Down in the pits

After I am done with writing this post, I will delete some of the earlier posts because this blog isnt a personal diary. If it had been, I wouldn't have put it up for public display. But, I will still go on recording my experiences as life goes to keep that little hope of self-development alive.

The last few weeks have been tumultous, both for my inner self and for the collectivity that I am a part of. I have been overcome by an utter sense of helplessness so often, for many different reasons. I had the same feeling when in our quest for justice for a friend who had been wronged by this scoundrel, a rogue of a guy, we faced a dead-end, where every finger was pointing at us, blaming us for everything that had happened, mocking us for the inconclusiveness of our efforts. She had had to bear with cheesy, vile comments on public forums by this person and finally, when she lost it and complained, everyone blamed us for having shown much haste. Someone had the nerve to say that it was she, herself whose reputation suffered the most.

How, in the world was her reputation marred, and why wasn't the same said for the guy, how was she more responsible for the final showdown, than that guy, if atall she was responsible--- Because it's not considered shameful for a guy to be going around defiling someone's name and honor; because we should ACCEPT it if guys write cheap love-notes on the net, as it is somehow an expression of their "manliness" (watever!). We dont feel like blaming the guy, so it is never HIS reputation that suffers; we dont feel like chastising the guy, so HE is able to walk away from the whole incident; we feel irked if a girl decides to react and get back to challenge the ACCEPTED, so we play her down to make a lesson out of her. and all this while, we continue to make the girl feel that things need to be altered on her side to avoid such incidents in the future. I thought it was very insensitive of a friend of mine to say that my friend needed to be a little more careful in the way she carried herself about, and then it wasnt just him, a very respected teacher came up with the same solution. Afterall, it runs deep in the society; from the president who gives statements to the international media implying that Pakistani women can cook up rape cases to get a free pass to greener pastures abroad, to the enthusiastic net-surfer (aka COWARD) who marvels in his new found anonymity that the computer screens affords him to play around with girls and the ordinary man walking on the street who considers it his right to gawk at every passing woman-from the burqa-clad to the hip teen, as long as it is a woman, it's worth it.

Just recently, an incident of a much greater personal nature brought the memories back. There couldn't be an open discussion of the issue because at the end of the day, it would have been the reputation of someone very close to me that would have been hurt. We couldn't talk about this to parents (there's a certain sense of calm when u deposit all ur worries and fears in their laps-even at the age of 19-luv u), because parents being parents, they know they cant change the world so it better be us, who should change to try from our side to avoid such incidents...(that meant losing orkut and the blog-eeks). We couldn't take this up to the higher-ups because of the lack of substantive proof, due to fake IDs and anonymous profiles, for an issue of such a serious nature. In all, we could only sulk and beat our heads off ranting about the injustice of it all as it happened and manage a relieved smile when it was decided on the other side that it should end-i.e. no control over its beginnings and its end. The same damn story repeating itself over and over again. He got away this time, he'll get away again and the harrassment will continue.

The maulvis may keep sermonizing about gender relations, the "liberals" may ramble on about sexual harrassment-it will always be Adam who decides if Eve forced him into eating the forbidden fruit, to set the course of history.