I wrote this one for the magazine.

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 Beware men. The next time you step forward to protect your women friends from getting sexually molested, be ready to be stabbed repeatedly, all under full public eye. And women, you were never safe to begin with. Just that the few good men ready to lose a few teeth and bones to save you may well lose their lives next time. That’s what happened with Keenan Santos and Reuben Fernandez and which could happen to others too. While the gathered crowd stared in sick pleasure, they were stabbed with choppers after being beaten with sticks by 20 men, all for trying to protect their friends from getting ‘eve-teased’.

Eve-teased. Such a charming word carrying with it images of bold dandy roadside Romeos loudly complimenting every girl passing them. No? No. What happens is that a creepy guy in the bus pinches you and all that you can do is glare at him with teary eyes and not complain. Why’d you complain too? You were just ‘eve-teased’. Chalta hain. And even if someone came to your defense, the irony’d be that it’d be your protector who’d get lynched. And justly so. Eves’re supposed to be pinched by every Adam in the world. No one should and can change that. And that’s what Reuben and Keenan learnt that night. The crowd watching them already knew that lesson. Why else’d they not come forward to help the young men while their friends kept on screaming for help. You can blame the ‘Bystander Effect’ for that. But we all know the truth.

The fact that it happened in ‘The Most Safest Indian City For Women’, Bombay (excuze moi, M. Thackeray) must be a pointer to the state of the world we live in. And no Delhiwalo, you may not rejoice that at last, some dirt got on the Mumbaikars too. We all know how safe you all’re from each other. If it happened in some remote outskirts of the big city, then it could’ve been blamed on the remoteness of the place, the very immorality and imprudence of boys and girls roaming around in secluded places. Then the whole of the city in particular and the nation in general could’ve gasped in collective self righteous horror.

Only this time those immoral, Americanised youngsters were out for a simple dinner at the restaurant they’ve always frequented, in a place very public. At the end of the night, two of those youngsters ended up dead, three sexually molested (oh be done with ‘Eve-teasing’ for Eve’s sake) and two others injured.

We live in a world with no heroes. No one to guard our backs. The sky isn’t going to throw up a caped vigilante to save us anytime soon. When you don’t care whether the other guy’s girlfriend gets molested or the guy gets killed, then you can scream all that you want the time you get screwed, no one is going to give you a second look. What happened to the friends that night shows our cities and their people at their worst. And the possibility of the worst becoming the norm is positively scaring.

Yes, as the title says, the magazine's launched! And I'm a bit late in announcing this here. But whatever. Compiling that one issue broke my back into a million pieces. But at the end of the day, it was more than worth the pain. :)



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