A post on Facebook by a 20-year-old who spent her childhood in a red-light district in Mumbai is going viral. It was shared more than 1500 times within an hour of being posted at 7 pm.
“I’ve grown up in a red light area, surrounded by the flesh trade all my life. At 12, I’ve been asked for my ‘rate’ and cried myself to sleep because I didn’t understand it. But you want to know what’s worse? It’s that the men who came to ask would all be from the ‘upper class’ as you call it with shiny cars and the perception that they could ‘buy’ anything,” she writes in the post on the Facebook page of Humans Of Bombay which says its mission is to “catalog the beat of the city.”
Her photo accompanies her short blog; her name does not. She has been the focus of media attention for her earlier accomplishments, some of which she refers to on Facebook.
She says Kranti, an NGO, helped her study Liberal Arts at a US College. “Through Kranti’s efforts I got a full scholarship ..we crowd sourced the rest of the money for my accomodation and day to day expenses and my life has just turned around,” she says.
She knows exactly what she wants to do next – “I speak fluent English and have amazing entrepreneurial ideas to make a difference to my home…to Kamathipura.”
She ends her piece with this powerful message: “Yes, open your mind about my home. …as Indians, we need to judge less and accept things that are not always in our comfort zone, because my background is not my weakness…I’m me, and no location can define who I am.” ‘
“I’ve grown up in a red light area, surrounded by the flesh trade all my life. At 12, I’ve been asked for my ‘rate’ and cried myself to sleep because I didn’t understand it. But you want to know what’s worse? It’s that the men who came to ask would all be from the ‘upper class’ as you call it with shiny cars and the perception that they could ‘buy’ anything. But the women there are my family…they’ve taken care of me when my mother would have to go work at a factory near by and treated with me so much love and kindness, but I still grew up with a very low self esteem because of my dark color. I don’t know why you have to be fair to be beautiful…and because I’m dark I’ve always been called ugly. Once my 12th standard ended, I decided to make a change. I told the people at my Municipal school that I wanted to study, learn English and make something of myself. That’s when I went to an organization called Kranti.
I spent the next year, traveling across India conducting workshops on sex education and that’s when I realized that not everyone judges me for my background and kind of got my self esteem back. I’ve always been a day dreamer, so I randomly just said it out loud one day that I want to go America (at that point I didn’t even know if it was a continent, city or a country) and through Kranti’s efforts I got a full scholarship at Bard College to study Liberal Arts. We crowd sourced the rest of the money for my accomodation and day to day expenses and my life has just turned around…I’ve been to semester at Sea, I speak fluent English and have amazing entrepreneurial ideas to make a difference to my home…to Kamathipura.
Yes, open your mind about my home. Accept that people have choices and know that so many women there are in it by choice…because it’s their source of livelihood. As Indians, we need to judge less and accept things that are not always in our comfort zone, because my background is not my weakness…I’m me, and no location can define who I am.”
