Yesterday when I was travelling from Panvel to my home by a local bus, enjoying my window seat (which is a delight for a daily train commuter), a chaos going in the bus caught my attention. A woman, thirty something, with her daughter around 12 yrs old was fighting with a man. After few moments, I realized that the man was sitting on a seat being reserved for women. When the man didn’t budge she asked the conductor to ask the man to give her seat, the conductor instead of saying anything to that man, he was asking convincing the woman that since he was the first to board the bus, he will get the seat and not her.
Now the man who was sitting on the women seat was defending himself by saying the other women who were standing are not complaining about it. I just looked at the other women standing in the bus and realized that most of them were illiterate and none of them was even aware that there are few seats being reserved for women.
It’s so disgusting that the men didn’t even bother to offer her a seat which is being reserved and he started abusing her, saying how indecent and impolite she is by asking the men to get up from the seat. Eventually after a huge fight, woman finally got a seat.
Looking at this incident what I realized was the woman was fighting for the right that was given to her. Here it was just a matter of a man sitting on the seat being reserved for women.
There are many places in India, where women working in a agricultural fields/construction sites, to name a few areas of work, are paid lesser wages compared to men as its considered that women are weaker and they cannot today strenuous work. These women are working with men in the scorching sun and working equally hard as men but still deprived of their rights.
This reminded me of an article which I had read a couple of months back which stated, Renuka Chaudhary when she was the Health and Welfare Minister had made provision for providing monthly pension to widow women who are not being looked after by their family or dumped by their family members. But no one was aware of it. (Even I as women was not aware had such a provision existed until I read that article).
There is so of much of injustice being done against women. We will have few debates; chat shows on these topics…after then are there any actions being taken? Are the suggestions or views of the people really taken into account? Or are we became used to such incidents ….Or have we became so selfish that we want to leave a comfy and cozy life let whatever happen to rest of the world and sleep over it?
