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Journalism of Courage
It was at a public bar on a lovely evening in the fall of 1994 when I uttered the word rape in a sentence where I was highlighting a violation of some people’s rights. Memory has me lost to more details, but I still remember that my then-boyfriend and a friend of his told me in no uncertain terms how disturbed they were that I used the word rape to describe something other than “the unlawful sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against a person’s will or with a person who is below a certain age or incapable of valid consent because of mental illness or deficiency, intoxication, deception or unconsciousness.” I have since memorised the dictionary meaning and tried to make a conscious effort to not use the word rape in vain.
Much has changed since 1994. Thirty years later, I am much more nuanced, blessed with far more sophistry in my command of language. I am nowhere near perfect, but I have greater empathy, patience and humanity. The path to achieving my goal of being a human who is more caring and sensitive is often challenging and many times requires me to unlearn much of what I was taught by peer pressure and education and by societal behaviour and norms. When I look into a mirror, I see a man much older and far more mature than the innocent newbie who left for New York City in the early ’90s, yet in and around Delhi and Mumbai, I still see men behaving today just as they did back then.
An education in the Arts taught me to be sensitive to the world I inhabit. It also gave me exposure to people who dress, walk, talk, think, act and express themselves very differently from the larger segment of society. Growing up gay in India meant that I didn’t have access to others whose journeys I could fashion mine after. It was life in Manhattan, a very global city in the world’s richest nation, with very Christian values and a very macho and masculine approach to life and living, that taught me how to navigate a world that wasn’t always fair and almost never perfectly equitable.
Now back home in India, working on making my restaurants and kitchens a safe haven for all employees, I’m troubled by the many accommodations we need to make for women’s safety and basic comforts. Not because of the financial costs and burdens this adds to the running of a business, but because of the statement this makes about what kind of men we are raising in India. That we have to have company-operated vehicles ferry women back and forth from work and home to ensure their safe passage is an indictment of how shamefully and dangerously uncivilised some Indian men are in the 21st century. This fear for the well-being of my fellow Indian citizens has given me greater appreciation for what a woman must feel about her plight in India, a land some call “the rape capital of the planet”.
I have gleaned from advocates for the safety of women in India and other parts of the world that the ratio of rape in a society is pretty much the same across all nations. Of course, this statistic could have exceptions, as most generalisations do. But what I have found disturbing in the Indian context is the acceptance we have given to the act of rape in our communities. The outrage, the candlelight vigils, the social media buzz, all of it dies, and then once again we are confronted with an abhorrently horrid act that has numerous men watching without any feelings of revulsion. Not only that, some of them will join in and lose their humanity, their decency and responsibility to self and society as they commit horrors that violate, break and destroy an innocent woman.
I have no idea what makes a man rape a woman, but I do know that Mother India is as aghast at her male children as I am and the world at large is. She hangs her head in shame that her sons – who are children of mothers, brothers of sisters, fathers of daughters, and grandparents and uncles of girls – have no understanding that they come from women and are part of the lives of women through blood and friendship, and that it is their duty to ensure all women are forever safe. How any man can remain silent and observe a rape is shocking. That several men would join in a rape, more shocking still. That this happens repeatedly across our nation is a reality that Mother India is having to live with and is being broken by.
How have we become so desensitised? How have we failed as a society? As an Indian man, I am ashamed of my fellow male Indian citizens, but I don’t think they are the only ones to blame. Also guilty are the grandmothers, aunts, mothers, sisters, daughters and girlfriends of my nation who haven’t found a way to teach the men in their lives to yell and scream when they see a rape and stop it from happening. I shudder to think that just as some Indian men have become inured to rape, so have our women. It is this gutturally appalling reality that has me wishing, praying, hoping and looking for miracles that will give the mothers, sisters and daughters of India the ability to educate the men they live and work with, whom they care for and teach and inspire, whom they mentor and get mentored by, and whom they love and confide in.
I don’t use the word rape in vain anymore. Every day, I meet educated men, men in power, men of influence, men who come from affluence, men in uniform, men who are educators, men who are public speakers, men who are celebrities and actors. Sadly, few of them have given me reason to believe that we are having serious conversations amongst ourselves about how to make Mother India a country where a woman doesn’t have to fear being raped as she goes about in public. I’m not sure we can ever rid the world of rapists, but a people who are civilised and of conscience, who claim to be religious and all for equality – at the very least ought not to enable beasts who silently watch the rape of a woman or child, or worse, join in without hesitation.
Bengal gave us the grand poetry of Rabindranath Tagore that showed us how vast and visionary the Indian mind has the capacity to be. Her son, Kazi azrul Islam, wrote poetry that deified women and romanticised them in ways that would make any man see a woman as a human being who deserves our respect, care, admiration, appreciation and protection. It is my hope that their words would trigger our collective humanity and make us a nation that ensures no one is raped. For that day I pray, and into that heaven of freedom, Mother India, I want you, my beloved country, to awake.
