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| Moment of truth: City unsafe for women |
| By expressbuzz.com |
| Published: 12/28/2009 |
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THE daily jottings of a crime reporter’s notepad — details about murder, robbery, assault, chain-snatching, house break-in, accident, kidnapping and sexual molestation — rarely grist for a defining moment of a year. In the grisly stories about the “wretched underside of a community” that are churned out at the end of the day, the victim is a “faceless cipher” for a crime reporter, who even survives emotionally by making a jokes at the press room. So a ‘behenji’ losing her strands of glittering gold or a bulky bag to bike bandits is just an object of ridicule. But it happened one night to me. Instead of taking down notes, I stood helpless on the road with no paper or pen to even jot down the number of the motorcycle that zoomed away. It was indeed the moment of truth, when I stood staring stupidly at the fast-receding back of a stocky youth — my poor, tattered bag dangling from his hand. I still do not know how the switch over took place. I only remember feeling angry and helpless — and violated. During those moments, I felt — felt deeply — for those faceless Sunitas, Geethas and Vijis, who suffered a fate similar to mine as they plodded their weary way to their homes from the workplace. And let me confess that confronting crime on your door step scares the hell out of you. No wonder, Adyar became a strange place to me overnight! It was while trying to describe the ‘bag snatcher’ to a police officer that I became aware of a few things. The youth had been neatly dressed; had a boxer’s build and his bike looked shiny. The officer nodded his head knowingly. Brats from good, affluent families are increasingly taking to crime for easy money to buy booze and drugs. Some consider it macho to be seen in the company of the local dadas. It is making the jobs of the police tough as many of them are first-time offenders and do not have a record. For these superbrats, good life means hanging out in expensive hotels and discotheques with a girlfriend on their arm. And the bill? A flimsy gold chain from a hapless woman’s neck will take care of that. Psychologists lay the blame squarely at the doors of their parents, who are immersed in their own pursuit of status and money that they prefer to turn a blind eye to the activities of their offspring till the law comes knocking at their door. A colleague narrated the chilling story of a businessman’s son, the product of a leading school in the city, who got mixed up with chain-snatching gangs from his locality and Andhra Pradesh. His family managed to extricate him out of the mess with great difficulty and packed him off to Malaysia. Read More. |
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the city is all made up by human so why cannot we take hold on our cities and and manipulate unsafe places into safer areas why are there always some unsafe places like the subways of sweden; the soviet gulags;the bars of SA;etc are unsafe for men similarly some places are there which are unsafe for women why cant we make these places safe for all. AcneZine Review http://ezinearticles.com/?Acnezine--Review---Does-the-Acnezine-Acne-Treatment-Work?&id=2928024