If not
to tell the world what I did see, and what I did think after seeing the videos.
I am not entirely sure or confident that I want to conjecture any duplicitous motivations
on the part of RoseChasm, but yes I am very curious as to the discrepancy
between the two accounts. One that was reported right after the alleged event
(Ganesh Chathurthi) and one that came to us in the form of the CNN iReport almost
a year later.
I did see other videos by her as
well. Some of them have her talking about the sari she is wearing, and how she
intends to use it as a tablecloth, the abysmal Internet service in India, and
other jovial, rhetorical encounters of her stay in India. None of those videos
present a picture of a woman living in fear, a woman who is being sexually
assaulted or harassed on a daily basis
I am not ordained to justify that
a persons experience is less or more painful than what it should be. For how
can we ever compare pain experienced by two different people? Neither am I insinuating
that India is a safe haven for women, and sexual harassment is not rampant.
However, when there are some inconsistencies between what you see and infer and
what is told to you, my integrity shouts at me to reconcile that information.
So this is my attempt at reconciliation. All I want to know is, are we getting
ahead of ourselves in this hoopla of declarations, chastising Indias abysmal
safety record (which is valid) based on an account that to me at this moment,
seems shaky at best?
Perhaps she did not want to share
this trauma at the time, perhaps the videos don’t broach this issue for another
reason altogether. Before we jump to any conclusions or make allegations, I
want to know why those videos were removed.
This is a question you might not
want to hear, but this is an answer I
need.
Here is the link to the Youtube
video which I had posted on my Facebook Timeline on August 25, which has now
for reasons unbeknownst to me, been removed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPu2GmF4Y44
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