Lions and Deers

This place isn’t safe. It's just that they cage the prey so the predator cannot attack it. It's funny how we cage the lions but not the men. We wish to leave the beautiful deer to frolic around the wild, trusting it that it knows to protect itself but despite being the civilized animals that we have evolved into, we still can't trust 50% of us.

I was 17 when I first stepped out of my home to know and explore the world, learn and create new things and was full of optimism. My parents have always been liberals, feminists and practical. So, as a naïve child, I thought that is how the world would be, where equality prevailed, sanity existed, and people could freely see and act against the absurdities. This is how I was brought up and this is how I expected everyone to be. But this was all just the wash of the eye that my parents had done for me, a fake world where crimes existed but far away from me; where my ears and eyes where shut as soon as any atrocity took place; a world which was comfortable, easy to live in, full of flowers and freedom. Since my parents meant everything to me, I thought that if they can give me freedom and trust that I will not misuse it, who in the world can stop me. But this first step outside enraged me. I wasn’t the same as a 17 years old boy. In fact, I wasn’t even equal to a 13 years old boy, with him being superior to any girl. “Don’t argue, he can wear that and go out because he is a boy”, was what I heard the first time I experienced the embarrassment of being a girl. It was just my first week out and this is what my parents had left me to? “But I’m informing you before I leave, I’m just going to collect my food and come back and I’ve worn such clothes all my life” was my reply. The security lady stared at my legs as I stared at the guys outside the gate who walked happily wearing muscle tees and shorts. I pointed at him and said he was revealing more than me, to which the statement in discussion was the answer. My brain could not interpret how the lady, being a woman herself, was stopping another girl from being treated equally in the society. Did she never feel the need for it? Had she not ever felt bad for not being treated the same as her counter gender? How could you be this ignorant and shamelessly give out such statements? I couldn’t make any sense of it and my rage had taken over me so I never had a peaceful conversation about it with her. Gradually I succumbed to the rules of living in this protective world and understood the plight of that lady. She never knew she was the same as any man she knew. She was completely unaware of her power, strengths, capabilities and rights. All she must have been taught about were “the rules”. But this poor uneducated and blinded lady was the authority that I had to follow and so I weakened myself, let go of the magic in my stride, the potential of my liberty and the equality of womanhood.

It's been two years, I still complain but never fight or act. I see that I’ve unwillingly become a part of this. Today, almost two years after that, a man (the security at the same gate) told me, “The future for girls is going to get more and more horrifying” as he went on to compare the nineteen years old me to his 'nine years old' self. But how had his thought process never taken the path which asked questions like, “why would the man become even more hunting for someone who is just the same as him? And if he does become so, why isn’t he tamed or rather, told about what is wrong with his attitude?”. Maybe education is that path which provides the clarity to ask these questions. Leaving his thoughts aside, he is just doing what he is paid for, stopping us from leaving after 7 because this is what he was told to do and when he tried making sense about it, his brain gave him the answer he gave me. Hence it is the educated commanding authorities who have made these rules whose thought process does not take “the turn”. So, I quietly agree yet again that I am not a lioness comparable to the lions. I am the deer, who shall be protected, who comes below the lion in the food chain, who shall always just be seen as mere food by the lions.