“I Have Lost Count.” Sona Mohapatra Pens Her Sexual Abuse Story With #MeToo And It’ll Move You

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Twitter spits out and discards a lot of trends almost every other day. But the hashtag #MeToo, for obvious reasons, has gone beyond the purview of just another trend. And if anything, it is here to stay. Thanks to the likes of the innumerable brave women who opened about their stories of sexual abuse, pushing us to lose the stigma.

While we are still talking about brave women, I’d like to make the case for another firebrand who has never shied away from voicing her opinion and making herself heard. You already know her as the ace singer Sona Mohapatra, but after this, you will know her for the woman of the hour, she is.

In a column for HuffPost, Sona Mohapatra has penned down her share of sexual abuse and it will break your heart. Opening about her childhood she wrote, 

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“On a train journey with my family as a child of 11, a Malayali uncle offering to share his food at dinner and after we retired for bed and I fell asleep, putting his hand down from the berth above, opening my jeans and shoving his hands in. Bewildering. Painful.”

Not just that. She even confessed to being afraid of playing ‘dark room’ and how the fear haunts her till date. 

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“These get-togethers continued and so did the discomfort, pain, shame and anger.”

Sona also revealed her concerns about the way the Industry and its caretakers treat female artists and it’s worrisome.

“I spent all of yesterday seeing the #MeToo hashtag and telling myself: ‘sexual abuse at work is what they are talking about. THAT hasn’t happened to me. At least not in some very hideous way. (We learn to grade such incidents and be grateful you see).’

I wake up every day thinking how differently a woman artist is treated at home and overseas. Just when I start to feel happy that it’s been a year of great concerts — one better than the other — playing in world-class venues, great cities, working on my stagecraft, musicianship, sound, costumes and band, I am reminded of the treatment meted out to several women artists at home in India.

Be it big college campuses and premiere institutes or renowned music festivals and corporate-funded bus tours, it will be men who will take the centre-stage, headline the marquee and I will have to be okay knowing that I, the woman, worshipped as goddess in this land of ours, will not be worthy of much more.

The ‘bulls’ will occupy every big arena while, I, along with the other ‘cows’, supposedly revered by this land, will have to be okay playing second fiddle. The one odd amongst us will get to be a token presence at best to help make the men’s club look ‘politically correct’ and ‘fair’.

 

She concluded her piece with an appeal and it is the need of the hour. 

“If all the good people of the country are watching and not doing anything about this, please know that you are complicit.”

“Let’s start by having a conversation. Here’s the most important thing I want to share as the Festival of Lights approaches us, I am on the right side of history.”

While it is her words, it is the collective conscience of every woman and every righteous man out there. So the question is, will you?

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