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Boys look up to the men around them for their role models, and if the men harass women, abuse them, as a matter of course, what are the boys learning?!
I was cat-called by boys going to school as if grown up men weren’t enough.
I moved to Deoghar, a small town in Jharkhand, a few months ago. The speciality of Deoghar is, everyone stares. The phrase ‘not all men’ doesn’t seem to work here at all! As a woman, after a while, you get used to the staring and the comments, but Deoghar is like a nightmare.
Morning, afternoon, evening, night — time never matters here. Forget about crop tops and spaghetti sleeves, even wearing a salwar gets you stares. And it’s not like a subtle kind of look. They are riding pillion on a bike and turning their heads a full 180 degrees like an owl to stare at me going my own way wearing simple jeans and a T-shirt. They are gathered early in the morning at tea stalls and conspicuously nudging their friends who then turn to stare at me dressed in the most loose fitting pyjama set and returning from night duty.
Everything was ignorable until one such morning, a yellow school bus from one of the prominent English medium schools passed by and a bunch of teenagers (yes, freaking little kids) stuck their head out of the window and passed a comment. It left me stunned.
These kids grow up seeing the older men and think it’s ‘okay’ to comment on any woman on the road. What is the meaning of education in English medium schools with a global outlook if that’s what they do with all the knowledge? Honestly I fear for where the world is going. The moment teenagers start cat-calling women 6-7-10 years older than them, we know it’s where the problem starts.
A request to all parents of the boys out there. Teach your child what’s wrong and right from a very young age. Only being a good role-model isn’t enough. Only sending them to good schools isn’t enough. The world they see is bad and they need to be made to realise that what they see is wrong – very wrong.
Image source: a still from the Marathi film Dahavi
Writer by night and nurse by day I'm quiet by nature, shy they say I wear my scrubs as if they were a cape But once I start speaking, there's no escape. #nurse # read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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