Listen, girls!
Don’t waste your time protesting.
Don’t protest against the government.
Don’t protest against society.
Nothing will change.
Just understand the place society has assigned you—and quietly go back there.
Because that is where society has always kept you.
Religion does not matter. Caste does not matter. Country, century, civilisation—none of it matters. Across borders, scriptures and cultures, you have repeatedly been placed in the second row of humanity.
We men may occasionally roar on your behalf. We may deliver magnificent speeches on women’s empowerment. We may celebrate Women’s Day, quote poetry, worship goddesses and proclaim that women are our equals.
But when equality demands that we surrender privilege?
Something inside us tears apart.
We simply don’t say it aloud.
Don’t believe me?
LOOK AT THE RAMAYANA
Kaikeyi asked for what she believed was her due—and history remembers her almost as a villain.
Sita endured unimaginable suffering, yet because society whispered, “What will people say?”, it was she who had to prove her purity through fire.
She went into exile.
She raised her sons away from the palace.
And finally, she disappeared into the earth.
And no, my Sanatani sister—don’t bury the question beneath verses, divinity and theological explanations.
Strip away the ornament.
Look at the human truth.
The trial by fire is always yours.
Because you are a woman.
When society puts you on trial, very few will step forward to save you.
We men won’t.
NOW OPEN THE MAHABHARATA
A daughter-in-law of the royal household is dragged into a packed court and nearly stripped in public.
The men powerful enough to stop it?
They debate dharma.
Others watch.
Some enjoy the spectacle.
Because somewhere beneath the grandeur of civilisation lies an ugly assumption:
your body is available for negotiation.
Five brothers may decide how your marriage will work.
Who asks you?
Nobody.
If you fail to bear a son, the blame is yours.
If you give birth to a daughter, eyes turn cold.
The responsibility is yours.
The shame is yours.
The sacrifice is yours.
You may be the only sister among a hundred brothers, yet nobody questions the man you are married to.
You may give birth and lose your children.
You may watch sons sacrificed to war.
A child born of your womb may be abandoned, condemned or killed.
Still, history will sing the names of the men.
Your grief becomes a footnote.
Your body becomes a battlefield.
And you?
You are expected to manage yourself.
Quietly.
AFTER ALL, WHAT DID MEN DO WRONG?
You should have stayed indoors.
Why does a woman need so many opinions anyway?
If your dignity is violated, somehow you must carry the shame.
Nobody will come.
We won’t.
You can be Aisha, married in childhood to a husband decades older, and you are expected to accept it without question.
You must cover yourself from head to toe because, apparently, the sight of you excites men.
And where, exactly, is the man’s responsibility in that?
Cover yourself—we may still be aroused.
And somehow that too becomes your fault.
Why did you walk past me?
Why were you there?
Why were you visible?
Why were you attractive?
Why were you alive in public?
Apparently I am a savage sexual animal with no control over myself
Yet, astonishingly, you are the one expected to take precautions.
SCRIPTURE AFTER SCRIPTURE. CIVILISATION AFTER CIVILISATION.
You may become the Levite’s concubine and be thrown before a mob.
You may become Dinah, violated by Shechem.
You may become Tamar, preyed upon by her own half-brother.
You may be violated, humiliated, traded, blamed.
Centuries later you may board a bus and be groped.
Molested.
Assaulted.
Raped.
And society will still ask:
What were you doing there?
You will be told to remain silent.
A woman may be assaulted, and then stories will somehow be written explaining why she caused it.
A war may be fought over you like Helen of Troy, and poets will immortalise the warriors.
But who will ask what Helen wanted?
What she feared?
What she lost?
Women, apparently, are not supposed to have so many desires of their own.
Your mother may turn into a pillar of salt for daring to look back.
A king of gods may desire you—and somehow you bear the curse.
A god may violate a woman in a temple—and mythology may still punish the woman.
You may worship your own gods and be called a witch.
You may fight for your country and be burned at the stake in the name of religion.
Nobody comes.
We don’t.
SO TELL ME, GIRL—WHO EXACTLY ARE YOU FIGHTING?
Your enemies are not always strangers hiding in dark alleys.
Sometimes they sit at your dining table.
Sometimes they share your surname.
Sometimes they bless you.
Sometimes they call themselves your protectors.
The family breathes easier once they have “married you off.”
Your husband hits you?
Men lose their temper sometimes.
He controls you?
He loves you.
He humiliates you?
Marriage requires adjustment.
An uncle.
A cousin.
A family friend.
A father-in-law.
Sometimes even a father.
The very people entrusted with protecting girls may prey upon them.
And whom will you tell?
Your mother?
Your aunt?
Someone may whisper:
Keep quiet. These things happen.
Fight your boss?
Your promotion disappears.
Your job disappears.
Fight society?
Society throws mud at you.
You must have dressed wrongly.
Why do you have so many male friends?
You smoke?
You drink?
You showed cleavage?
Then obviously men were going to be tempted.
As though a man's morality ends exactly where a woman's neckline begins.
AND NOW YOU WANT TO PROTEST?
Against whom?
What exactly are you asking from this society?
For much of your life, the only person who loves you without calculating your social value may be your child—until that child learns the rules of the same society.
Your parents love you, certainly.
Yet how many parents spend years worrying primarily about one question:
When can we hand her over to a “good boy”?
Because surely you cannot simply earn, live independently, build wealth, travel, choose, fail, rise again and design your own life.
Can you?
After all—
you are a girl.
How dare your dreams be that large?
And many men who claim to love you?
Sometimes what they love is your body.
The midnight message—
Still awake?
becomes:
What are you wearing?
Then:
Send me a picture.
Then:
Just once. I’ll delete it.
Different words.
Same entitlement.
Pleasure without responsibility.
Because somewhere inside the transaction lurks the old assumption:
you are something to be consumed.
AND WHEN CONSEQUENCES ARRIVE?
You take the emergency pill.
I won’t use a condom.
Why should I?
I have “control.”
I’m an alpha male.
If you become pregnant?
You get the abortion.
My responsibility?
What responsibility?
I am a man.
I have been with many women.
If you suffer an infection, trauma, stigma or consequence—
what can I do?
That is just who I am.
But if you have many relationships?
You are characterless.
If I have many partners?
I am a stud.
A macho man.
Do you want to complain?
To whom?
The law?
The neighbourhood big brother?
The political leader?
The police station?
The courtroom?
Society?
Too often, institutions themselves mirror the prejudices you are fighting.
Go complain to other women.
Even there, patriarchy has trained its own soldiers.
Women themselves may call you shameless, immoral, corrupted.
Even after reading every word of this, some women will still say:
“Women are more to blame.”
Girls should not fly so high.
Girls should know their limits.
And when disaster comes?
Nobody comes.
We men won’t.
OUR MALE EGO IS A STRANGE THING
Durga Puja is coming.
We worship Durga with drums, lights and flowers.
Then we go home and police the women in our families.
Then comes Kali Puja.
We worship Kali—
then explain her tongue by saying she stepped upon her husband and was ashamed.
Even the goddess, we insist, must remember the hierarchy.
The husband is above.
The woman below.
The master.
The obedient one.
We worship the feminine divine in temples—
and discipline living women inside homes.
We put goddesses on pedestals precisely because real women standing beside us as equals make us uncomfortable.
So we keep you indoors.
We control you.
We discipline you.
We suppress you.
And inside the very home we call your safest place, we claim rights over your body.
SO PERHAPS YOU SHOULD STOP BEGGING
Stop asking politely for what should already have been yours.
Stop pleading for dignity.
Stop requesting equality as though equality were charity.
Become Durga.
Become Kali.
Become the fierce force that refuses to bow.
And understand the metaphor correctly:
the weapon you need most is not hatred—it is power.
Economic power.
Legal power.
Political power.
Physical confidence.
Education.
Solidarity.
The ability to say NO without explaining yourself.
The ability to leave.
The ability to earn.
The ability to expose.
The ability to prosecute.
The ability to protect another woman when the mob comes for her.
Stop using persuasion where confrontation is necessary.
Stop extending an empty palm where rights must be claimed.
Do not beg for mercy.
Do not build your freedom on somebody else’s kindness.
Destroy the Raktabija of patriarchy—the monster that reproduces itself every time one form of oppression is defeated but its mindset survives elsewhere.
Kill the entitlement.
Kill the silence.
Kill the shame forced upon victims.
Kill the hypocrisy.
Kill the idea that honour lives between a woman’s legs.
Kill the belief that masculinity means domination.
Kill the system that teaches boys ownership and girls obedience.
Because otherwise neither women nor men will truly be free.
Let the old order die.
Let every rotten idea fall.
And perhaps those who remain standing will finally learn how to live beside women—
not above them.
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