Three women stood at three busy points in Thiruvananthapuram at 10 minutes past midnight on March 3, all alone, with their cell phones bright and shining in front of them. Daring the men and all those who talked ill of women on the streets past a certain hour they deemed right.
Shyni Rajkumar, known biking enthusiast and president of the JCI (Junior Chamber International) Trivandrum Smart City chapter, took the initiative with Liji Sreedhar, a social activist. Joining them was cine artiste Vineetha Deepak. “All three of us are members of JCI. When the night walk for women was done, under the initiative of the government, we felt that we should also be able to do it alone,” says Shyni.
The night walk initiated by the state governmnet for women was done on December 29, the seventh death anniversary of Nirbhaya, the victim of the Delhi rape tragedy of 2012. A group of women had got out of their houses to join the walk, with the support of the police and others.
Shyni and her friends wanted to make a point that this should also be possible when a woman is alone – to be able to walk on the street by herself, without the support of a group. Shyni started from Thampanoor, Lija from Peroorkada and Vineetha from Pattom. All three of them walked for an hour and more and reached Manaveeyam Veedi between 1 and 1.30 am.
“I had a few experiences – autorickshaw drivers seeing me at Thampanoor and offering to take me home, a young man making advances till I told him to go away and started a Facebook Live, another young man riding a bike past me and coming back again and again. Most of these stopped when they saw the Facebook Live. All three of us took FB Lives for the entire journey. What we have noticed is that the men do not approach you when there is a Facebook Live or when there are streetlights. It is mostly in the darker areas that they feel more powerful,” says Shyni.
Not that she wasn’t scared. “I didn’t know what to do if someone approached me with the wrong idea. But I wanted to face it, and now that I did, I know I can do it again.”
The other two women too got stared a lot but few approached them since they walked through areas with more streetlights. Shyni was also offered to be dropped home by another random person on the way who wouldn’t at first accept her answer that she wanted to walk alone.
“I didn’t carry any tools of protection except the phone. The other two carried a pepper spray, a shawl and a blade respectively,” she says. They decided that if anything did look fishy, they’d use their phones to call for help.
The first walk had happened spontaneously and within the JCI. But Shyni would like to extend the invitation to other women and through the less busier roads of the city.
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