Wednesday, March 4, 2015

An Open Letter to India's Daughter director Leslee Udwin

Dear Leslee Udwin

First of all, let me appreciate the time you have taken to come to India and spend good 2 years to research on our problems and try to show to the world.   Glad you had both the time and money to do the same.  How I wish you packed your bags and went to any middle east country and try to do the same and then en cash on the problems by selling your research for commercial use to the world biggest Television channels. Honestly, you wouldn't have become a celebrity or would be voicing your opinion still as you do today.

Yes,  we women in India are vulnerable.   So are you.  When you said that you have hidden your sexual assault trauma over the years,  I pity that you were not able to come out in your land and fight against the molester and fight for your justice.   At least we women in India, are bold in enough to tell to the world what we feel, what we lose and what we think and act accordingly.  Nirbhaya is just another woman who suffered.  There are hundreds of Nirbhaya's all around India who silently suffer, who protest and who punish those who attack them.  Our suffering need not be your commercial venture.  Thank you for your concern.

Every day in the buses we travel, some odd guy standing next to us, pitch amidst the Saree on our hips.   Another guy tries to touch us as we sit together and watch movies in a theater.   In a classroom, students are assaulted by the teachers and in offices by the bosses.   But is it happening only in India?  Do you dare to go to any other country and try to investigate and then film it and then make money out of it?  Can you do it in UK or USA?  Then please do it and leave us alone.

Do not add salt to our injuries.  From the time immemorial,  human civilization has breathed through the male chauvinism enough.   We know how some perverted and senseless minds think.   How vulnerable they think we women are and how they think that we have to abide by their pre-defined rules of living.  We are equal human beings.  We know to fight for our rights and we don't need a foreigner to come and show case our problems to the world.   We also know to handle our men.   

Not every man in this divine land is a pervert or think like the so-called idiots you have interviewed.  This divine Mother India has seen the greats of Paramacharya,  Swami Vivekananda,  Chanukya,  Chatrapathi Sivaji and several other leaders and social-scientists.     We focus on our positives and let the law of the land take care of the law breakers.    I know we are still following age old laws in terms of punishment and it takes its own sweet time to find justice in my motherland.    Yes, we are not barbaric to jump into action and kill them on the fly.  But same time, we are not weak to let the weak-minded not to be punished.  Period.

Ms Udwin....by showcasing your documentary in my country,  it will only agitate the young minds.  It is not going to add value to us.  We are continuing our fights for justice.   We are not scared to view the contents of your videos which you promised to use for social purpose and taken it without permission to the commercial platform.   We want to stone the idiots to death.  But what are we making of us in the process.  We want to cut the prime parts of the perverts but will that bleeding stop our girls from crying?   We want to hang the criminals in open air, but will that stop the next rape.   I don't think so!

As a woman,  as a mother, as a friend, as a sister each one of us are trying to educate our young men on what is right and what is wrong.  We are teaching our girls self-defense.  We are fighting for our rights in a more peaceful way.  We will overcome this menace one day.

And that day is not too far.  The day will dawn in my country when we women will not be ashamed to be part of this world.   Till then, we request you to stay away from our problems.  We will handle them to the end and one film of yours is not going to change anything!

Regards
A thoughtful Indian Woman.


***************After watching the video****************

I watched the video today after writing the above article.  Nothing I wrote stands changed.  We knew these perverts and what they think and expecting repentance from them is like searching for a pin in a sand.   Expecting the system to change overnight with this video also is not going to happen.  

This incident is indeed barbaric and unfortunately there are more similar and more worst cases that India had witnessed.     My friends argued that this video makes us speechless and should not be banned. Agree.  Same time, the actual gruesome act, the followed media attention,  the campaigns is all what we already saw.  We know the plight of middle class parents with big dreams fighting every odd in the society to make the dreams come true.  

The documentary says is done in public interest, if so why was it not freely uploaded to you-tube and spread across all over India.  It needed a platform to bring a tragedy back to memory.  India will not forget Nirbaya.  We don't need a well thought filmmaker to bring this to the masses to create a mass hysteria again over the tragedy that already shattered us.  

We need the system to change, where our men respect us and we are fighting for it day in and  day out.   We want the crime on women to come down and legal system tightened up to punish those who do these crimes.  

Justice delayed is justice denied.   Why are we wanting to even hear the opinion of these perverts again and again when it is against the actual democratic fabric of our Nation where women are treated equally.  This is the opinion of the defense lawyers,  the orthodox community reflections in every word they uttered.  Are we not seeing honour killings day in day out?   What are we doing?  Why did media stop from even giving out her name initially?   

We need to clean our system.  We don't need one more filmmaker encashing on our weaknesses.   Not another slumdog millionaire please.   Not another Nirbaya!

Ban or No Ban!  Bottomline is this video is not going to change anything unless each one of us try to change the system where all are part of !  God bless #India's daughter.

17 comments:

Hars said...

Grow up. Shed ur cynical attitude towards the outside world. Not everyone is out there to show india in bad light nor make money by doing so.

Eclectica said...

The documentary may just force a debate encouraging people - men and women - to question beliefs, to show the door to education, to change mindsets which are the root cause of the rot.
If indeed permission was given only for social cause and not commercial usage, then the BBC/Leslie U should definitely be brought to task.
Yes they wouldn't have been able to document this in any other part of the world possibly.
We Indians are a generous and trusting lot.

Anonymous said...

Like your pre-video comments and post-video comments.
Should Ms.Udwin has tried to do the same when thousands of women in SriLanka were facing the same or any other women in Afghanistan....Udwin would have been already in the news either for being stopped to enter the country or for being executed by the militants.
Some people know the trick of the trade (??) that Portraying the "poor" India would be both emotionally and commercially a huge hit....as though such things happen ONLY in India.
This holds good even for the slum dog millionaires too my Madam.!
Its our mistake too that we have the habit of allowing to post photos of rich and sky scrappers from abroad and let them take pictures of beggars and children on the streets.
Law must be made clear and re-written for such heinous crime ....like we dealt with Kasab.

Anonymous said...

Imagine. A filmmaker travels to Belgium because she has heard about the pedophilia scandals in the country. She directs a documentary film, which includes an interview with an infamous pedophile. This man says that the girls he raped had actually seduced him and that they really enjoyed it. The filmmaker then comments that Belgian society is responsible for creating such pedophiles by teaching them what to think. Most men in this country are programmed in this way, she insists. In fact, this is all part of a larger disease and culture, which is also reflected in Belgian cinema. How would we Belgians react? We would find this shocking and infuriating. It is as though pedophilia is an expression of the core of our culture, as though we are programmed for child abuse.

Umasree said...

This story is not all that imaginary, even though it does concern another country. Over the past week, the international hue and cry about rape in India has gone through another round. This time the cause is a documentary where one of the accused in a brutal rape case makes atrocious statements. Significantly, the English filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, does not see this man as a pathological individual. In an interview, she characterises him as representative of “most men in this country,” who are “programmed in a certain way.” It is this society that creates and encourages such rapists, she says, and the objectifying of women in Bollywood films reveals how this is part of a larger disease and culture.

Anonymous said...

Many Indians reacted with shock. Many are also infuriated. Some even see this as an international conspiracy to defame India and call for banning the film. It is easy to dismiss all of this as expressions of a hurt national pride unable to cope with the reality of rape and misogyny in India. Or to ridicule it as a form of cultural paranoia. But the many Indians who feel this way are neither paranoid nor stupid. In fact, there is a need to make sense of the widespread impression that such an international conspiracy is going on.

To understand what is at stake, let us turn back to the heart of Europe. Here, the media agrees with the filmmaker. One headline says “A girl should just let herself be raped quietly” –insinuating that this is a widespread opinion in India. The journalist writes: “Especially in North India women are considered outlaws when it comes to sex.” In other words, any man can have a go at them without threat of punishment. But how could Indian men in general – who are also fathers, brothers and sons of women –see these women as objects freely available for rape? This can be the case only if the culture is itself morally perverse: mothers and fathers must raise their sons to become rapists. This is the implicit message of the discourse about rape in India.

Anonymous said...

India used to be the land of gurus, snake charmers, and fakirs. It was the country of caste, cows and curry. Nowadays, it has become the rape nation in the Western imagination. Time and again, women travelling to India are warned: “Be careful with all those rapists there.” People from all walks of life express their disgust at a culture where rape seems to be part of everyday life. Recently, a German university professor refused an Indian intern because of “the rape problem in India” and the threat he would pose to her female students. The media join in: “How India became a country of gang rapes.” “The terrible truth about rape in India.” “In rural India, rapes are common, but justice for victims is not.” “Why rapes are ‘normal’ in India.” These are only a few representative headlines. What is so striking about these claims is the following: they transform the immoral acts of certain individuals into expressions of an entire culture and its values.

What are the factual grounds for this move? In Belgium, four to five gang rapes take place every week. Eight women are raped every single day. In a study of the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights one third of all European women reveal that they have been the victims of physical and sexual violence. As many report that they went through such violence at the hands of adults during their youth. 55% of all women has experienced sexual intimidation. But how many newspaper stories do we see about “how Belgium became a country of gang rapes”? How many journalists try to explain “why sexual violence is ‘normal’ in Europe” or “how women in the EU are outlawed when it comes to sex”? Right. None.
“Three women raped per hour in India,” the European press cried out recently. But they forget to mention that this is out of a population of 1.25 billion. In Belgium, one rape is reported every three hours – out of a population of 11 million. In England and Wales alone, where the population is less than 56 million, about 78,000 rapes are estimated to occur every year. That amounts to more than 9 rapes every hour. You can do the math yourself. Or you could leave that to a 2010 United Nations report. In India, 1.8 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants were reported that year. In Belgium, the number was almost 30. It was 27.3 for the US and about 28 for the UK.
The predictable response is that only a fraction of rapes is reported in India. Well, in countries like Belgium, experts estimate that only 1 in 10 cases of sexual violence is reported by the victims. Even if the number in India is only 1 in 100, there are still many more cases of sexual violence in Belgium, the US or the UK. One could add that the Indian police is notoriously corrupt in its condoning of rape and that even these projections underestimate the real number. But this only shows that one can deny any empirical data in order to embrace the image of India as a rape nation.

Anonymous said...

The reporting about India excels in ignorance. It blindly buys into the stories told by a particular class of journalists and intellectuals. Thus, when two girls were found hanging from a tree in an Indian village in May 2014, the European media jumped on this. Obviously, these girls had been raped and murdered because of caste, the evil social system of India. “You can rape and kill a Dalit girl,” said one headline. Another article reported that these girls were from “the Dalit community, a group of people at the bottom of the social ladder who were excluded from the caste system.” The higher castes, both journalists revealed with much fanfare, use sexual violence to oppress the lower castes.
When more facts emerged, these same media kept quiet. They offered no evidence for the claim that men from ‘higher castes’ systematically rape women from ‘lower castes’. They also failed to admit that the alleged perpetrators did not belong to an upper caste and the girls were not Dalits, but that both belonged to OBC groups. It would be even more painful to recognise that the CBI came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of rape or murder, that one of the girls had been having an affair with the main accused, and that the family members had made inconsistent statements and appeared to have bribed the witnesses. Instead they insinuated that the police was trying to cover up the crimes. This fit beautifully into the hackneyed story about India; the facts did not.

Anonymous said...

In Europe (and among certain intellectuals in India) clichés about India replace reasonable reflection. Hatred towards women is deeply rooted in this society, journalists say. Evidently, the implicit comparison is always with European society and its emancipation of women. Well, let us compare the role of women in the Indian political landscape with that of a country like Belgium. The last ten years, arguably the most powerful person in India was a woman. Similarly, several women could be found among the most popular and powerful leaders of state-level governments. The same goes for mayors and university vice-chancellors.India had its first female prime minister in 1966. Fifty years later, we are still waiting. As of yet, no woman has become prime minister of the federal government of Belgium. As of yet, no woman has become minister-president of the regional government of Flanders. As of yet, my city has seen no woman as its mayor. Oh yes, recently my university did appoint its first female rector in almost 200 years.

Anonymous said...

t is not that all of the European reporting about India is fictitious. The country has its share of problems when it comes to the relationship between men and women. Only a fool would deny that. There is tremendous injustice towards women, as is the case elsewhere. In cities like Delhi, sexual violence and harassment are a major concern. The hobnobbing between politicians and goondas in certain parts of India rightly shocks observers. But our dominant stories do not allow us to understand any of these dimensions of Indian society. They only create delusions about the country.
Indeed, in a population of 1.25 billion, one will find more psychopaths and pathological individuals than in a population of 11 million. But to infer from this that most Indian men are programmed to think of women as objects of rape is an instance of the fallacy of hasty generalisation. “Not all Indian men think and act in this way,” commentators often admit. But this just confirms how twisted this approach is. Pathological men are now presented as the norm of Indian society and others as the exception, while it is surely the other way round.
To show how defective this discourse is, we can just select another set of facts, which allow us to draw opposite conclusions. The numerous female politicians, the devis so commonly revered, gurus like Amma followed by so many, the importance of the mother in Indian society. All of these facts could be used to suggest that women occupy an extraordinary position in Indian culture. Without serious research, such a conclusion would be as empty as the stories about “the deeply rooted hatred of women.” But this exercise reveals just how irrational the discourse about rape culture in India is.

Anonymous said...

The fallacy of hasty generalisation is commonly used in propaganda and the politics of fear. Now, it is part and parcel of the discourse about rape in India. No wonder then that many Indians have the sense of an international conspiracy against their country. However misguided the calls for banning films and books may be, they are expressions of feeling powerless in the face of a centuries-old discourse about Indian culture that continues to dominate international public opinion. In insidious ways, this discourse misrepresents India as the very embodiment of immorality: a culture that programs its people to follow immoral rules as though these are moral.
India and the West could together look for solutions to the problems that we share. Instead, Western commentators reproduce old colonial stories about India as an immoral culture. This gives them a twisted relationship to the Indian people. On the one hand, they keep turning towards the same class of Indian journalists, activists, and intellectuals for ‘local knowledge’. But these native informants merely talk the talk of the West to the West. On the other hand, more and more Indians are disgusted by the West’s condescending attitude towards their country. And this is then dismissed as hurt pride. If we want to bring our two peoples and cultures closer together in this new age, reason and empathy are our only hope. The madness of the current discourse about India must end.
(Author: Jakob De Roover is a Professor at the India Platform, Ghent University, Belgium)

Shashi said...

INDIA'S DAUGHTER - SHAME bbc SHAME
____________________________________
A shameful insensitivity, voyeurism promoted by BBC... in the garb of journalism.
(No I will not be giving the link here, as I don't want to be a party to creating eyeballs for their shameful act)
Some Issues, I would like to share...

1) By their own charter they were not supposed to show any content that can harm the victims, the family members and other such people, but they went ahead and uploaded on You Tube.

2) The producers, directors etc. got the permission to shoot this for non-commercial use, but they were trying to release it commercially.

3) It was to be aired on 8th Dec, on Women's day (How sick) but as we Indians, Media and finally the Government raised protest, they slyly released it on Youtube, before British Government due to pressure of Indian could do something to stop its broadcast. HOW SHAMEFUL .

4) The director was supposed to be a rape victim.... No one in his or her right mind would do this to a fellow victim and his / her family.

5) We, the Indian, The Indian Media, Journalists etc, gave different names to the victim, Nirbhaya, Brave heart etc... and in this documentary I hear (No, I have not seen it, don't want to see it) that it's all revealed. SHAME.

6)We have had enough of this attitude of foreign media, that anything goes in India, a land of fakir's, snake charmers, rapists and call-centre guys and gals.

IT'S TIME THEY REMEMBER THAT WE ARE FAR AHEAD THAN THEM (i.e. BBC and it's country of origin) in most of the technology and journalism. The second largest population of English speaking people, probably the third highest scientist, technically skilled and other skilled people in the world. We are the people, who have put a space craft on the way to Mars, which they can never dream of in the near future... and WE WILL NOT TAKE IT LYING DOWN...

IT'S TIME YOU GROW UP TO REALISE OUR COLLECTIVE STRENGTH, OTHERWISE IT'S GOING TO BE YOUR LOSS. WE MIGHT JUST DECIDE TO IGNORE YOU AND YOUR BROADCAST...

SHAME - SHAME - SHAME

__
Shashi
ॐ नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya

Pavithra Suresh said...

Super retaliation

Balaji Raghavendran said...

A wonderful reply Uma.

Shanmuga Pratap said...

fitting reply Uma..

Rama Krishnan said...

Uma hats off..

Yalla Srinivasa said...

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=787342774668456&set=vr.787342774668456&type=2&theater