I am a girl; a woman now. Born and brought up in India, I have been taught to believe since childhood that it is better to be safe than sorry. If you are brave, you may have to pay the price for it. (just like the protagonists, who pay the price for being brave in the movie Pink).Somehow the society teaches and reinforces that it is better to be a coward than to be brave, if you are a girl.
I’m sure that any girl in our great cultured country would have had her share of travelling in crowded buses and lewd comments, a stranger who will choose to bump into you even when there is a wide enough road for him to walk; weird men who brush past you intentionally just to make that one split second contact with your body even as you cross the road, the odd boob grab or butt slap on isolated roads by strangers or even worse by known people. And what have we been taught is the best way to deal with such situations?
AVOID. Avoid getting into such situations because there is pretty much nothing that you can do if you get into a mess like this except curse your fate and wonder why you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A few years ago this artsy movie released and since it was a bit hatke from the mainstream, most of the friends excused themselves one by one till it was only me and my girlfriend who were left . We decided to catch the movie after work. It was a long movie (hindi movie) and we loved it. But it was only after the movie got over and we stepped out of the cinema hall, we realised that it was almost midnight. The city roads were deserted and not even lit in some areas.
The city roads which are so crowded during day time wore a menacing and sinister look at that time of the night. With Soumya Vishwanathan and Jigisha Ghosh cases at the back of my mind, I drove back home at super speed with my foot firm on the accelerator. Not once did I brake. I relaxed only after reaching the apartment gate and thanked the Lord that we made it home safely.
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Is this movie going to change the misogynistic mindset of our society? Is it going to change anything at all? I don’t think so. Scarlett Keeling was 15 when she was murdered on a Goan beach in 2008. After an eight year trial, the accused have been pronounced not guilty. The moot point everyone wants to know – What was she doing at 3 am all drunk in the shack that night? She asked for it, didn’t she? But did she deserve a death so brutal and undignified because she was drunk and did not have her guardians with her?
Pink or Scarlett | its only black for girls in India
Everybody knows and agrees that our society has different standards for boys and girls in pretty much everything. So it is okay for boys to be drunk and out of their homes for fun but for girls – it’s a big no no. Ask any Indian girl and she will tell you that it was a potentially risky situation Scarlett was putting herself into. But Scarlett was a foreigner and had no way of knowing the great Indian culture.
Our society is so evolved that it can judge women and how they deserve to be treated on the basis of what they wear, if they are smoking or drinking, or if they are friendly or laughing loudly. But that still doesn’t explain rapes of minors – little girls and women old enough to be grandmas. It is basically a patriarchal mindset, which is not likely to go away now or any time soon.
All that the movie Pink does is shine a light on the sordid hypocrisy in our society and does it quite successfully. Hats off to the two guys – Shoojit Sirkar and Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, who produced and directed the movie respectively, for doing that.
