Metros like Mumbai and Bangalore are considered to be ‘safe cities’ for women but in reality it has become more unsafe and questionable in the last few years. India has undergone a painful transition where violence and crime against women has risen tremendously and that puts me in sheer embarrassment when I write on this subject.
It is actually True- a Demon can be lurking anywhere in the world. With the growing numbers of crime against women such as eve-teasing, sexual assaults, kidnapping and domestic violence have left the women feeling insecure and disturbed. Also, the tragic fact remains that 80% of women choose to remain silent to express their pain.
Females- (young girls, working women or middle aged ladies) are still misbehaved with, at public places –be it a crowded road, a fancy club or even in colleges and other educational institutions.
We had a little encounter the other day and I had never ever witnessed something like that (so close) in my life and I was shocked to the bits.
It was late in the evening around 9.30pm, when both I and my better half were driving from our relatives place near Oberoi Mall, Mumbai. At a little distance, we saw a bike parked at the side pavement, where a guy was beating a young girl mercilessly in the middle of the road. Before, we could reach; the guy had thrashed and hit the girl, a few times, really badly.
We stopped our car immediately and my husband went to rescue the girl. He slapped the guy hard and threatened him while I ran towards the girl to check on her. She seemed horrified and dumbstruck with what had happened to her just a couple of minutes back. She told me, that she was hit badly in her stomach and was crying aloud.
In no time, a crowd gathered and few men even spanked that guy and alarmed him of calling the police and then the following consequences. However, that jerk kept shouting and pleading, that the girl was his girlfriend. The scene was straight out of the crime patrol episode.
Without wasting further time, we decided to drop the girl at her residence who kept crying profusely. Few men from the crowd had let that guy go on his bike as there was no point to hold him back as no one wanted to get into a fiasco with the local police at that hour. One man also scolded the girl and shouted that she should not have sat on that guy’s bike in the first instance.
Both me and my husband were very worried for the girl and while driving back asked what had actually happened with her earlier.
The girl was in her early twenties from a lower middle class family and lived in a small chawl in Vakola near Santacruz. She innocently told us that the guy was her ex-boyfriend who had been troubling her for past few days as she had denied his proposal and broken off with him in the past. She further added that she was waiting at the bus stop after a day’s work to go home when that guy appeared from nowhere and insisted on dropping her home, as they were neighbors too.
She probably agreed to take the lift thinking of getting dropped at the doorstep of her home. But, little did she know, that the guy had something else in mind.
Since the girl was pretty young and naïve, we both tried and explained her of various repercussions of what could have happened, if we wouldn’t have stopped our car to save her. We made her realize that it was imperative that she shares this issue with her parents and lodge a complaint to the local police without delay.
Luckily, that girl reached her home safely that night and I was only thankful to God, who made us her ‘messiah or savior’!
But even though, we had done a good deed that evening, I couldn’t sleep that night and continued to feel the pressure and kept thinking about thousand other women who get verbally or physically abused each day and become victims to even bigger and horrendous problems.
My aim to write this blog is only to voice out my sentiment that we all need to act together and stop crime against women. In reality, it is not the ‘Cities’ which are to be blamed but it is actually the ‘orthodox male dominated traditional mindset’ that needs to evolve!
