'Zindagi Gulzar Hai'

There comes a time when you realize that you have surrendered a part of your heart to a book, film, television series or a professor because they leave you moved. The writer, the artist becomes a presence in your mind separate from your experience of their work.

With each redefining moment of watching Kashav's story I feel a complicated mixture of love and alarm at its intensity. I sometimes cannot believe this story has actually been written.

Sultana apa, you have my heart. Don't let me down; I won't be able to bear it.

[No spoilers, please.]

can we be counter-imaginative?

It was half past eight in the evening. I was cycling back from university to my hostel. (The road approaching my hostel is hardly a road; it has bumps the size of small hillocks. I usually stand up and ride this rough stretch.) I was emerging from an unlit, dark 400 metre stretch of this road when a group of four men suddenly jumped in front of my cycle, shouted "Ha!" and ran away, laughing. 

I stopped in my tracks and tried to understand what had just happened. Was this an issue of safety, human dignity, violence against women? Why did they do this? And suddenly, a thought entered my head: what made them behave specifically the way they did? This wasn't a spontaneous outburst; it was a planned, unwelcome flash mob. Even if it took them a couple of minutes, they had obviously devised their scheme carefully. It had been executed with perfection. In addition to this, it takes a fair amount of controlled recklessness to jump in front of a moving vehicle in the dark. It was imaginative.

Which brings me back to the idea of using imagination to devise strategies which can counter, or attempt to counter sexual violence. This is, of course, applicable only in situations where the survivors of sexual violence wish to put themselves out there, once again, without any guarantees of safety or success. Apart from the survivor's personal choices, it also depends on the kind of sexual violence we are trying to devise strategies for. It may seem exceedingly difficult, for instance, to come up with a strategy to counter rape as it is happening. But can we come up with a way to respond to being ogled?

There is some work being done around this idea by Blank Noise. 

The question of context is never far behind when thinking of issues of sexual violence or really, any social issue. There are no universal values, and there can definitely be no "10 Ways To..." counter being forcibly objectified. That said, we definitely can benefit from imagining, visualising, discussing and hopefully experimenting with strategies to counter this kind of daily violence against women, within our specific contexts.