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Groped

by Ankita Menon
(Hoshiarpur, India)

Pardon me for I know what I am writing, for neither it is easily digestible nor there's any courage to accept the facts...


A video is going viral today of a mother brutally beaten for revealing to the masses that she was groped under the sun in a huge bazaar in Uttar Pradesh.
As she asserts and questions to those two men how dare they grabbed her, one of the groper responds by kicking her head with a stick and the crowd responds by zooming their cameras even more...
The best shot the crowd took was of the six year old, unable to control her tears, with arms wide open wanting to stick to her mother crying 'mamma! Mamma!' Obviously the crowd's hands were busy making the Oscar movie hence no one came to pick the child. Well understood.

Even more intense seen captured was of the husband looking blank when his wife was hurt by the groper, with her head bleeding as she stood mum... Obviously noone was supposed to come forward to help the couple. Maybe it was just a head injury with all her face bleeding. The little issue as it was, it was supposed to be ignored. Well taken.
'Out of the world' scene was of the poor policemen asking the crowd 'Who were the guys! Who were the guys!', while the mother cries out that she would kill herself if they aren't found out by the police...
Maybe everyone was wearing Kala chashma as it was really sunny out there
and so it got really difficult for the crowd to find out who those guys were till they disappeared from the scene. Innocent crowd. No problem.

I shall come back to the crowd later.
What is this fascination of ours with the things which do not involve someone's consent? What is this part of us which wants us to indulge into making someone uncomfortable?
Pornography specifically glorifies groping and a million people every minute are deriving their sexual pleasures either practically doing it in buses, trains, bazaars, almost everywhere or watching it happening on laptop screens or mobile phones!
What causes what I do not know! But all these things are pretty much linked with one another! If that was consensual we may have a thousand names to name this. But GROPED means without CONSENT. And anything which is done without the consent of the other deserves no place in anyone's life and society. How difficult is it to understand this?!
But what to do. When internet is flooded with such ideas and buses and trains are swarmed by such people, who is going to care anyway.
Strange is our society's response, our helpless Crowd. We have places where When two people want to be with each other will-fully, with all their consent, the mob beats them to death! And we have places where the GROPED is pleading for justice for being touched without any consent, she is being video taped till her child breaks into tears and the mother keeps standing unheard bleeding red...
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