Finding our voice again
It has been exactly 3 months since my last post.
Work’s been busy. And you could say that the weekends have been disappearing quickly, as they are wont to.
Yet, it would be unfair to blame this entirely on the paucity of time. I also had a bout of what is fashionably called the writer’s block. On multiple occasions, I tried to consciously block the noise in my head, take to the keyboard and be ready to type.
But I had nothing to say.
As Bradley Cooper elaborated in his latest flick — A Star is Born (great movie, by the way), a performer can have a great voice or be proficient at their art, but it is all pretty useless if they have nothing to say.
Well, writers are performers too. And the paper’s their stage.
While I was fighting this lack of things to say, however, the better half of a billion strong India, was busy finding a renewed voice. Tanushree Dutta, a starlet shunned into oblivion a few years ago, had thrown a burning matchstick and started a raging forest fire.
Hordes of women who had so much of angst and hurt pent up over years and decades, had finally found a voice in a movement unlike any seen before. Many swan-like feathers have been ruffled and, most importantly, the grave issue of sexual harassment has found a place in the Indian public discourse.
But what next? It is being argued that though the perpetrators have been called out, there is an evident dearth of action to bring them to justice. This lack of structure and process has also resulted in factions labeling a slew of complaints as vague and mere attempts to milk the attention. Nothing of this sort has helped the movement, as is evidenced by the decline in the graph above.
Over the years, these women had a lot to say. But did not have a voice. Now that they have found a voice, it will be useful if the right things are said — those which lead the outrage towards an outcome.
