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Magazine
In Conversation
The power of one
ANJANA RAJAN
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Pinki Virani believes that even small, incremental changes initiated by individuals do matter in the long run.
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“We’ve got to stop believing in the movies. They are mythology…Life is non-fiction.”
Photo: S. Subramanium
Time for everyone to speak out: Pinki Virani.
“Lives are lost in the loopholes of the law.” Author and activist Pinki Virani’s grim statement rings all too true as another June 1 rolls around, the day Aruna Shanbaug would have celebrated her 60th birthday. “Aruna is our conscience and our grim reminder that nothing has changed,” says Pinki, who wrote Aruna’s Story: The True Account of a Rape and its Aftermath (Penguin), in 1998, and continues to raise awareness about this and other issues. Aruna, a nurse, was brutally assaulted while on duty in a Mumbai hospital in 1973. While she has been cortically blind and in a vegetative state ever since, her rapist — convicted of attempt to murder and robbery but not rape — has been long out of prison after a six-year sentence.
In Aruna’s case and those of countless other rape victims, the laws create their own escape routes for the accused, says Pinki. “With all our growing awareness and whatever we are willing to do as individuals, the laws are not there.”
Working at it
These facts, these words, are enough to bring about a gloomy silence. But that’s not Pinki’s intention. A firm believer in “the power of one,” she says, “Now is the time for incremental change, in small, small ways.”
Inspirational words. But anyone who knows Pinki’s work knows she is not made of words alone. Author of Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India (Penguin), she was recently awarded the Government of India’s Stree Shakti Puraskar, honouring her role in women’s empowerment and the book’s contribution to raising awareness about child sexual abuse, its prevention and ways of dealing with the trauma. Even the fact that the award came to her eight years after the book’s publication shows it triggered incremental change. Bitter Chocolate, in which the author talks about her own experience of abuse as a child, offers guidelines on protecting children as well as how to help victims move on in life. A bestseller, also adapted as a play by Arvind Gaur and Lushin Dubey, it is used by parents and professionals in educational and medical institutions.
While aware that justice eludes victims of child sexual abuse and rape, Pinki is nonetheless pleased at the recognition — observing this is the first time it went to “a non-gynaecologist, non-NGO person.”
In the face of an unhelpful legal system and non-committal political scenario, Pinki advises, “Be your own movement, your own power of one — in your lane, in your neighbourhood, and you will have done good work.”
It is hard not to be swept up in her enthusiasm. Certain that one’s sins will be visited on those one loves, she suddenly asks, “Does it sound too idealistic?” But, she explains, “I was born in 1959, a generation that was born with a lot of idealism.”
Bitter Chocolate, the author relates, was not meant to be about her, but a way of communicating with society, and she toured extensively after its publication. “And I was very clear: I said I won’t meet only the mothers. The fathers must come. The child requires the father as much as the mother.” Sometimes finding resentment at this stand, she met teachers and principals and parents, receiving questions about specific problems, sex or sexual abuse.
Society’s penchant for hero worship troubles her. In a girls’ college in Chennai, she was told, “All of us can’t be like you.” Pinki says, “I was completely taken aback. Why would you want to be like me? I said, just because you don’t speak excellent English and I do, and you wear salwar-kameez and I wear trousers, there’s no real difference. I was born in a chawl in a joint family. Would you want to be raped repeatedly by your uncle?”
Pinki starkly reminds us, “We’ve got to stop believing in the movies. They are mythology. In reel 16, God comes in the form of the hero. In reel 14, the mythological mother gets up and slaps her wayward son.” She pauses, and adds, “Life is non-fiction.”
Taboo word
Taboos add to the mess. “A teacher said to me, ‘I agree with you, and I’ll talk to my daughter-in-law.’ I said, why not your son? As women we are so scared of talking about sex in our home.”
In contrast, the young men she speaks to are “more gung-ho”. Pinki empathises with the women’s reticence, “but if it’s a question of feeling shy or protecting my child from a horrible crime,” she knows which reaction must win. Parents need to be strong enough, also, to get over fears of offending the authorities. “It’s a known fact, it’s in Bitter Chocolate too, that paedophiles are roaming around the Internet or as PT teachers in schools.”
You can only agree when she says, “The world is a pretty shitty place. At least we don’t have to make it worse.” And “different levels of awareness at different places, different people understanding their responsibility at different places,” may just tip the balance, “to leave the world a less polluted place.”
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