Is Delhi Safe For Women?

The recent gruesome murder of a female journalist in Delhi in the wee hours of early morning is shocking. Once again Delhi is under the scanner.

"Is Delhi safe for women?". No it is not. But then it never was. I have lived all my life in Mumbai. The image of Delhi was always that of a city extremely unsafe for women. I grew up hearing that. And so as a Mumbaikar, I always had this bias against Delhi and particularly the men in Delhi. Could not bring myself to take up a job in Delhi or get married to a guy from Delhi. Simply because of its negative reputation as far as safety is concerned.

Delhi's bad track record goes much before Mrs Sheila Dixit started her tenure as the CM. Eve teasing, harassing women, killing for dowry, the Tandoor case, Jessica Lal Murder, Arushi murder and now this...all of it has happened in Delhi.

As a working women, as a resident of another sprawling Metropolitan (Mumbai), I am in agreement with Mrs. Sheila Dixit to a great extent. It is indeed being a bit too confident and adventurous; to be out alone in a car at 3.00 am in the morning. Be it Delhi, Be it Mumbai, Be it Kolkatta or Chennai. A female (more so alone) is always vulnerable. Any where in the world. And lets accept this. It is a fact. One is only safe till such a time that an incidence like does not happen.

It is not what Mrs Dixit chooses to say that decides the culture of a city. It is the people that make the culture of a city. Over the years I have visited Delhi for work and had an opportunity to stay for extended periods such a month or longer too. I found men in and around Delhi to be extremely rude to women, chauvinists, unruly, crude and vulgar. Being educated or well dressed has very little to do with this. Men in Delhi (again I am reiterating some class/sect) live in primitive ages as far as their treatment of women is concerned. Abusive language towards women, road rage and other such aggressive behaviors are largely displayed in public against women.

Few days back, a TV news carried the story of a pregnant women being beaten by her in-laws for dowry. Again in Delhi. Cruelty to women is a way of life in Delhi. Be it towards a strange women, a daughter, a wife or a mother. More so if you are a foreigner.

It is not Mrs Dixit who needs to apologise to media or any one else; it is the men of Delhi who must apologise to WOMEN. It is the men in Delhi who must come out in the open and protest against those of their gender. It is the men of Delhi who have to restore their credibility.

The channel where she was employed too shares the blame. For their careless attitude towards the safety of a female employee. They made her work late in the night; but shied away from the responsibility of providing safety and security. Knowing very well how unsafe it was to venture out in the night on the roads of Delhi. The news channel is cunningly diverting peoples attention from their own mistake and piling on to Mrs Sheila Dixit.

No city in the world is safe in the night. Be it London, New York or Manhattan. There are enough night crime in New York or London or any other large city in world. Not only against women, but men too get targeted and killed.

Unfortunately all the apologies in the world will not get their daughters back. Jessica or Arushi or Soumya. They are gone for ever. What happened was most unfortunate. It could have been very easily circumvented through proper safety and security measures.

May god give strength to the bereaved family.

Let us learn a lesson and move on. Let every event and incidence in the society not become a blame game.

Bigg Boss- How different is it from any corporate office?

This is the season 2 of the popular Indian version of the program Bigg Boss. The original program is called 'Big Brother'.

It is a fantastic experiment in human behaviour. We can keep changing the set of people, try new permutations and combinations of profiles (the famous, the not so famous, the beautiful, the not so beautiful, rich, not so rich, educated and not so educated). But the reactions are all the same.

There are many similarities between the Bigg Bosses House and a Corporate Office. We have jokingly started referring to our own office as the Bigg Bosses house.

When people are put in together in to the house, Bigg Bosses House, they are good with each other. They go out of their way to help each other. There are cameras capturing every minutes.

Just like people are good to a new joinee in an organisation. They go out of their way to be nice to a new joinee. Same is the case with Bigg Boss. You are always being watched!

With time, groupism starts. People start hanging together in groups. People start bitching about each others.

So much of it happens in a Corporate office too. There are groups and ever one wants to be with a group. You have no place if you don’t belong to a group.

Then it is time to start nominations. Initially the unsuspecting one's are asked nominated. Most of the time they don’t even know why they have been nominated.

The same thing happens in a corporate office. Completely unsuspecting people are picked up as scape goats.

It just gets murkier inside the house. People start abusing each other, plans are made to oust people from the other group. It is a war of sorts.

Well well well.....nothing different in a corporate office....

As the competition heads towards the final lap, it is a question of ones own survival. The starts parasitic behaviour. Inmates from the same group start nominating people from within the group. Friends on face, but in the confession room they nominate each other. The realisation then dawns on the participants and the viewers too, that; there are no friends out there in the house. They are only competitors. It is a competition and any form of competition has to be eliminated.

Well...well...well...Not at all different in a corporate at all....It is a question of survival and no one is a friend. And so even in the so called civil, professional and task driven environment of the fortune 500 companies of the world, we demonstrate the same behaviour as the inmates of Bigg Boss.

A fantastic, unfailing experiment in human behaviour.

Living in the present.

It is sad to see that our approach towards life is becoming so tactical. We live from one day to another day. Forget thinking about doing good work, earning good karma for the betterment of next birth/life. We don't want to spend time thinking about this life! It's all right here, right now approach.

Life is about living in the present moment. Because there is nothing else to life other than the present. The spiritual context of living life in the present means, drop all your karma at this minute and move on. I had attended a corporate workshop conducted by the Isha Yoga Foundation (Coimbatore, India) few years back. Our spiritual teacher taught us that the only way to happiness is to live in the present moment and drop all your karma at this moment and move on.

But what do we do instead? We carry this baggage of karma with us all our life. And like the bag that Santa Claus carries with him, we keep filling the bag with life's experiences!!! The good and the bad. Happy moments and sad moments. Love, hatred, likes, dislikes, attachments, anger, and many more mixed bag of thoughts, memories and feelings. With passing age, the bag only but becomes heavy. And we carry this weight with us. Remember, had we dropped all the little and big karma on the way and moved on, life would have been so light. So carefree. So happy. Living in the present means moving on without the karma.

Coming back to where I started from, the definition of living in the present has taken a dangerous meaning today. For most, living in the present means shrugging off their responsibility towards a better future. "Why should I worry about the future? I am not going to be here when the glaciers melt. I am living in the present. Let those who come in the future worry about their present."

It is right here, right now. This attitude is creating a recklessness in all of us. We have become careless about our actions and their consequences. Because, we may not live to see the consequences of our reckless actions. The future feels somewhere far away and distant. It is not the next second which has to come after the present moment has gone in the past. The glaciers will take a long time to melt, the last tiger will take a long time to disappear from the earth, it will be long time before humanity is wiped off from the surface of this earth. That is what everyone is thinking. There is 3 kinds of visible life on the earth and we have started a war against all of them, to DESTROY THEM!

Why else are we destroying nature by cutting forests and trees?
Why else are we destroying rare species of birds and animals?
Why else are we destroying humanity by planting bombs and killing each other so mercilessly?

Because we are all living in the present. Right here, right now. We know that the future of our planet is very bleak and scary. But who cares. We will not be here to see our planet gradually die away. Whose planet is it anyways?