I am sad. I am sad because Anushka Sharma is being joked about as she attended a match to support her beau and the latter didn’t score as well as he does usually. I am sad because Instagram has taken down the photo of a girl who’s on her period. I am sad because a bunch of men were shamelessly ogling at a woman who was breastfeeding her baby on flight. And I am sad because four young women (who happen to be the leading ladies of the most popular youth show on Indian television today, Kaisi Yeh Yaariyan) were eve-teased by some collegians while they were shooting for their show in a college in Mumbai.
I feel so bogged down when such incidents happen around me. But they keep happening all the time. While some women put up with this sh*t and choose to keep mum, there are also some gutsy women who dare to give it back to the ones who unnecessarily target them for being… women. And that’s exactly how Nandini aka Niti Taylor, Navya aka Veebha Anand, Mukti aka Charlie Chauhan and Aalia aka Krissann Barretto have reacted after being mistreated by a bunch of boys.
It seems the team of Kaisi Yeh Yaariyan was shooting for an important sequence in the college along with Sunny Leone. Reportedly, the episode that was being filmed there, was all about women raising their voice against slut-shaming. So the four female protagonists organize a slut walk, where they walk the ramp in short clothes, asserting that every girl has the right to wear anything that she wants to. The were also joined by the lead actors, Dishank Arora, Parth Samthaan, Ayaz Ahmed and Utkarsh Gupta during the sequence.
But apparently, a few engineering students from the same college started passing lewd remarks at the girls during the shoot. Naturally, the girls were in for a rude shock. So they asked the boys to shut up and walked away.
Now, considering their entire episode is about slut-shaming and supposedly, that’s exactly what happened with them, it could be a promotional gimmick too. Especially, because recently, we reported how Kritika Kamra slapped Rajeev Khandelwal when he had tried to kiss her. And that turned to be a publicity stunt for their upcoming show. But I’d like to believe that it’s not because this subject is quite sensitive and I’m sure that the TV PRs know better.
So here’s to the girls for standing up and speaking up against the boys who eve-teased them. You go girls!