I completed my school with good percentage and got into Delhi university. After getting into UG i started travelling by bus, i was scared with the routes because i never travelled alone not on the bus and not even in the metro. I always liked to dress up, wore big earrings, eyeliner. I always got ready for myself, i didn’t believe that we should get ready to show other, after all, i never had anyone to show so preferred dressing up for myself. But when i use to stand in a bus, those eyes staring at me made me feel like i could hide somewhere and sometimes covering up myself completely so that no one sees that face.
I started dressing up shabbily i don’t know what was happening, but i was facing it for so long, but every time i felt those eyes on me scanning, i felt terrible, terrible about myself, about everything. On streets, in metro and i realised i was not a single girl who was facing this problem, many girls go through what i was going that made me feel like it’s normal if you are a girl you have to face it. I had no solution for getting out of it so i decided to change because you know change starts within you.
I understood it is not because the way i dress or not because the way i look, it is because we let them stare, it is because nobody told them that girls are not commodity to be looked upon, so i started staring back at men exactly the same way they use to and sometimes out of shame they started looking down or elsewhere. Sometimes i asked them is there any problem they are facing or anything they want from me in front of everyone, so that at least some feel guilty about what they are doing, but i really don’t know whom to blame? Their parents, their company, elders, maybe they don’t respect anyone but if we talk about the literate men of our country, the ratio of staring at women if they pass by wearing short clothes would be similar to what of illiterate ones, educating was an idea to be suggested, but even married men do such thing. But what i realized was the men with me( like my male friends) i never saw them doing such things, men were doing but not the one i knew, and the one’s reading i know be it, men or women, you agree with this that your friends don’t do that or you yourself, so, i think a better option is men should educate men if a father tells his son that he should respect the girl he definitely will, or if shows that in his behaviour that’s what the child will learn, so, i think we all before covering ourselves let men tell other men what could be done.