So I was at this wonderfully comfortable place today... mostly women and a few token men... and we were all sitting and talking about being feminists... and the usual concerns about being identified as a feminist were raised and the answers were mostly the ones that I had evolved to form in my head for myself (and by that virtue possessing some sort of longer staying power)

Towards the end however, a woman told us her story. Of how she was subjected to having people question her about the way she was dressed and how she was probably guilty for the advances made and for the time when a man broke into her room.

Now, the outline of the story has been played and replayed so many times that it has become monotonously trite. But at that moment it all came alive, filling in the gaping outline, was the real and the physical, the woman who stood there while people passed judgements on her and her body.

And suddenly, women were reborn in my head.

Forgotten for the past two years. Their body and the struggle to reclaim that space forever and continuously. Forgotten in the power of being a journalist.

I do not claim for journalism the higher ideals of equality. Like much of the world outside, it sucks and aint that great a place for women.

But it did something for me. It took away from me the shackles of worry of my physical safety. I remember riding home at eleven on my two-wheeler on national highways and open fields, having imaginary conversations with creepy men who would accost me midway. I would tell them that I am a journalist. That I know the area politician. That they would be in big trouble if they tried to mess with me. And in my head, they would run away in fear at hearing these powerful things.

My most cherished moment as a woman journalist came at this chief minister's city tour that i was assigned to cover. Now, wherever the cm went, huge crowds gathered. huge crowds of men. some of my women colleagues decided to opt out of the field trip and sit in our bus. but since i was always uncomfortable acknowledging limits of my gender, i went.

i went and i stood amidst hundreds of men. a woman in a crowd. nah... a huge, huge crowd. but automatically, there was space around me. people jostled and pushed, but never in that one hour that i stood, never was there an "innocuous brush", a prying finger, a humiliating groping.

i felt safe. for the first time, i felt safe in a crowd of men. i didnt have to move my body in those obvious, non-obvious ways we do, to protect myself, i didnt have to look out for suspect men, i didnt have to worry about a hundred little and big things i would otherwise have been worried to death about. i just had to do my job of covering an event and i did without worrying about being me, a woman.

i m not saying here that my safety was a result of being journalist alone. but it is the power i commanded because there was a whole battalion of people out there, police included, who were there for me. who stood as my shield.

this sort of safety, much flawed maybe, i can only dream about, having left the profession for a while. but. but imagine a world where this safety were possible. where we lived not afraid that we were women, but content in that we were women.