There has been a sickening regularity about it.  New Year’s Eve, young women just wanting to have a good time at some of the popular watering holes in the cities across India, letting their hair down if you will.  Suddenly, a bunch of men materialize out of some dark shadows and start pawing and groping them with an astounding sense of entitlement.  It doesn’t matter that there are so many otherwise nice people around, but nobody is coming forward to help these women as if paralyzed with some primordial notion of shame, complicit somehow in their own debasement.  I often wonder what sort of sexual frustration raging inside these ruffians that even a hint of skin on the opposite sex can turn them into a depraved animal.  Every time something as gross as this happens, it kind of strikes a terrible blow against every other decent man that I know.  I don’t even want to get into any discussion about what those women were wearing or how they were conducting themselves.  If these men can’t control their libido, it’s their problem and not women’s, who have got every right to dress, party and do whatever they would like to do at any hour of the day or night.  What kind of a beast would try to get physical with anyone without their express consent!  The coercion, the violence, and the ugliness is absolutely nauseating.

   I hope that women in India will not take this as a sign of times to come and cower in fear and make themselves invisible.  I want quite the opposite.  I would dearly like to see more than more women coming out in numbers at all hours of day and night everywhere wearing anything that catches their fancy.  All of you must claim your public place without any fear or apprehension.