Victim of street harassment

Dear Sir,

I am a 50-year-old woman and I am under medication for high blood pressure. My doctor has advised me to walk for at least  an hour a day. Since the weather is fine in Doha now, I have started walking from my office on the C Ring Road to my house in the Mansoura area. At my pace it takes me an hour to reach home.
I leave my office early, trying to reach my home before it gets dark. Despite this precaution, I had a bad experience the other day, which came as a shock to me.
When I had almost reached my home that day, a youth, maybe in his 20s, approached me, addressing me: “Hi, madam!”
I didn’t respond to him and walked on, ignoring him. But the guy would not leave me alone; he still came after me, now calling me, “Sister”. I further ignored him but then he started talking to me in Hindi.... I turned around and shouted at him, saying that I would call the police if he continued to pester me. I could see the fear in his face now. After a pause, he asked me for direction to Al Meera. But I knew his intentions were not pure; there were many people on the road at the time and if he had wanted directions, he could easily have asked any one of them, not a single woman walking alone.
I have heard about isolated incidents like this before and I wish that we should make it clear to such mischievous people that ill-intentioned behaviour like this will not be tolerated in this country.
I am not a woman who dresses skimpily or provocatively; I wear fully-covered dresses.
The incident will not prevent me from walking again, however. But I will be more on guard.  I now keep my mobile phone ready to take a photo of people who pester me and will immediately alert the police.
Regular police patrol in “sensitive” areas would deter such miscreants, I feel.

Rekha Mahesh, (e-mail address supplied)

Article ignores core issue

Dear Sir,

A K B Krishnan’s detailed comment, titled “Incredible India or Incredibly intolerant India” (Gulf Times, December 2), is nothing but a futile attempt to glorify the irrelevant part of a recent speech made by Bollywood actor Amir Khan. It is sad to note that more than a quarter of a page in Gulf Times is dedicated to such a fringe issue related to  a significant topic touching the  ground realities in contemporary India while neglecting the spirit of Khan’s speech.
It is not necessary for Khan to resign from his position of India’s “tourism ambassador”  to express his feelings and opinions on the country’s social coherence, especially when its constitution guarantees  the right of freedom of expression as a citizen’s democratic right.   
We have no illusion that the writer is unaware of the very reason of repeated messages of  Indian President  Pranab Mukherjee who reminded the country’s government and people  of  the importance of tolerance, secularism and of protecting pluralism.  It would be relevant to observe here that Mukherjee is the head of state but that title did not prevent him from expressing his implicit disapproval and criticism of the growing intolerance among different sections of people.  In addition, he even  raised alarm  about the increasing disquiet in India that harms its pluralistic social fabric. But no observer of the Indian society felt along the same lines as your correspondent that he should have resigned from presidency first before making such comments.   
The point is that the title or position one holds in a country need not prevent him from making an honest internal criticism about a malaise growing within the nation.  Besides this, the world at large is aware of the reaction from prominent writers, scholars and scientists of India by returning their certificates of recognition as a protest to growing intolerance and negligence of the government to curb it.  
Even the Reserve Bank of India governor (a non-political position) has raised voice against the tendencies of disunity being fostered in the country.  So Khan is not the only one who has voiced concern over  and shared his views on the hatred being bred between communities which engenders a feeling of insecurity among minority groups.
In fact it would get us nowhere by evaluating how Khan assuaged the feeling of his wife to continue to stay in India.  Instead, it would have been brilliant if the analysis could have shed light on what made them and other prominent figures to think and react in the same way, rather than analysing what Khan had told his wife in their private conversation.

Saheer Rahman, (Address supplied)

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