Our India and Their India.

Our India.

One in which we discuss if our daughters should be choosing Science or Humanities. One India discusses if a dear daughter looks better in a blue noodle strap top or in a black halter neck dress.
One India is explaining their assets and investments to their children, daughters included.
One India is daughters cheerfully opening champagne bottles to celebrate.
One India is parents dropping their kids and friends (girls and boys) to the club for a dance.
One India has daughters sitting on the kitchen counter, reading out from Chicken Soup for the Teenagers Soul to parents trying some new recipe.
One India has parents sending a daughter for a holiday abroad(/camps/traveling with friends?) on her 17th birthday - alone.
One India is planning driving classes for a soon to be adult child ... a girl, because autos are not safe.
One India sometimes might forget to tell this apple of their eye that their is a world outside, of inferior men who think she is not an equal citizen.

The other India might just accept that molesting can be a debatable topic.

He belongs to the Other India.
He's still stuck in an era where if a woman is beaten by her husband she has probably burnt the rice.
He comes from a era where a woman cannot even dry her under wear where it can be seen.
Where men walk around scratching and shirtless, with an obscenely wrapped lungi, but women must not, cannot even ask for a painkiller for period cramps without pretending a headache.
Where women must bathe in any weather before sun rise because ...
Where it is dangerous to use common toilets at night. Men lurk to wait for some characterless, immoral woman who might need to use these shared loos.

So please do not say these attacks are not against the poor women.
When the privileged ones are attacked the underprivileged become even more vulnerable.

This man comes from Hubli?
So he comes from a place so seeped in Indian culture that women in villages around there still stuff red chili in their children's eyes if they are being troublesome.

When they go for working in the fields they tie (yes like puppies) their two year olds in an open area outside their house so the neighbours and people passing by can watch over them. Generally they are gone for many hours, so they leave water and 'pao' (bun).

When these children are a little older they are sent to cities to work as domestic helpers. So at least they get decent meals.

Where if they really don't like one of their many children the parents just let this child die of neglect.

Where a man only gets rebuked when he tries to burn his sleeping family of five daughters and one son, while they slept. (His wife was threatening to tell his soon to be second wife's parents, that her 37 year husband was not an eligible bachelor.)

If he has grown up near Hubli, it's easy to understand why he doesn't think molesting the girls was wrong.
He cannot be expected to understand that the women who send him those Pink Chaddis do not consider him worthy of a more intellectual debate.

He is not.

Edited to Add: PLEASE THRONG THE STREETS IN YOUR CITIES. CHOOSE VENUES AND REACH THERE. LET'S MAKE THIS VALENTINE DAY, A DAY TO FIGHT FOR OUR SECOND FREEDOM.
REMEMBER TO WEAR PINK (real men can wear pink, only fifth-fail-molesters-can't) TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT FOR THIS PROTEST.