Stand Together

Yesterday during the sermon, Pastor Sandeep flashed a slide which was a news paper article from the Deccan Chronicle with the heading "3 girls are raped every day in Andhra Pradesh". We all know that those are the numbers that the police have. We can't say what the real number is.  As I was going home from church, I was thinking what kind of men would commit such a crime. The answer came to me in the evening when I was returning home from my guitar class. I was in  a fully packed 7 seater auto. This auto has a seating capacity of only 12 people including the driver. But in most cases at all times there are more than 20 people, standing and hanging in these 7 seaters. It so happened that there were all women within the compartment and only one man. This man was drunk and he was breathing down upon me and another girl sitting next to me. We continually asked him to stand straight. He moved a little when we began asking the driver to ask this person the get off.  At the next...

There is something about these old ladies that takes me by surprise. I know one such special lady. She is one of my co-passengers in bus number 572, Secunderabad to Rajapet (Nalgonda), one of the district to district buses. She gets into the bus form the ECIL bus terminus and buys a ticket to Rajapet, the last stop of the bus. She mostly sits next to me and out of curiosity I once  happened to ask her how far Rajapet was. She told me that if she gets a bus at 7 in the evening from ECIL she would reach Rajapet comfortably by 10 pm. Comfortably one long journey! This lady looks uneducated and she is. She looks like any other telugu village woman. An old cotton Sari (unstarched) tied so high that her ankles are clearly visible, a blouse that doesnt match the colour of the Sari, dishevelled white hair, a pair of very heavy gold earrings not taken off for a quarter of a century, no footwear and a walking stick is the best desription I can give of her. One day I asked her about her earrings....