I feel I am a very priviliged person. Born to Hindu parents in a country where majority is Hindu. Born to brahmin parents where the society is castiest and brahmins are considered the upper-caste. Born to educated parents in a country where being literate itself is an achievement and formal education still unreachable to many. Born as a son of government employee at a time when government still had some socialistic views and hence took good care of their employees and my education was taken care of.
With all that, I have one of the major priviliges something that close to 50% of our country’s population doesnt have. I was born as a boy. As you might have observed, all these priviliges were bestowed upon me even before I could stand on my own feet or before even earning a bead of sweat on my forehead. I was born into these priviliges just by chance. I could easily have been born in war-torn Libya or Iraq. As easily I could have been in one of the dalits family having to run from their homes thanks to the outrage by upper-caste men. Or could have been born to a Muslim family suffering the riots of Gujarat in 2002.
Today I mention this privilige of being a boy to share my experience of the evening. In a rare moment, me along with my professor and couple of his other research students decided to go out for the evening snacks. As we were walking towards the junction which was around 500m away, we saw a large crowd at a distance. This crowd had gathered for the results of a local gram panchayat election as just behind our college was the counting booth and people supporting various parties had gathered to get the results. As we walked, my prof noticed couple of girls who were his students returning back hesitant to pass through the crowd. Realizing why they were returning, my prof asked them to join us as we would also anyways be passing the crowd.
This was something that kind of struck me as it has never been in my life that I felt scared to pass through the crowd. Esecially this is an area just beside our college, something which we regularly pass through. And yet these students feared just passing the crowd which had peacefully gathered on both the sides of the street. I just snickered at them telling them that why they should fear passing through as someone who are about to become an engineer. They just kept quiet.
After reaching the junction and crossing the signal, my prof asked these students who were laughing amongst themselves casually what made them laugh. The girls innocently mentioned that at the other end of the signal, there was a boy who had been following them since afternoon. They did not know him at all but he was following them for close to 3 hours since afternoon when they had caught a bus to college from Majestic(the main bus terminus). My prof was shocked that the girls had not mentioned this to him earlier and he asked me to come along with him and we confronted the boy. It was evident that this boy was following the girls. My prof threatened the boy of consequences if dares to follow them again and he asked me to take a photo of the boy from my mobile. Just as I was about to do it, the boy got scared and ran away.
The girls were relived. But it was a strange experience to me. Something thanks to my priviliges will never have to go through myself. I am sure this experience will leave a mark on those girls too. May be add to their fear or hopefully remove some fear and encourage them itself to confront.
Born in a patriachal society has given me lots of privilege, but today’s incident reminded me that my priviliges which have been bestowed on my just by chance are also part of oppression on the someone else. The only way forward for the society is to remove this oppression and for that a major role would be of those priviliged to give up their priviliges, not as charity but because they never earned these priviliges.
