Silent No More

To not be skipped by any male, while hands are being shaken.

My original, full article whose edited version appears in the Kathmandu Post of September 21, 2014

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Let me begin this rant by recalling a small incidence that took place around this time last year.

A meme was posted by Facebook page of Mahabir Pun, whose caption read "girls have tension about Teej and dar, boys have tension about the ticket price of Nepal vs Afghanistan game". It was the time of Teej and also Nepal Cricket Team was playing in home ground against Afghanistan. If it was pages like 9GAG or others posting such stuff, I would not have cared. But coming from a page of such an esteemed personality who I diligently follow, I cannot even begin to say how offensive and inappropriate I found this post to be. I, along with a few other "outrageous girls" promptly commented on it and this post was later removed. I am sure Mahabir Pun was not the one posting it and whoever posted it just meant to cash in on the occasion without any "harm" intended. But the fact that, anybody would find such a crude and sexist meme to be fit for posting shows that we still have this cheap sense of humor where anything sexist is meant to be "funny" and not personal. A few male members had pointed it out as such in reply to our comments.

Around the same time, there was this big front page advertisement in a national paper for Father's Day which read "A father is a girl's first love and a boy's first hero"!

Only a few months ago, someone from my college posted a Facebook status which in essence meant that "engineers who succeed were dumped by their girl friends in second semester"!

My college buddy made it clear that the engineer post was not meant to be "personal" when I pointed out gently that his post was offensive to me-being a female engineer and all. Similarly, a friend assured me that the Father's Day advert was meant to be harmless, and that I should not waste my time fuming over such trifle issues.

These seemingly harmless yet disconcerting public display of insensitivities takes me back to my college days when I was an undergraduate engineering student.

Those were the pre-Jana Andolan days, a time when to come across as champion of gender equality, all you had to do was recite "for me, there are only two castes in the world - men and women" without indulging in the status difference of  these two "caste" in Nepali society.

On my first week of college, one of the first comments that a male classmate had made to me was, why I was here studying engineering even though I was a girl! Never mind that this "girl" was the one who had helped him navigate a difficult step in computer lecture just a while ago. This was my first experience of such a vocal outrageous comment right in my face. May be I should have asked him why he did not understand such simple computer trick because being male-shouldn't it have been hard wired in his brain already by Divinity itself?

But I was too flabbergasted to even reply. A dumb "huh" from my face must have come across as "you are totally right-I have no idea" to him because he would keep repeating this comment to other girls. But this was only the beginning. Within my four years, I would be subject to many such sexist comments, observations, and treatments not only from my fellow students but sometimes even from male faculties-all of which would primarily suspect and often deny my capability as a female to succeed in the "male" domain of Engineering. A little example, when I was the first and only one to solve a particularly hard question during one assessment, the first reaction of the teacher was disbelief-after that denial. While discussing the question in class later, he gave a male student the credit of being the first one to have solved it through his "assistance". I couldn't be acknowledged, because like my friend had so reminded me in the first week "I was a girl and could not do engineering sums". Even when the class was murmuring that I was the one who solved it and without any "assistance" at that, he never relinquished.

Engineering is merited as one of the most prestigious disciplines in Nepal-we were the "cream of the country" as our lecturers liked to remind us again and again. Yet it is also an institution that fosters the patriarchal notion of male supremacy, and often within the University no one questions or challenges it. Every female engineering graduate I know has gone through the experience of being looked down during her student years by her own classmates - because of her sex.

Sheryl Sandberg says in her book Lean In that she too feared of being labeled as feminist at some point in her life. I myself let go of so many moments, so many instances-because I wanted to fit in. Instances where I raised my voice, friends would pacify me with "don't take it personally" lines. So many instances where we felt discrimination crop up but remained silent, fearing the label, fearing we would be left without any friends. We feared of being ostracized from our college "cool" circle if we pursued such matters. 

Jana Andolan happened during our senior year. The issue of gender had begun to be raised more vocally and fiercely in national discourse. When we graduated I breathed with relief that I would never have to deal with such concentrated sexism any longer. When I started work, changed my major more or less and then dawdled on my own for a bit between Nepal and US, I mistook my own blissful absence from society as a sign of lessening sexism and chauvinism. What added to my misreading, were the issues making headway nationally as well after post Spring Uprising-the issue of Gender being one of the most prominent. So, for a time being I thought things were changing dramatically for the better. So when I came back home, I waited to finally not be skipped by any male when hands were being shaken. But when I am still skipped during handshakes, when a regular basis I encounter sexism off and online, when I am writing this rant with a vehemence in my brain, I know that things haven't really changed that much.

Kathmandu is to me the metropolitan - of innumerable males on street who zoom on in you, trying to jostle you, touch you and invade your space. I learnt to have my fists ready by my side when I walk in its crowd from my teenage days, and do so to this day. I have never felt safe,  never felt totally content and free while walking in its street. It's a thing to laugh off during casual talk, but imagine for a second how it feels to never be relaxed,  never secure, never safe, never free.

To this day and age, I'm still going through those same experiences. Only now, I've realized this sexist mindset transcends discipline, is rampant everywhere in Nepal-from a small village to social media sphere, and is not something that will be cleansed by one Andolan. And also not something which will cease to exist if I ignore it, or remained silent about it.