Imagine

Imagine, if you will, a world where women are not treated like possessions.

Imagine a time when bride prices are a forgotten term, when language professors will puzzle over the meaning of terms like "eve-teasing" and "honour killing" because their usage has no currency.

Imagine a time when anything that is fine for a boy to do is appropriate for a girl to do too.

Imagine a time when the only time we tell our mothers and wives and sisters and daughters what they should wear is when it is raining outside and they haven't noticed and are going out without their raincoats.

Imagine a time when film students will wonder how songs picturised around the glorification of sexual harassment ever found an audience, how the stars and the makers of those movies ever got rich and famous instead of ridiculed and scorned.

Imagine a polity where 'leaders' who make primitive sexist statements are hounded out of public life.

Imagine a society where rapists, not the raped, are shunned, disgraced and have their lives ruined.

Better still, imagine a time when rape is something that no longer happens.

Imagine being the generation that made it possible, by raising their voices, by being the change instead of demanding it, by being furious with the government (and rightly so) and the politicians (and rightly so) and the police (and rightly so), but also recognising that they, my generation and the ones before us, let it be possible for venal people to flourish and perpetuate these horrors, and by screaming out loud and long, enough!

We couldn't. You can. Imagine that.