One of the most difficult things to do is to speak the truth. What’s even more difficult? To first accept the truth. I don’t know if any of you have seen the Kinley Commercial (I’ll link it at the end as part of this post anyway), when I first saw it on TV, all I could think was ‘this requires some guts’. Thankfully, the incident shown in the commercial is only concerned with individuals. There are bitterer truths that concern the society, let alone individuals. Most of us are good at speaking or writing about them, if not doing anything else. Definitely this is not a concrete way to solve any problem, but it can very well be the beginning of bringing awareness. I am pretty sure that by now most of us are aware of the PM’s ‘Clean India’ campaign. As of now, I haven’t done much to contribute to it apart from the fact that I already take care that I don’t litter around in public places (and ask people to not to) etc. But apart from the physical rubbish that we have in India (and most of us are quite capable of adding to the pile, we all have known that one plot of land during childhood days where the entire residential block went to dump their trash even though that land was not a dump yard), there are many other kinds of rubbish here in India that we need to get rid of. I thought it’ll be a good idea to make a (definitely not exhaustive) list of rubbish but truths nonetheless that we need to get rid of:

1. Religion and caste based prejudices: This is an easy one, we have seen so much of it since birth. If you were lucky enough to not be born in a family who does this, then also the society must have made you aware of it by now. One of the greatest human migrations ever in history, the Hindustan Pakistan partition, says a lot about religion based prejudices.
2. Crime against women: Enough said. Honestly, I can’t see mindsets changing soon enough. And, yes, crime against women does not only include rape, domestic abuse, dowry and female foeticide. It also includes women not getting equal chances in education, not getting equal pays, not getting enough freedom to wear whatever they want, to go wherever they want instead of getting subjected to ‘log kya kahenge’ (what would people say) unlike their brothers.
3. Gender Equality: Yes, point 2 and 3 are different. No group gets benefited by reservation in most instances. If there is crime against women, it definitely affects men in wrong ways too. It gives the opportunity to women to enjoy the benefits of being the privileged class. They don’t bat an eyelid before pushing men aside in the most crass way possible to get a seat in public transport, they don’t feel bad about asking men to get up from seats ‘reserved’ for them. They can always threaten men with rape charges. How many of us haven’t seen these? No matter how exaggerated this sounds, you know you have seen this bitter truth.

These are all that I can think of. Please add more that I have missed on. This post has been written as part of IndiBlogger’s Happy Hours Campaign for Kinley. Here’s the Kinley commercial I talked about in the beginning.