Hampi 1

One of the greatest pleasures that the denizens of Karthi indulge in is envisioning our next long trip. This time we were going somewhere special, a place that had always captured my imagination and that caught my family's attention when the movie Anandam came out. I for one, went into full research mode, reading up on all I could about the Vijayanagara empire's history and even buying a coffee table book off Amazon - Hampi - Discover the Splendours of Vijayanagar by Subhadra Sen Gupta and photographs by Clare Arni. 

Six months ago we booked tickets on the Hampi Express from Bengaluru leaving on the Durgashtami day. We got confirmed tickets, so were placid seeing the crowds on the platform as our train chugged in. We managed to find our seats and settled down despite there being several people standing around. Confident that the ticket examiner would chase away those without reservations, we went to sleep. When a call of nature woke me up at 2 pm, I reached for my sandals beneath my berth only to find 4 people lying on their sides on the floor between the lower berths. I hurriedly put on my glasses to see that the main corridor too was similarly filled by crouching and curled up humanity. I summoned all the Spartan spirit in my being that I could and lay back in my berth.

That is when I saw a bridge-like construction between the middle berths above me. An inspection revealed that there was a lady curled up into a question mark in the space left on our 9-year-old's berth and a gentleman was lying down on the opposite berth with his torso there, legs spanning the aisle and feet almost on the lady's face. The last vestiges of my Spartan spirit fled around 4 am and I decided to brave the crush to use the toilet, using the night lights and the edges of the upper bunks to navigate, planting my feet as far apart as possible to inflict least damage on the protruding appendages of the people under me. My brain brought back fleeting images of a Kathakali performance in which Duryodhana tries to navigate the illusory ponds in the Indraprastha palace. 

Fortunately there was no one sleeping IN the toilet. On the way to and from the toilet I heard a lot of vituperative language despite my care. Luckily for me the insults were in provincial Kannada and garbled by sleep, so I didn't understand a word!

All that was forgotten on our ride from Hospet to the ruined city of Hampi that was once the capital of a prosperous empire that ruled all of Southern India in its heyday. The gentle morning sun fell on fallen granite pillars and leaning structures that sometimes had markers, but more often seemed to efface themselves to blend in with their background. As we climbed the Hemakuta hill and then made a winding descent, the Virupaksha temple with the Tungabhadra in the background became visible.

All of the monuments of Hampi are situated South of the Tungabhadra spread out among the hills and valleys. The main things not to miss are the Virupaksha temple and the  Hampi bazaar in front of it that stretches to the foot of the Matanga hill, the Krishna temple, the Vitthala temple, the two "minuscule" monolithic Ganapathis, the Narasimha, the Royal enclosure, Zenana quarters and the Queen's bath. From now on, I will let the pictures speak...

The Sasivekalu (mustard seed) Ganesha

This is his brother, Kadlegalu (bengal gram) Ganesha. Don't you love the ancients' sense of humour?

ONE relief sculpture on the LOWER end of ONE pillar of the mandapa in front of Kadlegalu Ganesha. Minimalism was definitely not a designing trend in Vijayanagara!

The Dasavathara carvings at the entrance to the Krishna temple built by the great Krishna Deva Raya himself. My next ambition is to see the Balagopal icon that graced this temple, which is currently in the Government Museum in Chennai.

Ladies, ladies, green is a very unattractive color for your complexion, dontcha think???

The Narasimha. Now this guy has stared down at us from social studies text books for years on end, hasn't he? Along with the ends of his appendages, the Lakshmi Devi in his lap too has vanished, leaving just part of her arm seen near his left armpit.

No, you can't take out this nifty chariot for a junket around the parikrama path. The iconic stone chariot in the Vitthala temple. 

You feel, "Oh, what a beautiful shrine!" Wait...wait...

Now you see its teeny tiny place in the overall structure! Can you help believing the local legend that Lord Vitthala refused to be stationed in such an ornate structure and instead preferred to go back to his original, simpler home? 

 

A daredevil vyali rider!

A gnarled living tree in the  Vitthala temple courtyard seemingly carved out of and growing out of stone!

Can you imagine the number of chisel taps and the measuring and remeasuring it took to produce these perfect geometrical patterns? Such dedication!

At the end of a day of walking around and the architectural overwhelm, there is no better place to relax than the steps at the side of the Matanga hill looking down the Hampi bazaar street to the gopuram of the Virupaksha temple. 

Next time I will take you to the royal glories of Hampi... Ciao!

Be Ready!

On Sunday, I received a forwarded whatsapp image

With the typical disdain of an Anglophile, I was about to dismiss this image, particularly turned off by the mishmash that is supposed to be English in it. But the dates and the area of influence mentioned niggled me into doing a bit of research on this. You know how I feel about rumor-mongering if you have read this blog post of mine.

What I did find was an article in the Hindu - this is the link to the same  - regarding this Mr. Babu Kalayil and how he had predicted the 2004 earthquake and subsequent tsunami and how the Kerala University has a team of academics doing research with him.  The Hindu is NOT a tabloid rag and that lent the news some credibility.

Then I sat back and thought about one January morning in 2001 when the earth shook in my native town of Kottayam. It was a relatively minor quake and no one in my community was harmed. But I remembered standing still wondering what was happening to my glass of tea that was trying to dance across the top of the TV and my sister coming out of the bathroom clad in a towel shouting that the building is falling. Funny now, but how naive and unprepared were we?

Naturally I was concerned for my loved ones. DH, I know has mock drills for fire escape and such things on a regular basis in his office and knows what to do in emergency situations. But what about the kids, and their school? 

The next thing I did was to call Mr. Babu Kalayil himself to confirm whether the letter was actually written by him or whether somebody had used his name. He confirmed that it was his prediction and that he had informed the Chief Minister of Kerala as well as the meterorology department who haven't heeded his words.

The next thing I did was to meet the Principal of our kids' school and ask him about whether there was any disaster response plan in place. Predictably there was nothing. He had the grace to hear me out and accept a printout of the Himachal Pradesh government's emergency evacuation plan and mock drill directives for educational institutions that I had got off the internet. But he said he would not take any steps based on the information until a government directive is given.

I was disappointed. From what I have seen of governments so far, they are seldom proactive. The safety guidelines, regulations and directives are formulated and put in place always AFTER a cataclysmic event. The Principal told me that he was afraid that he would be the laughing stock of his staff members if he put a disaster management drill in place due to this warning!!! I told him that I had surmounted the same fear in going to meet him. It was only the thought that I wouldn't be able to live with my conscience in the eventuality that something bad happened and I had not done ANYTHING in preparation that helped me overcome the fear of ridicule. I also reminded him of the story of Noah who had been the butt of ridicule before the Deluge, and how none of those who ridiculed him had survived.

Earthquake prediction as a science is still in a very nascent stage. It has a lot of variables and when a guy says he is using extra sensory perception to detect it, the news is very suspect. But it will not hurt to be prepared. If nothing happens, I will be the first to laugh at my fears on New Year's Day, 2018. In the meanwhile, I will be educating my family on earthquake survival and making a plan in case we all are in different places at the time. And we will probably be avoiding the beaches for some time.

Here are a few good resources that could help you prepare: 

1. The US government's site: https://www.ready.gov/earthquakes
2. A video, "When the Earth Shakes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXxPTAhMGLI
3. The Himachal government's pdf on mock drills in schools: http://www.shimlamc.org/file.axd?file=2016%2F1%2FMock+Drills-+Guidance+Note+for+Schools+(29-03).pdf

Forewarned is forearmed and it NEVER hurts to be prepared. Until the 2004 tsunami hit Indian shores, no one knew that such a thing could happen. Until the ground shook beneath me in 2001, I didn't know earthquakes could happen in Kerala.

So, what are you going to do?

My Craft Room: Before and After

Let me dive right in:

Here is what my craft room looked like at the end of March

The builders left the walls painted in wall primer tinted a greenish yellow that showed the cement color behind the walls. It looked much worse than this photo.

One of the first things I did was to shift all my craft things and furniture to the next room. Please be warned, the mess is likely to startle and horrify! :D

Most of my stuff was pretty organized, but mostly in big, labelled totes that looked untidy on the shelves. After the laborious, multiple-coat woodwork painting, I first painted the walls with leftover white paint. And left a taped rectangle on one wall...

Why? I'll show you in a bit! 

So here is my craft room AFTER the painting! 

Tadaaaa!

That's my sewing machine on an old computer table on the left. And can you see why I taped that rectangle off? One coat of special paint transformed it into a blackboard where I can draw or write as the fancy takes me!

Of course I have a white board too...  one can never have too many boards!!!

What's that, you want to see how the cupboards are organized? Are you sure? Ok, here goes... Let me open the cupboard on the left...

I don't know how long this state of affairs is likely to last, viz., the super organized look. But at least I will know where to look to find everything. The rotating spice rack on the middle shelf came with me from Houston and sat gathering dust in my kitchen cupboard for a long time because, let's face it, we Indians do not use dinky amounts of spice in our curries and refilling the tiny plastic bottles was a huge chore. So now they hold my beads! 

And yes, those are recycled and reinforced shoe boxes on the top shelves. In fact the whole row of shelving on the top contain lots of cardboard boxes. I can never bring myself to throw them away. As you can see, they can come in very, very handy!

Here are the drawers beneath:

They hold my cotton yarns and threads of different weights. 

Let's see the cupboard on the right:

Those are my craft books on the top, they are two layers deep. The two shelves below them are full of jewelry findings as well as finished pieces. The right side of the cupboard is devoted to paper goods. Can you see Shamu there, guarding my paper goods? He's been with me from the time we visited Sea World in San Antonio back in 2003. 

One drawer below this cupboard is filled with craft paints and varnishes:

I have left the right drawer empty and the two large bottom drawers have extra boxes, an iron etc.

It's true what the decorators say, "A coat of paint can transform a room". I can feel the change in the energy when I go there to make things now. On my  wish list - material to make some nice curtains and a comfy upholstered chair on which I can put up my feet and crochet to my heart's content. I'll be getting the first soon and sewing up some cafe style curtains. Our downstairs sofa will have to make do for the time being for the second item! 

Lessons from Painting a Room

I've always wanted to paint a room by myself. I used to tell DH that whenever we had a home of our own, I wanted to paint it - at least the inside of the house - I had no plans to dangle precariously over the exteriors of our home. DH waited for 7 years after building Karthi to see if I gathered any momentum in the house-painting direction. Then he gave the job of painting our living quarters downstairs to a set of professional painters who broke all their assurances of being least disruptive and of finishing within the stipulated time. In the end, they made a slapdash job of it in the last areas they painted.

So the chances of getting my craft room upstairs painted properly any time soon diminished. But I had been watching the painters, studying their technique and materials at first hand and gained valuable lessons from them. I slowly began gathering supplies once a few months. This summer vacation, I decided to take the plunge. And here are some lessons that I have learned in the past 3 months that it took me to complete one room!!!

1. It's not as glam as it looks: My room-painting ambitions were fueled by many pretty pictures of people doing this effortlessly... Have you seen the song "Kinavile janaalakal" in the movie Pranchiyettan and the Saint? The character Padmashree dons a pretty bandanna , ...

... wields a wicked paint scraper in her perfectly French manicured fingers, ... 

... and rocks the painting scene in her designer outfit

Meanwhile in reality, it looked like this...

Yup, that's me, up on my stepladder, please feel free to laugh to your heart's content. You will notice that my hair is completely UNDER my bandanna, I am wearing my oldest house clothes with long sleeves and an apron over it (I've had to discard two dresses and aprons because they were not fit to be worn again) and also a towel over my nose to keep the nasty fumes out. 

I am also wearing a pair of my favorite knit cotton gloves to protect my hands. Thank goodness I chose to model my attire on that of the professional painters rather than a movie star!!! :)

And movies get so many things wrong at so many levels... which leads me to my next lesson...

2. Going from dark to light is very, very tough: 

The painters in the movie could never have got the immaculate white wall that they are shown to have got that afternoon if this was the wall that they had to work with. I found that out when I tried to turn my mahogany brown door and frame to white. It took me at least four coats of white enamel paint to get it to look at least a creamy white. And I stopped at that. The beige built-ins took three coats too. Thus the woodwork took a huge chunk of time to complete.

3.  Buy paint from paint stores: When I ran out of my initial supply of white enamel paint, I ran to a small local hardware store and made sure to buy the same brand and type of paint. When I opened it, there was a pool of brownish liquid on the top. I mixed it thoroughly according to instructions and it looked somewhat okay in the can. It was only after I painted that whole top set of cupboard doors twice with the same paint and compared it with the others that I realized that the color was so off.

That was when I checked the date on the paint can and it was more than two years old. The bottom was slightly rusted. Busy paint stores have a lot of sales and seldom have old paint in their stock. But a hardware store might have old stock. I should have been suspicious about the discount the shopkeeper gave me.

I must also say that acrylic emulsion paint doesn't seem to go bad this way. We had some white emulsion paint left over from 2015 and it did very well to give my walls a first coat once I strained off some impurities that had got in the paint bucket. Reusing that paint saved me a lot of money this time over.

I didn't bother to go over the two discolored coats... I decided that I would let it stand as a lesson to myself to be more careful in the future.

4. It doesn't do to hurry or work against a tight deadline: I had planned out the painting meticulously. I would spend an hour or two each day in painting the room with Kunjunni's help. That way we could complete the work within two months' time. But a hectic and physically taxing journey had me bedridden with flu for two weeks in May. I bounded back to my project as soon as I could get up without feeling woozy, but found that I could not stand the fumes for a week longer.

When I got back to work, there was just a week more to the school reopening after which I wouldn't have company to do the work. One day I worked almost 6 hours completing the final coat of the woodwork and a coat of white paint for the walls. Boy, it was hard work and I was completely drained. I missed the next day. On the third day I started painting the walls blue, intending to put in another long day and completing one coat of blue for the whole room that day itself.

Half way through painting the borders of the first wall, I left my painting mug and brush on the top of my step ladder and then shifted the stepladder to a new position! Negligence brought on by my hurry... The mug tipped over and before I knew it, I was splashed with paint from neck down! There were puddles on the floor, the wall was liberally spattered as was a newly white-painted drawer that had been calmly drying itself on the floor for the past two days.

I had to rush in to the attached bathroom and stand under the shower to wash out most of the paint (thank God it was an acrylic emulsion and not enamel paint) and then went to change downstairs leaving blue puddles everywhere.  But there was something else that was happening, which leads to my next lesson:

5. Never use any electronics near the painting area: What I didn't realize when the paint had fallen all over my front and when I stood under the shower was that I HAD MY PHONE IN MY APRON POCKET!!! On the previous days, I had always left it on the table or inside a cupboard while I worked. I was in the shower for almost a minute when I realized that my not-two-month-old phone was in the pocket where the paint had fallen the most and now I was pouring water over it too. The paint entered the head phone jack and screwed up the touch screen and voided my warranty too.

The next day I got it to a service center where the young technician had a good laugh at my expense ("You tried to paint a room by yourself?!") and made no promises to get it working other than to give it a thorough clean and see what happened. Fortunately, my phone was restored to its original health. The only casualty was an additional hybrid sim slot adapter that was damaged beyond repair. 

I did a lot of rethinking after the incident: I stopped work for two days. Then I decided that I would work alone if need be, take my time and finish only small, manageable areas in one day's work. And you can be sure that I left my phone outside the ROOM when I went painting again!!!

6. There will be splashes and blotches, however much you protect against them:

Looking back, I think it would have been wiser to invest in some plastic drop cloths to protect the floors and my craft table instead of using newspapers like I did. But the newspapers did a pretty good job too. 

As for my painting itself, there are lots of instances of blue encroaching on white and vice versa, but I am leaving them alone. I am leaving the pictures up here on a public blog because I want to counteract the ill-effects of people always feeding off the "perfect" pictures that are usually seen on the internet. I am a recovering perfectionist myself and I need to accept that I have done a good enough job as an amateur house painter.

7. Accept your limits and improvise when you can:  I decided early on that I would not be smoothing the walls with putty. I had seen how hard the painters had to work using it and then sanding it down and knew it was beyond my level of expertise. This meant that I had to get a very long-napped roller brush for the walls. (See, I had done my homework, reading up). But even that was not enough as I could see white spots all over even after several passes with the brush. 

So I took  a mug of blue paint and an old small paintbrush to touch up the parts where the roller brush or a regular brush couldn't reach on the pitted surface of the walls. I poked paint into the holes with a dabbing motion and got rid of the most glaring spots this way.

There were several things that I got right too. Learning to clean brushes properly after each day's work and doing it religiously means that if I ever feel like painting again, I have a good set of tools with me. 

Finally the room is clear and I have reorganized my craft supplies. Is my job over? Nope. There are several splotches on the floor and I have some cotton waste, turpentine, a scraper and some sand paper ready in a basket to do some splotch-removal a little at a time. Will I ever paint a room again? Yes, I will, provided I get in a professional to smooth the walls for me. Meanwhile I am more than ready to repaint cabinets or walls whenever the need arises.

I have a new respect for house painters. It's a tough job. The dust, the fumes and the sheer physical strength and endurance required to do the job well need to be experienced to be believed.

So what did my craft room look like before and how does it look now? Hmm... may be that will make another post!!!

Movie Review: Take Off

I don't really like conflict films or war movies - give me a choice and I will always opt for a soppy, syrupy love story any day. I hate watching the aftermath of armed conflicts in terms of loss of limbs and lives. I especially hate watching medical dramas in conflict zones and the endless parade of bloody and maimed bodies.

Then why did I go to watch Take Off? For one, it based on the real story of the rescue of a group of  Malayali nurses stranded in Iraq during the first onslaught of ISIS attacks there. I still remember praying for the safe deliverance of those women. It is also a tribute to the director who gave us that perfect movie called Traffic - Rajesh Pillai. Which is why perhaps I choked up when the titles of his three movies blossomed on the screen before the movie. That I was not the only one so affected was proved by the heartfelt applause in the house-full movie hall.

The movie drew me in with the title scenes themselves - the montage of nurses across history prompted our inquisitive Ani to ask me several questions. And we were thrown directly into the life of Sameera - played by, no, lived by Parvathy Thiruvothu - the woman for whom her career and life are a series of battles in which she must stay strong or risk being swamped. Her struggle to travel to Iraq for the sole sake of a livelihood to support her family is interleaved with glimpses of the tortuous past she has had to lead so far. We become convinced that this is a woman who will not surrender meekly before anything that life throws at her. 

The rest of the story is very well known. The makers of this movie have worked their magic in interweaving enough suspense and unpredictable incidents that leave the audience gasping and worrying and flinching at the right moments. The supporting cast of Fahadh Fasil, Kunchacko Boban and Asif Ali have performed extremely well. I call them the supporting cast because the movie rides on the very capable shoulders of Parvathy - just one shot of Sameera walking away with her pregnant waddle from the Indian Embassy is enough to convey the courage and the tragedy embodied in that one character. I was too emotionally overcome at that moment to give her a standing ovation on the spot.

But we did give a standing ovation at the end of the movie and once again when the montage of videos and pictures of the forty-six nurses who made it back safely to their homes rolled across the screen. I doubt if there was a dry eye in the hall at that moment. I don't know much about the technical aspects of film making to evaluate them one by one. What I do know that this movie is a seamless, world-standard thriller which moved to me to tears at the end of it. 

The movie addresses several issues from international politics and diplomatic relations to the underpaid drudgery of nurses in India, touching on several other on the way including a woman's reproductive rights. I am still dealing with the emotional aftermath of the movie to be able to analyze all those issues. But one thing I can say for sure:

Definite must-watch!

Why I Quit from Whatsapp groups

I have always been wary of social networking platforms. One of my friends had to bug me for six months before I joined Orkut. And when Facebook turned up, I was one of the last among my friends to join. I haven't gone anywhere near Twitter or Instagram, which would make me a dinosaur, I think. It was not until 2014 and my second android phone that I finally gave in to peer pressure to install Whatsapp.

As in any relationship, the honeymoon period was fabulous! There was a lot of catching up to do in the five groups I was added. Friends all over the world, in different time zones, came together in shared waking times and chatted, sharing tidbits from their daily lives. Some chats continued for days. There was a lot of good-natured teasing and reminiscing.

Whatsapp helped a lot with dealing with tough times too. When a dear friend was in trouble, one group chipped in and helped out. It helped in organizing 3 reunions in the past 3 years. Most of the time, the news enthusiasts kept me up-to-date on the latest breaking news. When I needed to find a reliable computer hardware specialist for my sis-in-law in her home town, it was my group I turned to and got prompt results. And when my mother passed, it was easier to just pass the news to one friend in each group who got the news out and had the calls and messages coming in.

It was not all love and hugs either! I got slammed in one group for choosing to be a homemaker. In another I got slammed for being a bad mother (because of a joke in which I said I would slap my kids' hands if they tried to take my food from me - after they got their own portions of course)! There were animated and occasionally acrimonious discussions about faith and sometimes even politics. But I enjoyed those discussions because they were fun and rousing and because it was with my friends that I was sharing my convictions and beliefs.

Then what, you ask, prompted me to quit Whatsapp groups?

The endless stream of forwarded pictures, videos, gifs and jokes that came to stand in for REAL conversation. Since there had been warnings about the evils of Whatsapp media message auto downloading,  I had disabled the feature from the very beginning. And I ignored almost all media messages unless someone added a line to it that it was worth watching for some reason. I thought I was being very clever and selective.

But as time went on, any real chatting in the groups died down. But my phone still vibrated several times during the day and they all seemed to be for what I will call "media vomit".  Soon, I too was downloading all media as soon as they came and being the sociable creature that I am, commenting or reacting to whatever was in them. And I even started forwarding them to other groups as well. I enjoyed the funny, thanked the senders for the instructive, shared the inspirational AND (here is where I went wrong) objected to things that seemed inappropriate to me.

My friends being very kind, did not ask me who the hell I was to judge what was inappropriate or wrong.  When I found rumors, I immediately searched snopes.com to check if it was true and posted that link right beneath the rumor-mongering messages. I slammed sexist jokes. I took up issue with the kind of videos that glorify old Indian customs with spurious scientific explanations. And then I realized, I don't like the ME in Whatsapp groups - I was becoming a sort of information-Nazi. A liberal-feminist-non-left-wing-non-denominational Nazi perhaps, but a Nazi nonetheless.

I took a small step back and really thought about where I was vis-a-vis this problem. DH and I had gradually developed a nighttime ritual of showing each other the Whatsapp videos and jokes that we enjoyed during the day. One day he was on leave due to a cold and asked me to read out an abridged version of the classic Rama Raja Bahadur to him. We enjoyed the first two chapters so much that we continued the practice till we finished the book. It became the best bedtime ritual there could be. You can be sure I did the 'voices' in the dialogues! Each night's installment was followed by a light discussion and speculation of what would happen. It was such an improvement on sharing media vomit!

And then came the straw that broke the camel's back. There is a new song video out now - it goes... "A for anderwear, B for bhegitables" I got the SAME video forwarded to me by 6 different people in just 3 groups - which only goes to show that most people DO NOT check what they are already receiving in the first place! 

I  looked around at my carefully curated collection of books, then at the long and ever-growing list of books that I want to read. I remembered an article I read a while back which concluded that "You are what you read/watch everyday". So what was I doing to my level of consciousness by admitting all this media vomit into my mind for almost one or two hours a day? (Oh yes, those 5-minute videos add up!!!) And here I pride myself on being someone who doesn't watch brain-eating soap-operas!

In Facebook, if somebody regularly posts things that annoy you, you can just quietly unsubscribe from their stream. There is no such option in Whatsapp groups. And I seemed to be unable to stop myself from downloading media. So I took the leap, I quit all my groups. It was like surgery, pretty painful, but necessary.

It's been two days now. I still sporadically search the status bar of my phone for the icon. But so far I have not gone crawling to the group admins and begged to be taken back :)

And my friends? The ones who really matter are always at hand, ready for some real conversation either through Whatsapp or otherwise. But hey, they are the ones who have been there since before this part of the information revolution and they are likely to be there always. One of the greatest blessings of my life for which I am extremely grateful.

The Aftermath

The moment I hit 'Publish' on my last post, I began to have second thoughts. "Was it okay to have written that?" "Will people perceive me as a lecher/disaster  magnet?", "Was it alright to have mentioned the proper name for a part of my anatomy?" - all these raced through my mind. Couldn't help the effect of several centuries worth of conditioning that has been handed down among women across generations. I have seen the sort of inane comments that appear below completely innocent posts of female celebrities and felt relieved that I am not a celebrity and hoped that the few friends who read my posts would not take it wrong. It just felt good to have poured out the rant I had been harboring for a weekend. 

After the day was done, I came back to Facebook where I share my posts and saw the first few comments - all of them encouraging and I even saw a few shares. Intrigued, I went to check the stats on the post and was flabbergasted... 5000 hits, in one day!!! To put it in perspective, the largest number of hits I have got so far is around 3000 on one post that I wrote about 5 years ago - ahem! 

From then on, each day I checked the stats and it grew and grew till it has reached 15,000 as of today. But more heartening were the comments a few brave souls posted on my blog as well as on Facebook. All the women who commented said that they had to face the same and worse. Only one, ONE among my Malayali friends said that she has never had to face a harassing situation in Kerala even once - which reminds me, I must ask her to buy me a lottery ticket the next time I see her! 

Was I saddened by the responses? Yes. Here, being a coddled homemaker who uses public transport perhaps once or twice a month and gets out of the house once a week, I have had to face this menace. To think of all the sisters and mothers who have to travel to work everyday, stay in rickety houses, in unsavory neighborhoods... it saddened me a lot.

Was I heartened by the responses? YES. Despite this menace, women do not hole themselves up in secure homes and don't go about with armed black cats bristling around them. Malayali women are so brave!!! I am proud of you all!

Yes, it is imperative that we go out. Yes, it is imperative that we do not suffer in silence, but at least roar out a protest when molested. Many molesters adopt the notorious mindset given utterance by the veteran actor Soman in Hitler, "If only she had screamed loudly at least once..." - that typically chauvinistic comment for not having had the self-control to not rape a woman. We shouldn't let lechers have that excuse any more. Because if one woman keeps quiet about being harassed in public today, it might lead the perpetrator to wilder/ more aggressive excesses tomorrow. 

This post is dedicated to all the wonderful, decent men - Dads, brothers, husbands, sons and friends, who support and let the women in their lives live free. Please don't feel bad if women treat you with wariness and suspicion, because you see, the devils incarnate do not go around with the mark of Cain on their foreheads. They happen to look just like you...