After the BBC documentary India’s Daughter aired on 4th March, everywhere everyone seems to be talking about just that. It’s been 3 years since the incident happened in Delhi, or more like two years since it happened in December 2012 and the documentary has refreshed everyone’s memories.

I remember those days in 2013 when for months every media channel and every medium of communication was filled with talk of the case. And this week seems like it all over again. Not as much or as strong maybe yet it’s there again.

{Just in case this link stops working, here’s another – https://vimeo.com/121374149}

The Govt. is fighting to shut everyone up, to ban the documentary and everyone else is raising their voices in protest. Some protesting against the Govt., asking for freedom of speech, stating democracy, some panning the documentary for showing India in bad light, some spewing anger at all that was said in the documentary,…

There are a lot of voices, views and opinions out there. It was all of this that brought the documentary to my attention and I went and watched it. I wanted to know what all the hullabaloo was all about.

The one hour long documentary by Leslee Udwin is nothing extraordinary in every way. The script and story isn’t new, the way the show is pieced together isn’t great and every quip and dialogue has been said enough times before this.

As a woman who was born and has lived all her life in India, I found nothing in the documentary. My blood didn’t boil, anger didn’t manifest, nothing happened. No, that’s not true, something did happen, I did laugh, the laugh of resignation, the laugh of sadness, the laugh of knowing that next week there will be a new sensation, a new talking point.

A lot of men in the video said the girl had it coming, a educated lawyer talked about women as flowers, flowers that can adorn a head or be thrown in the gutter. Another talked about burning his daughter alive if she stepped off the line. To them women were just objects, livestock, cattle. To them women are not equal in India.

And we will never be equal. At least not until women rise up and fight for their own. Until mothers, sisters and wives of rapists ask for justice, for their men to lynched so other men may learn a lesson and other women may become safe.

The plight of women in India or for that matter the world will not change until we women change. Until we stop toeing the line, following the rules. We need to get up and fight, fight the system, fight culture, fight society, fight rules, fight.

We need to start wearing what we want to, going out when we want to, doing what we want to. All of this without being scared of repercussions. The repercussions will come, men will push back, but we can have the world only if we push, only if we fight.

Fight not to be better or bigger but fight to be equal!

****There was one thing that stood out for me in the documentary and that was the parents. Jyoti Singh’s parents are just awesome, it takes a lot of courage to bring up your daughter the way they did, it also takes a lot of inner strength to watch your daughter die and still talk about it. F**K You Arnab for your nonsensical ideas of hiding rape behind a veil of Nirbhaya. Her name was Jyoti Singh and her name must be taken (shouted out actually) so we may remember her both for her courage and for how she was raped.****

I had come across this documentary some time back and I remember it making me sit up. I did the usual things we do when we find things we like online; I shared it on various networks and forgot about it soon after. Then while generally surfing yesterday I found it again, only this time I found it on the makers page.

Amrit Vatsa has an interesting blog that caught my eye. He tell stories but not just in words, he tell video stories of people in all of three minutes, well mostly 3 minutes. 🙂 He has quite a collection of 3 minute stories and you should definitely check them out. But this post isn’t about that.

This post is about a story he told a while back, a story about how rape is not always about sex. Shreena and Ria have a powerful message to spread, and it is one I really like as it is about equality in it’s true sense. Every time women seem to fight for equality, we are trying to get what men already have, or do what men are already allowed.

As an idea that has disturbed me for a long time. I don’t want to constantly strive to be a man or even better than a man. I just want to be. I want to do what I want to do; not because I have to prove a point but because it make me happy. I don’t want to be a tom-boy coz I’m I am boyish. I don’t want to ride bikes because men do it, or travel alone because men can do it. I want to do all I do because I simply want to. This applies to even such mundane things as cooking and cleaning!

It’s a slightly convoluted idea but there in for me lies equality. As a child my parents never told me I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. I was allowed to do everything my brother did and more but it wasn’t as competition of girl vs boy. There were things I was told that I was not allowed but never because I was a girl. Well, so I remember it, or maybe it was just me fighting to be me and not be labeled a girl.

So why am I sharing this video, well, because I want to push Shreena’s and Ria’s idea, I want equality for boys and girls, men and women. I’d like a world where we can just be who we are without having to fit into molds, or live up to norms of how we should be. I want to remove the definitions of man and woman and what each is allowed and not allowed. I want to see men cry openly without shame and women scratch their crotch in public without getting scorned. 😀

If the above video does not show up for you, you can click and see it on Amrit Vatsa’s Vimeo channel.

Shreena Thakore, Ria Vaidya, and Rishabh Singh run the campaign No Country For Women with the intention “to change the problematic attitude of a country toward half of its population”. They are fighting for gender equality and the removal of gender-based policing, violence and discrimination. Their work involves a lot of workshops across schools and colleges, distribution of written and audio-visual material online, and implementing effective long-term solutions. Check out their website if you would like to invite them to your school or college, have a discussion or just donate towards their idea.

What kind of a world do you want? What is your definition of equality? What did you think of the video?