Is India becoming the New Afghanistan ?

For the last decade, India has been called a developing nation, and it is also claimed that maybe by 2047 we'll officially become a developed country like the U.S. and U.K.  And for that, we've started to feel really proud of our country for quite a few years and believe that India has developed a lot over the past few decades.

But the actual question is: has it? Have we actually developed as a country, or just trying to hide behind a facade of new tech innovations and trying to call it development? Let's be honest, we might not realize it, but we never had the basic amenities that we have the right to have as citizens of a country, which include a lot of factors like cleanliness, a good traffic management system, clean food, fresh air, and many other facilities that many countries in the world usually have. 

But I guess we sort of made our peace with all this and tried to ignore all these things till it came to our safety. And by safety, it's mainly the safety of women in our country. The steps taken by the government to make the women of our country safer- or wait, are there actually any steps? Honestly, I don't remember the government or us as a country doing any damn thing to make the other half of the population safe instead of just separating the women from men. Starting girls' colleges, girls' schools, introducing separate women's coaches in the metro, and whatnot. But has this made any improvement or just worsened the whole situation in a deep-rooted manner? 

Doing all this, putting restrictions on the women of the country, is just making the men more confident; it's giving them the validation that they're right. They did not do anything wrong by catcalling, molesting, or raping the girl. In fact, it was the fault of the woman- maybe her clothes, maybe how she behaved, or why she went out in the first place, or why she did not retaliate enough, and a lot more. And you know the most disappointing fact of all time: all these accusations made on the victim about her clothes, her actions, her behavior are made by a "woman" a lot of times. It's the women of our country that act as torchbearers of the deep-rooted patriarchy that's become so ingrained even in our upbringings that, mostly in houses if there are two kids - a boy and a girl- their tasks are sort of segregated based on their gender. The girl helps the mother, and the boy maybe does a little bit of outside work or, even worse, the boy doesn't do anything at all, mainly. This upbringing, this is where the "problems" of all the causes arise; this kind of upbringing gives a kind of superiority complex in the boys from a very young age. How the parents don't say no to any of the demands their boy makes gives the guy that ego of never liking "no" as an answer from anyone. 

Women are literally half of the population of the country, still always treated like a secondary person. No matter how educated or skilled a woman is, there has always been some incident in her life where she wished she was a man, and that's the saddest thing ever. Women literally live a whole different life in comparison to men, a life of constant fear and stress: fear of whether the outfit is too revealing, why is that man staring at me, why is he following me, why did the cab driver take a different route, what if it gets late, and a thousand billion more questions that each and every woman in this country asks herself daily, and believe me, it's exhausting, exhausting as hell! 

As a girl who graduated from an all-girls college, I never experienced a world like this before. A world where you were not judged by your gender first; you were not given work based on whether you were a man or a woman; a world where I could wear my favorite outfit without having anyone staring at me constantly; a world where everyone was given opportunities based on their skills and not their gender; a world where so many different kinds of women from literally every part of the country had the best possible education. I genuinely give a lot of credit for the person I've become to the fact that I was a part of an all-girls college where I got to meet some of the smartest, wisest, and most confident women. 

Being a Delhi University student, I know it is literally the dream of so many students to take admission in Delhi University. Especially one of the best colleges like LSR is on the list of every girl who wants to study in DU. But did we ever imagine that more than a dream, it can become a nightmare for the girls when they get admission to such a prestigious college like LSR? Buses, metros, roads, shops, and literally every other place that felt unsafe to most of the women out there still never imagined in their worst nightmare that a place that was once a safe space, that gave them the voice they needed, that gave them the freedom of choice, the freedom of speech, and the confidence they always lacked, "that safe space" would eventually turn into the same world they always were a part of. It felt like the same household where they were the ones having to face all the restrictions. More than restrictions, they were given this illusion of choice, and the options were "education" or "safety". 

Now, when we think of a developed India by 2047, and the slogan for that goes something like "Everything For Everyone" "Everyone For Everything", clearly written by a man, because as a woman living in this country and also knowing the opinion of a lot of other women, I can very confidently say that the everyone means just "men", because nothing as such happened for the women in this country apart from just making separate buses and metros for them, which is not the solution. The women are not some different species who need to be kept away from men to be protected; in fact, there should be some serious, quick, and strict actions against the criminals, against the people who do the catcalling regularly, and the rapists who commit the crime, instead of locking up the girls. 

As citizens of the country, we need to be sensible about this critical situation: this whole scenario, these regular cases, this matter of safety, is affecting the whole country, not just the women but each and every one of us, and to actually bring a change, all of us need to take action as a unit, as a whole.