Bullies: Not just offline anymore

Cyber bullying seems to be the “in thing” these days. This post is not triggered in the wake of dhanya rajendran being unceremoniously abused online in her twitter account or the number of instagrammers i follow all report on cyber bullying where men/women of all age wants to pass lurid comments about you, your body and also their body.  Two weeks ago i was bullied by a guy to give up my seat in the public transport. I would have willfully given up my seat to the poor twenty something healthy guy if he had just asked. And for not wanting any early morning scenes which has a domino effect on a busy weekday I used all my energy to shut up and gave up my seat. This is okay. Understandable even. Atleast you see who is foul mouthing you and react accordingly.

Cyber bullies are a different class of their own. Most of us would have received the hi, how are you, you look great, your lips are perfect kind of message in the ‘filtered messages/others folder’ in our social website inboxes. Most of us, the humans that we are, ignore it too. Then there are those unknown persons that send you messages vulgarly, sometimes they include compromising pictures also, we report, delete and move on. Like its just another day and another idiot.  

I was a  victim, no not a victim, i experienced different kinds of bullying and i have kept mum for this long for the same reason that just another day, just another guy. But something in me snapped today. 

I ll tell you about the variety and different cases that were all part of the online bullying. Case 1: It started of with someone constantly messaging me and telling me i know them and i have to talk to them, saving my own photos and sending it to me. It was creepy as hell, i tried to figure who that person is, because  it was someone i knew from my college,  who was posing anonymous. After trying to hold a conversation, doing a little sleuthing and blocking fake ids and a hacked facebook account, it finally stopped.

Case 2: A particular person i have never spoken to in my undergrad, constantly pings me fullstop. You read that right. Full stop or dot. Whatever you want to call it. You may ask so what.. so did i.. to the point where it became a complete nuisance. I reasoned with him saying he must stop doing this crap only for him denying something like that. After which i had to block this guy in every social website possible and then i started receiving calls from this married gentleman at midnight (yes thanks to truecaller ID) and it continues till date. #stalkeralert

Case 3: This is the creepiest of all. Someone created a fake id with some other name and then spoke to people i know quite inappropriately i guess. I am not sure how to explain this shit, but i will do my best. According to this guy (who btw knows me very well or i assumed that much and disclaimer: he is married as well) some guy/girl used a fake id but said it was me and spoke a lot of inappropriate things and then he thought “But Aishwarya doesn’t speak this way”  and continued speaking because you see he is married and so he kind of got the privilege to flirt with random strangers (And “flirting” is the nicest term i can think of). It doesn’t stop there, in his mind he believed it is I who is “smitten” and “charmed” by him and he is trying to catch me offguard by calling me with the fake name. In all honesty, i told him its not me and I can report to the cyber crime such impersonator. He then decides to tell me, even if its not you, i developed a liking towards you, come out with me? And this coming from a man you respected once. 

A very similar scenario happened with some other person, again a married man !

All my life i have tried to and been much straight forward and these men think I have such low moral standards. That is fine, because everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. 

But these men, who were supposedly good friends, who have my personal contact, if they had been good friends would have immediately gotten in touch with me..!! But they rather enjoyed what they got from a fake account. Who all are they cheating, their wife, their children, the family or the girl who was thinking your a friend.

I don’t know which is true. Either they are completely lying about impersonation and talking about their wishful thinking or they were happy talking crap to strange impersonators and living in their own bliss

Idhuvum oru vidhamana vakram thaane (isn’t this a sort of perversion in itself) 

I can go on to tell about so many times i have been bullied and harassed both online and offline. There were so many times i lodged complaints to the cyber police and everytime my family was as supportive and as understanding. But that doesn’t stop them from getting paranoid, because “society”. 

I am not talking about me alone, this is about all the women out there who go through this day in and day out, to all those who abhor social media because they dont want to see or hear such humiliation. Dhanya rajendran was victimised, so was chinmayi sripada and so many more ! One cannot and should not say they are in public life, they will get criticisms. These are not criticisms, it is harassment and they don’t just happen to celebrities. 

Mental harassment is real and though we try to turn a blind eye to all this and say, “no i do not care” !! It still hurts ! 

I m not gender biased here. I was bullied by men ! And if some guy is going to come and ask me, “you think men dont get harassed” , my response would be , “i hope you don’t”.

Harassing someone is wrong on a very primal level, be it a man or a woman !

Stop bullying !

Live and let live !

Jai Hind !

P.S : Please bear with non allignment and grammatical errors. My mobile is not as obliging as the laptop