All of us have rights. Our very existance is cause enough for us to have these rights and some of the things that go against these basic rights are violence and discrimination.
We have an online voice that will help us tackle both in India. Fight-back.net is an online petition to bring about a "Radical Change in Indian Rape Laws"
The site allows you to sign up a petition. The excerpt below gives you a few of the things the site stands for:
* The Definition of Rape. Merely because a woman does not put up a fight, it does not mean that the act was consensual.
* The Punishment. Ten years to do time is hardly punishment for rape, considering the heinous nature of the offence.
Life imprisonment at the minimum, and death penalty at the maximum should be the plausible punishments.
To read the rest of the petition click here.
You may wonder why we are putting this up on a mostly tech site? We are in an era where social activism is now online, and what you say and think reflects in the nature of your online activities.
There have been heinous crimes against women in the past in India and we really need the online community to be more sensitive about what is happening in the current social scenario. Just recently I came across the following video. Not only did it make my blood boil, it makes me unhappy that I live in a world where people think it is their right to do ill to others.
It's time we changed, and along with us our society. The pink chaddi campaign has slowly mellowed down and disappeared in the background, I hope this campaign continues and brings out some change to the world we live in.
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Death Penalty is practiced only in India, the United States and some Islamic Nations. Most of the developed world has done away with the death penalty because it is considered uncivilized. I tend to agree with this. It is not for you or any government to take a life.
If you want to deliver justice, I think the death penalty is being very lenient of the criminal.
More than the people who are involved in the heinous act of molesting a woman in public view, I'd rather the people in the media be prosecuted and beheaded in full public view for showing it repeatedly.
I wonder if technology is really helping us or snatching away privacy from our lives! Every second day a new channel comes up and does its own thing. Somebody starts it and the others just follow suit blindly.
And what are we doing? We're just sitting and watching, and let our blood boil? I wonder how it's going to help. If nobody watches such visuals and circulate the clippings on the Net/ MMS, etc, why will anyone show such things?
Why will there be rape scenes in every bloody movie that is being made? Because it's titillation. Because all said and done, we're all perverts in some way, and all these things appeal to our basic instincts.
Isn't it time we changed our mindset towards crime and violence in general (not particularly the crimes against women alone which obviously are sensationalized as entertainment) and learn to say NO to a few unwanted things?