Who the hell is Eve?
Mumbai Mirror carried this report on a 10-year-old child getting severely hurt when her skirt got caught in the wheel of a car that had 22-year-olds in it, passing lewd comments at her older sister and friend. The car dragged this girl some way and then backed up on her leg and zoomed off. The girl, among many things, suffers two fractured vertibrae.
And MM called it a case of "eve-teasing".
Now, I am not too much of a stickler for PC-ness. I don't think the blind should be called visually impaired or retarded be called differently abled. Such crock makes me sick. (I should know;I have a delightful 24-year-old sister in law who is severely retarded and the family much prefers we accept that and use the specific term for it.)
But 'eve teasing' annoys me to no bloody end. Firstly, the word teasing. It gets me going like nothing else does. Teasing - implying a little fun, some harmlessness, a little masti. None of that is present in a case of molestation/harassment when a dirty lech grabs your breast or some sick frustrated creature rubs his crotch against your butt or hand in a crowded place. There is no fun, no harmlessness - no teasing there. What there is is dirty, naked perversity, humiliation and sheer rage.
My next bone of contention is 'eve'. I have NO explanations for it. I just don't bloody understand it. What eve? Who eve? What bloody nonsense!
The way I see it, it's plain harassment of women and not eve-teasing or whatever euphemism MCPs would like to call it.
And as for 10-year-old Asma, I'll be praying for recovery. And I hope they get the bloody bastards who did this to her. I hope they get them real good.
*****
It would be so nice to have a good news page in a newspaper. We wake up every day to things like those poor, poor boys in an Iraq "orphanage" or some geeky techies being beaten up in Bangalore for being techies (I found that quite funny, actually) or that scary thing called global warming. So much unfairness, greed, pain, misery. It's enough to send you into gloom even if things are going 'swimmingly well' in your own life.
I think every newspaper should have at least one space dedicated to good news. Now on, though I am not a newspaper, I'm going to carry at least one good piece of news -mine own or about the world. (I am going to sound like a version of the Bible :)!!)
Good News: One Sunni man drove 30 minutes through the dangerous streets of Baghdad to watch the football game with his Shiite friends whom he had not seen in months.
This is what people are about, no? Warmth, friendship, tears and football, yeah!
Find it here.
Labels: fuzzy warm feeling, women
2 Comments:
If I am not mistaken the term 'eve teasing' is used only in India. Everywhere else it is called sexual harrassment.
I too was enraged that a little girl should be harmed the way she was. But the truth is that you cannot change the mentality fo these people ... which is why I have always said that projects like Jasmeen Patheja's Blank Noise can achieve nothing in a country where the sexual frustration and perversion we witness is such a deep rooted problem.
You're right, swb, it's wholly indian. Which is why it's all the more annoying because it just shows what the indian attitude to such things is if we are calling harassment "teasing" .
As for blank noise, my opinion is still out on its usefulness.
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