When your 10yrs old you wish to be 20, when you reach your 20’s you wish to remain 20, But biologically that is not possible so you slowly inch your way to the dreaded 30’s and hope that by the time you do attain the glorious number you would have attained a family and immense wealth. In the span of 10yrs you are expected to sort out your life and career and then sit back and enjoy the reaps of your labour for the next 30-40 years that you will be destined to live. So, in all your life only amounts to 10yrs of living.

Needless to say, my 20’s was a disaster. For the first five years I overcame my emotional traumas subjected on me by a dysfunctional family, which saw me spiralling into an unhappy, emotionally abusive relationship and then the remaining five were consumed by an elusive ailment which pretty much destroyed any chances of me having a career. Imagine my joy when I rang in my 30^th birthday with no career or a family. You would assume that I would be depressed and dejected but oddly enough I was very happy.

Though I didn’t have all the things prescribed by life, when I turned 30 the one thing that I did have was clarity. I knew what I wanted and now all I have to do is work towards it. It’s a lot harder achieving your goals if you start later in life but not impossible. So ya 3 cheers for your 30’s.

What is the point of all this blabbering you ask? Well it’s my 2 pieces of knowledge to the world. Your 30’s are not the worst that can happen to you in fact they maybe better than your 20’s, you see once you’re here there’s no where to go but down, so you really don’t have much to loose, you’re already old (if not wise), so when there’s no pressure of living it up, crashing the party or rocking it up, you can see more clearly and objectively and presumably a little boringly that none of that bull crap really matters. No one gained insight by partying hard at least not anyone that I know of. We might just swear that we’re never going to drink so much again, but who are we kidding.

My 20’s were all about experimenting, discovering the unknown, discovering myself, how can this be all there is to me? I never bothered honing any of my skills, or being a team player or for that matter being a part of anything substantial because I was too cool to be bothered about doing anything and then you expect that one day someone will see the genius that you are, because apparently that’s the vibe you give out. Haaaaa…those gorgeous naïve 20’s. I’m not saying its not fun, I had a blast, the turmoil, the heartache, the confusion, the delirium, the nausea, the mindless partying, all the craziness that comes with being a clueless 20yr old, I had fun doing all of it. And I would advise all 20yr olds to try it because until you haven’t been stupid and foolish and downright idiotic, you don’t realise how stupid and foolish and downright idiotic you really are. And until you don’t realise that your stupid and foolish and downright idiotic, you will never really grow and become a better person.

So, what is the moral at the end of all this? Don’t be so hard on yourself, your not supposed to figure out your life in your 20’s, you just have to realise that your no longer a child and grow up.

The Idea of Feminism

On 16^th December 2012, a girl was brutally raped in a moving bus in Delhi. The story caught wild fire and spread throughout the country inciting outrage everywhere. It wasn’t that rapes had never happened before but this time people had had enough. None of the arguments worked anymore people wanted justice and were ready to go to any extent to achieve it. This story isn’t about that incident it’s about what happened afterwards.

The problem for me started first when I saw Anurag Kashyap’s ‘That Day after Everyday’ in Oct of 2013, it was one of the first short films, about eve teasing, which came out by a prominent filmmaker at that time and it went viral. Out of curiosity I managed to take a peek at it, what I saw scared me tremendously. The movie portrayed the issue in such a black and white manner, the solution it put forward was truly scary. Beat the bad guys up and they won’t dare to do the crime again. They even have a dialogue to this effect in the film, and it’s at this point that the ‘Eureka’ moment happens and the female characters go ahead and pursue their goal. The audience had gone mad, people applauded his insightfulness, and chanted death to the abuser (mind its death to only the male abuser).

This chant of death has been ringing in my head for some time now. I feel like where ever I turn there is a woman activist, or a wannabe woman activist standing with a placard saying death to the rapist (rapist now comprises of harasser, teasing or abuse). It’s almost as if this and this alone can make the problem go away forever. And our judiciary did listen and has implemented death as a punishment for rape under extreme circumstances. So why are we still chanting this slogan?

This is when I started pondering about the whole issue. I spent a lot of time reading articles and comments that people had left behind, I even confronted a journalist of a renowned newspaper who had written a piece praising what Anurag had conveyed through his short film. I questioned why she liked the movie so much, the reply I got was far from satisfactory. People really believed that violence would solve everything, not only women but even men. But there is a huge problem with this argument, it’s just a ‘quick fix’ to a long standing problem and I know that can never be the solution. Suppression of women in India has happened along the course of many years, mind-sets have been forged through this time and unless we don’t change this, you can hang and beat as many people as you want, it’s not going to change a thing

On Dec 10^th, 2014, Shenaz Treasurywala, a once upon a time VJ and actor felt it was her duty to reach out to prominent ‘MEN’ in our society and plead with them to bring change. I have to agree her letter was touching in the beginning, if you take out the first para where she addresses the ‘MEN’ who it was meant for. I related to it, I related to the anger she felt, as girls and women most of us experience sexual abuse at a very young age. I still remember the first time someone flashed at me, I was barely 7 or 8yrs, and was so clueless and confused. I didn’t really understand what had just happened but I knew that it was something really bad. And I couldn’t talk about this to anyone either because firstly I wasn’t sure what had happened and secondly I was so scared I’d get punished if my parents found out. So throughout my school life I kept mum about all the abuse I went through. And yes people are very perverted, the first time someone grabbed my ass I was just 11yrs old. So I understand the anger, I understand the frustration, what I find very hard to understand is the solution people are fighting for.

Over these past 3yrs I’ve come across many arguments on this topic, most of them end with cutting of the man’s penis, subjecting him to public humiliation and then hanging him. And people justify this argument with absurd statements like we need to instil fear in them, woman have lived in fear for so long now it’s their turn to be afraid, men are animals, all men are guilty just by default.

This brings me to the reason why I finally decided to speak out. A couple of day’s back I had a bizarre argument with an acquaintance of mine, she and my friend where discussing feminism and the topic got heated very quickly. My friend not being of the female gender was told off, as he had never experienced the things we as female go through. I have heard this argument many a times, and I agree as women we do go through a lot of shit, but just because we do doesn’t mean we know best. Noticing this turn of events I decided to step in and I realised that as a female arguing the fact that it’s not women rights that we need today but equality for all genders people will take my argument more seriously than if the same argument came from the opposite sex. Hence the article.

As I’ve said earlier the topic of Women empowerment has been gnawing away at me for some time now. I stopped being a feminist a long time ago, as the word started being associated with angry women whose goal in life was to hate men. But the more I come to think about it’s not the word that is the problem, it’s what people have made of it that is troubling. Recently Emma Watson gave a speech at the launch of the HeForShe campaign at the UN, I quote ‘Feminism by definition is the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities’, I don’t think anyone could have said it better. So if this is the goal of Feminism then how can we justify beating and hanging men in order to suppress them, how can we demand separate laws for both the sexes, where is the equality in that? I want to take this moment and ask everyone reading this to just think for a second what you are demanding, think about what the consequence of that demand might be. Just think.