We are in dire need of dialogue with some men out there. Yes, NOT ALL MEN, but some, the insecure ones (Precisely the ones who made #NotAllMen a trend). The ones who think if they don’t masturbate in presence of a woman watching, we wouldn’t know what’s in there. The ones who think every time a woman is chosen for a position over them, she must have ‘paid’ for it. The ones who cannot tolerate women walking on the street as normal human beings and hence, do all sorts of things to make them uncomfortable and conscious of their gender while they are on the street.
Very recently, I witnessed an incident which kept me upset for quite some time. It was a hot April evening, working out had made it more so for me. I had been working on my thighs and so when I stepped out of the gym, all my attention was secured by the strategy of keeping my grip on the ground intact. So I didn’t realize when a hand came out of an auto-rickshaw and shoved a half-eaten ice-cream cone in my face. I was in state of utter shock and couldn’t either scream or note the number of the auto-rickshaw. For my own stupid reasons, I have always been scared of an approaching bus or a truck, but I never imagined that I will ever have to be scared of an approach auto-rickshaw.The question this incident raises is that, “what all things do we have to be scared and alert of?”
When such incidents happen to women, people go on saying, “They were asking for it”, but I was so not asking for that ice-cream. The point is, even if you think that the person in front of you is in need of something, you should, out of basic courtesy, make sure they actually want it (and it is not simply your head making things up), before shoving it into their faces. You don’t want people to be afraid of your noble intentions, after all. Consent is the way out of this world where a part of its inhabitants want the other part to be scared of something as blissful as an ice-cream. Now fellow beings, did we not promise ourselves to make this world a better place than this?