Blank Noise

A few years ago, when I was in College, I distinctly remember a conversation I had with this friend who had just come back from a trip to Europe. I will never forget how she said that everywhere she went she was treated and looked upon as an individual, and not an object. I am not sure I understood it very well back then, but today I know what she means.

The easiest explanation for this is: I often go out for coffee with a colleague I am good friends with. And he is undoubtedly one of the few men in my life who does not think that any woman around, no matter what the venue or the occasion, deserves a thorough checking out. Right from his body language to his words to his behavior, everything is geared towards the idea that before you are either a man or a woman, you are an individual. Probably that has something to do with his tremendously good manners that come to the surface no matter what the occasion or who the person. Or perhaps because he has spent several years abroad. Or may be because he is extremely well-educated. Or perhaps it’s a combination of all these three together, or perhaps none of them. May be it’s just him.

I came across Blank Noise in the India Today dated June 19, and then again on July 1 on the news channel Times Now. It’s a project started by Jasmeen Patheja, a Bangalorean. The project protests against eve teasing, because whether done openly or beneath the veneer of sophistication, it IS an offence.

On the television show, what one of the Blank Noise volunteers said made perfect sense. That here in India no one, not even the women themselves, take eve-teasing as a serious offence. It’s something that all of us deal with right from childhood and hence we consider it normal. And we react, if at all we do, only when the offence is beyond endurance levels. Until that time, we ourselves don’t react because we are so used to being part of a strange society where no matter what the crime is against the woman, the first question that’s always asked is, “What was she wearing?” The implication thus being that the man has no reason to control his actions. He really need not because it's not his fault. He is doing whatever he is doing, or has done whatever he has done...be it mentally undressing a woman, or checking her assets, or committing something far more heinous...simply because of the woman's clothes, because through her clothes she asked for it. In other words, he was pushed into doing whatever he did because of clothes that another individual wore, and not because his mind told him to do so.

Kind of blurs the meaning of the word ‘victim’ doesn’t it?