Striking Back

THIS ARTICLE in the Guardian has some important lessons for us in India as well. Bidisha, a novelist and art critic living in London, decided to confront harassment instead of adopting the usual mealy-mouthed approach.

I went on ahead and then, as in a nightmare, I saw the boys again up ahead, watching me languidly. My muscles filled with adrenaline and, fuelled by decades of rage, I began to pursue the boys like a killer cyborg – or a killer midget cyborg in bottle-end specs. They freaked on instinct and pedalled hard but there I was, powering across the park and shaking my fist, miraculously keeping up.

Fantastic. In related stuff, Blank Noise Project ran an Action Hero campaign some time back, which had numerous women sharing their stories of how they confronted or challenged street sexual harassment. Read the stories here. Link via Aditya, Ammu Joseph and Space Bar.

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About: Anindita Sengupta

Anindita Sengupta is a poet, writer, journalist and consultant. She has been published in The Guardian (UK), The Hindu, Bangalore Mirror and Outlook Traveller Guides. Her first collection of poems, City of Water, was published by Sahitya Akademi in February 2010. Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies and she has performed at several national and international poetry festivals. In 2008, she received the Toto Funds the Arts award for creative writing and in 2010, she was a Charles Wallace fellow at University of Kent in England. In 2012, she received the Muse India Young Writer award for City of Water. She is preoccupied with gender, poetry, art, pop culture, media and new media. She lives in Mumbai.

2 comments

  1. Hi Anu, I read that link through Space Bar’s comment and was disgusted at some of the comments people left on there for Bidisha. Far from lauding her stance, they pulled her down, dismissed her and on occasion, lynched her post apart. I noticed some of the comments were deleted by the post moderator, so I can only imagine how offensive those must’ve been. And then people say there is no need for feminism in the world today! How can there NOT be, when a mentality like that still exists?!!

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