Take back the midnight

Today is women’s day. Yesterday was angry women’s day and tomorrow will be still-angry women’s day. Surely, what
politics ignited in Mangalore has now the potential to become a forest fire — or what Malcolm Gladwell calls the tipping point. It is the critical mass an event requires to become a superevent, the buzz that can survive without hype, and the silence that becomes loud. 

The noise of femininity — or, more appropriately, womanhood — is palpable. In Bangalore, women are determined to live the night (sup and stroll) on women’s day, at one of its busiest areas, to demonstrate the idea of freedom.  It’s a sad reflection on a city that considers itself global in every respect: entrepreneurship, relationship, ITship and BPOship. Indeed, Mangalore has created a moral divide among generations and sexes, revealing the ugly face of society and its lust for tradition. 

In the 1990s, just when Bangalore was revealing its IT baby muscles, Bangalore was not afraid to drink, or raise a toast to, women’s freedom. But as IT brought more women onto its shopfloors and cubicles, the office was being metamorphosed. It was becoming flexible, gender-balanced, relationship-based rather than
hierarchy-driven, and people-centric rather than process-focused. While women may not have everything do with that, they certainly aided the catalysis.  

Industry’s numbers do the talking: as many as 28 per cent of India’s working women are in IT and IT-related services. Nearly 47 per cent of the entry-level recruits are women; women constitute 30 per cent of the IT workforce today but are likely to touch 45 per cent in 2010. Significantly, more than 10 per cent of the women are in top roles. 

That’s what’s happening in IT workplaces. But the changing ratios, and economic independence of women, are impacting lifestyles. They are changing the dynamic of shopping, eating and entertaining. How do the guardians of law react to this newfound freedom?

Are they aware of the changing social and economic configurations in society? Are they insensitive and indifferent to this equality that has been accelerated by IT? Is the IT woman a social anomaly or is she a modern reality?  

Even as the world has changed in offices, and rightfully so, the world around is changing at a snail’s pace for the modern woman. It is a frustrating pace, pushed ahead by economic opportunity and pulled back by social tension. It is not enough to celebrate a women’s day; we should have a women’s season every year, says a social activist.  
Even then, it’s an individual effort. As artist Karen Moller writes: “Yet, even in my day at a young age I recognised that my own mother’s secret wants and dreams had nothing to do with having children, the new fridge, or the TV. In fact, her lack of participation in what she thought of as real life said, if you do not step out of line, you are going to end up like me, a frustrated housewife.” 

Little wonder then that a global campaign, Take Back The Night, has found traction in Bangalore. Women are talking about it, reinventing it, and localising it. In essence, as Bangalore-based writer CK Meena puts it, it is about testing, and pushing, the limits of freedom. “The more I pushed, the stronger I felt. The limits I set for myself were my own, not imposed on me.”  

But unless you step into a woman shoes to find out where the society pinches, you won’t catch the social drift. Says Bangalore-based telly journalist Maya Sharma: “Perhaps most men — and there are honourable exceptions — cannot really comprehend what it is for a woman to feel fear to walk alone.

Until that comprehension comes about, it looks as if a totally safe Bangalore for women lies in their dreams alone.”  
But is the problem Bangalore’s alone? Certainly not. A growing
urban India faces this nightmare in different shades. If Take Back

The Night has stirred Bangalore, maybe Take Back The Afternoon will provoke Delhi. And in Mumbai, where women are relatively safe, the chant may centre around Take Back The Midnight. 

Whatever the slogans and the chants, it’s time Bangalore gifts the night to its better half. It’s time the global city stalks, and
accosts, its fears.