An effort to raise our consciousness

Contributor: Ajay Etikala

Here's a moving sharing by a young person who is on a journey of expressing his being and serving our world with empathy. A long time member of Youth Alliance, Ajay is currently working on his initiative Tokri and he is going deep. In the ensuing paragraphs he shares an experience he had and how it challenged something in him and in us as a collective society. Such people together are raising the consciousness of our society and healing our world.  

Now a days I am working on an initiative to create a branded vegetable vending stalls in Delhi. The idea is to start with 2 and slowly grow to 50 once we reach 50 vendors, we will be able to procure directly from farmers in bulk and increase their incomes. I am sharing a personal incident which recently happened 10 days back, in a conversation with a friend, I realised the importance of sharing this and bringing up the point in public.

For this initiative I am actively looking for women who are from less resourced communities and are looking for jobs. I met a young Muslim woman (28-29) with a cute little girl (7-8 years) in a night shelter who was in acute distress as she left her home. She was forcefully married twice but was unfortunately both times she was a victim of domestic abuse. First at a young age of 12 she was forcefully married to a man (40+), here she was a victim of domestic violence and alcohol abuse. After a year somehow she stood up, gathered all the courage and filed for the divorce. Here she got some compensation through court but her chacha took that money away!

 

Later after few years again forcefully she got married to a farmer but now the same things continued for 5 years and she thought this was her fate and started accepting the reality. But later she couldn't resist when the same things were going on her young daughter, hence she left her husband's place and filed for a divorce. Again this time she was given some compensation for her and her daughter too. Her Chacha has done some fraud with lawyer and took the money. Now this time finally realising the whole vicious cycle she left the home secretly and came to a night shelter.

As she was looking for a job, I asked her if she would be interested in this initiative, she agreed and we started to look for a home for her stay after a week long search, we found a landlady (60+) who agreed to give her a room. It took me long to convince her why I am doing this? As she sensed something is wrong between both of us. As being a young Hindu boy why I am trying to help a Muslim divorcee? I provided my personal details for the police verification. We immediately shifted, but after 2 days her elder son called me and kept the condition that he wants to do the police verification of her address too, which she was not comfortable with as her Chacha is still looking for her. Basically he indirectly wanted us to vacate as he knew the story.

He started advising me to stay away from all these things as I would be harming my career, life etc etc. As he too tried helping a women in his young age by providing a her a job in his own factory but later he had to marry her because she alleged him with some wrongdoing despite being already married. For which he still regrets. I can totally empathise with him as he genuinely wanted to advise me. But I had a serious issue when both the land lady and the son were repeatedly questioning her character and blaming her for her fate! Finally we had to vacate the room the next day.

But what triggered me to put this in public after 10 days when I shared this with an "educated" friend, who was also giving the same logic that it can't happen two times with someone, she must have been wrong and has some deficiency (Is she some material that we easily say she has some deficiency ?) and lot more...!

Definitely this whole incident has taught me lot. I am not writing this to blame anyone and point fingers at people. Everyone is right in their own context and with respect to their previous experiences. I am trying to make few points here 

• Why we still see a little difference among people based on their religion and gender?
• Why do we blame females first in any situations starting from small day to day things. (Frankly speaking I too do it with my mom and sister more as compared to my father).
• Especially things related to relationships/love why do we easily blame the character of females first without even understanding the situation? And why we all are naturally inclined towards other's stories and try to make it gossip?
• Keeping gender aside in most of our situations we tend to shift the blame towards others, why can't we take a step back, introspect and see how can we make things fruitful ahead rather blaming? 

I am just raising these questions to trigger our thought process. At least from this incident I am taking lot of learning and homework for myself to improve upon and try to be a better person, I hope there are some learning/insights from this story for all of us too!