Aruna is an 8-year-old girl.
Lives in a low-income settlement.
They pick their battles.
Last week, on a coffee meeting with Vanesa Rocha Lopes, she asked this serious question. An average Indian Woman undergoes violence and harassment. It happens in her family/society/community. Why wouldn’t she complain about it?
We discussed it from Aruna’s perspective(name changed). Aruna is an 8-year-old girl and I know her for the last 5 years. She lives in a low-income settlement in Madurai. Small houses, shared toilets, a lot of people and noise goes unsaid.
For her age, she has already seen the rough ends of people. She grows up witnessing trouble between two neighbors, their daily fights, verbal abuse, physical assault, and everything around. She grows up witnessing an alcoholic father ill-treating her mother.
She grows up seeing the loan sharks insulting her grandmother. She witnesses senior teachers shouting at the young lady teachers in her school. A teen boy passing comments on her and her elder sister is something she already knows to handle.
She also knows there is another world where children of her age travel in Air-conditioned no-noise buses to schools. She accepts she doesn’t belong to that world. Her acceptance of the status quo is so strong, she doesn’t aspire to be somewhere else.
As she grows, what do you expect her to become? Most Aruna’s accept the vulnerabilities related to growing up in a lesser privileged community. It stays with them.
They don’t fight back for everything. Those who fight back for everything lose an opportunity to be part of that community. They pick their battles.
An ‘opportunity to complain’ is a privilege!
What do you think?
-This post was originally published in our co-founder Krishnan’s LinkedIn page
