India Of my Dreams -- Episode 5: Safety

 Hi… I am Ayaan.

And this week, I cannot write a soft story.

While the internet spent days trolling an actor for not fitting the role of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, something else was happening. Something that had nothing to do with cinema. Something that shook me — and an entire city — to the core.

A three-year-old girl went to see a calf in a shed.

That was all she wanted. A child's curiosity. A small, innocent moment.

It was her last.

She was brutally raped and murdered by a 65-year-old man.

I am sitting in Bangalore reading this on my phone. And I don't have words for what I feel. Anger. Disgust. A helplessness that I don't know what to do with.

The city of Pune erupted.

People came out on the streets. Some demanded he be hanged. Some demanded something older — the punishment Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj once gave to those who dishonored women. Hands. Legs. Gone. A lifetime of consequence for a lifetime of damage caused.

I won't tell you whether that is right or wrong. That is not my pla

ce.

But I understood the feeling behind it.

Because someone needs to answer this question —

Who gave him the right?

Who gave any person the right to treat a child — a three-year-old child — as if her life meant nothing? As if she was not a person but an object to be used and discarded?

Two people struggle for years. They build a life. They have a child. They pour everything into that child.

And then one person — one decision — ends all of it.

And then I kept reading.

Because it didn't stop there.

The same week — a grandfather in Pune tried to rape his own granddaughter. People caught him. She survived. Barely.

And in Ghaziabad — another child. Four years old. Raped and killed. The accused was later killed in a police encounter.

Three incidents. One week. Three little girls.

I sat with that for a long time.

Did the encounter in Ghaziabad bring justice? Maybe some felt it did. Maybe for a moment it felt like the right answer.

But the question that won't leave me is this —

Are daughters in India truly safe?

Not in theory. Not on paper. Not in speeches.

In reality. In sheds. In homes. In the hands of people who were supposed to be family.

I know people leave this country for exactly this reason. They go somewhere they feel their daughters will be safer. I understand that now in a way I didn't before.

But I also know — I have to believe — that this will change.

Not because I am naive. But because the alternative — accepting that this is simply how things are — is something I refuse to do.

We need a system that creates genuine fear before the act. Not punishment that comes years later after appeals and delays and headlines that have already moved on. Fear that exists before someone even thinks about crossing that line.

And we need to look at ourselves too.

At how we talk about women. At how we look at them. At whether we have quietly — without meaning to — taught the people around us that a woman's body is something other than her own.

Because monsters don't appear from nowhere.

They grow in silence.

In cultures that look away. In systems that move slowly. In societies that outrage for a week and forget by the next.

The India of my dreams is not a complicated vision.

It is simply one where a three-year-old can go see a calf in a shed —

and come home.

That's it.

That's the dream.

And until that is reality — we are not done.

— Ayaan | And I am still learning, one hard truth at a time. 

Outrage is easy. Prevention is work. And that work belongs to all of us.

More Dreams To Come...