Women who wake don't go back to sleep

A new consciousness is erupting amongst women across the country, from the National Centre for the Performing Arts, where The Feminist Conference was held yesterday by She The People and UN Women, to the silently-packed cinema halls that flocked to watch the Bollywood film Pink a couple of weeks ago. From the Muslim women quietly seeking to put their own voices out, on quietly-held placards if that be the only way to get the message across above the din, to those approaching courts against Female Genital Mutilation alongside Triple Talaq, and those seeking entry into Haji Ali or Sabrimala. Support their individual fights or not, women are that demographic now that have seen way too much to unsee.

It was a fuse that was lit when the New Delhi gangrape occurred in 2012, when ordinary housewives and school children took to the streets against a silent administration that used water cannons to quell a fire they thought could be put out. There is no central organisation under which women sit at Jantar Mantar. Instead, women went back to their homes and said 'no more'. They walked out of abusive relationships and marriages, made films, like Shikha Makan's Bachelor Girls, about the lack of rental accommodation for women, like Piku, on being caregivers for the elderly, a role traditionally reserved for sons, and did it with humour, and quirk as much as anger. They built platforms like She Says and Safe City to map street harassment and violence against women. Actors like Kalki Koechlin moved away from sterotyping on celluloid to monologues and roles that reflected their truer selves.

Women didn't pick up guns and throw stones. Women made a simple change in their daily lives: Women simply woke up.

What is the new changed awake Indian woman like? She marches into interview rooms and negotiates for pay. She occupies the public space she needs. She loiters. She decides when she wants to have a child, or not. She makes her life a little bit easier, using technology.

When Monica Ghurde was killed, even brave women felt fear, but shared empathy also with the elderly woman who was also bound and killed in Goa on the very same day, that few media mourned for.

As individuals crowdsource empathetic gynaecologists, and raise women's concerns on social media, or look for what patriarchy does to men, women seem to have stopped relying on official bodies to fix things. Sure the Safe City project is coming, but the CCTVs got caught up in red tape. Women can't wait.

Maybe somethings just need to be women's work to get done. The government can wake up, or not.