Someone once said freedom is not a gift of heaven, you have to fight for it every day. I didn’t quite realise its meaning until one day the society I live in came up with an awful method of controlling the lives of unmarried people.
I am talking about my housing in Powai, Mumbai. Clearly, the management is completely intolerant towards unmarried people (as if they themselves were born married). They made all the tenants sign an agreement that after 10pm, guests are not allowed in a flat where single men and women are staying. While the official document states that this rule applies to all tenants, only unmarried ones are harassed by security guards and forced to comply.
This ignites me and every unmarried person living in our society with so much anger. Why is this rule only for us? Is being unmarried a crime? Is this even legal? What kind of moral policing is that? Who gave them the authority to tell us how we want to live our lives?
We all are social beings and we all have friends and relatives in the city whom we want to spend time with. They are our family when we are staying away from home. We all have cousins who are now closer to us than ever and we want them by our side. We have friends from our native place who once in a while want to meet us because they were so tired of missing us all the time. And yes we have partners with whom we are thinking of spending the rest of our lives with! So what’s wrong in all the above?
If someone wants to meet us, why should we roam on the streets at 2am in the night? Is it just because some empty-headed person barred their entry in our homes? The married couples or the owners can literally do anything in their flats like invite friends and relatives, organise parties, and celebrate birthdays with loud noises, even drink in the open parking. And nobody ever stops them.
We pay our rent on time. We don’t trouble our neighbours. We don’t create a nuisance in the society. Then why this rule for us?
We want answers to all these questions. But the sad part is nobody wants to invite trouble by raising a voice and fight them in the open. Because we all know what that would lead to. We would be thrown out of our houses or their sickening guards would start troubling us even more (just so you know, the tenants are not even allowed to walk in the society’s complex or play badminton after 11pm which is really troubling). Or more in the words of our society chairman, false charges about our character could be imposed on us!
Hence through this article, I want to unite all those who have faced/are facing this problem. It is high time that we stand together against these hypocrites and get our freedom back because freedom is indeed our birthright and lets’ show them that nobody can take that away from us!