“No place you can call home, no one you can call your own.”

It seems as if school-level debates have lost their ground or, if I may say, have cracked the ground open. If I had known that this is the kind of society I would grow up to be a part of, all those arguments and rebuttals would have been for nothing. 

Discussing the plight of stateless refugees, a renowned political theorist, Hannah Arendt remarked, “One ought to have a right to have rights.” She asserts that former (i.e., citizenship rights) is a necessary prerequisite for obtaining basic human rights. However, in my country, this idea follows a crass inversion: despite holding the status of a valued citizen, violations of human dignity remain a pervasive reality.

As I flip through the peculiarly scented, 20-page-long newspaper in the morning—a supposedly fresh start to a new day—I am almost certain to spot yet another account of 'rape and attempted murder'—the same old ghastly deed, just printed in varying font sizes. Sometimes it’s large, covering almost one-third of the entire front page, or if it hasn't garnered much attention, it's cramped somewhere in a trivial corner of the subsequent pages.

Fourteen years after the horrific Nirbhaya case, such acts have become normalized as part of daily news reporting, until the nation awaits the next shocking sequel.

I sincerely hope that I never come to the day when I must say, 'A crime is committed the day a little girl takes her first breath in this nasty circle of life!'

Article 19(1): The right to expression and peaceful protest. Immediately, I pose a simple question to my mom, “Who in this world is even playing fair and square?” She responds thoughtfully, “Even the sex chromosome has an unfair advantage in determining its place in the embryo."

And not many years later, one body gets to take control and become strong at the expense of the other. Add a few more years, and one mind becomes so deviously psychotic that the other has to bear the brunt of it.

In no way am I implying that my existence would suddenly find purpose if I had been born a cis male. What I'm alluding to is an unspoken understanding that none of us chose to co-exist as different genders on this planet. But while we do, one of us has to deliberately exercise restraint so that a few more of us can lead dignified lives both within and outside the confines of four walls.

We've come so far—78 years on the timeline. But we're still far from truly achieving independence!

The funny (read: sickening) part is that I'm still holding on to a bleak sense of 'hope' because, fortunately or unfortunately, I've been raised to fight the problem rather than run away from it, and never to give up on the people and things I love.

And India—she's one of them on that list.