Sisterhood Chits

When we started planning this year's campaign, we asked Ragamalika Karthikeyan for ideas. We adapted one of them as 'Sisterhood Chits.'

 

You can find this bright red basket at Chamiers and Maalgaadi through the 16 Days. You will also find it at some of our events. 

What is this about? Life is tough, especially for women who face a daily minefield of violence and other realities (and people) that undermine their self-confidence. We want to tell each other--we matter, we're strong and we can overcome anything and thrive. So we invite you to write a message and leave it and take a message for yourself than another sister wrote. 

What are you waiting for? Start today, wherever you are... As you can see from the first two photos, someone did right after we set this up at Chamiers! The third photo is from Maalgaadi.

 

The Dummies' Guide to Sexual Harassment

The mannequin at Chamiers.
Picture courtesy: Sreelekha Raghavan

If street sexual harassment was a visual, how would it look?

This is the question behind our art intervention, "The Dummies' Guide to Sexual Harassment." As part of the campaign this year, we've placed 4 mannequins in different parts of city, inviting people to mark the parts of their body where they've been touched without their consent.

This idea for a city-wide mannequin placement was born in a conversation with Aditi Surendra, who wanted to use mannequins to start a conversation about women's experience of street sexual harassment.

Special thanks to our partners, Sundari Silks and Tranz Mannequins for providing us with these mannequins! And a big thank you to our location partners - Chamiers, PCVC, Shree Ayurvedic Multispecialty Hospital and Women's Christian College - for helping us take this vision forward.

Thanks to the following publications for covering this initiative!

The News Minute: These Chennai mannequins show how often women are groped on streets

The Times of India: What are these mannequins doing in Chennai?

The Hindu: Saying with stickers, what they have gone through

Deccan Chronicle: Mannequins to judge extent of street abuse

dtNEXT: Mannequins spring up to break silence on street sexual abuse

The Letterbox Resistance

November 25, 2016. 10.15am. A group of people gathered at a cafe in Chennai, with writing supplies, colours, paper and postcards. Their agenda: The Letterbox Resistance!

The first day of the 2016 campaign started with letters written to loved ones, to state authorities, to people in positions of power like school principals and hostel wardens, and to absolute strangers who might come upon these notes, and perhaps spare a moment to think about gender violence.

Do check out the photos here!

   


Thanks to the following publications for covering this initiative:

Deccan Chronicle: 16-day campaign steps up awareness on gender issues

Day 5 - Not Silence, But Verse

Prajnya's poetry reading will start in an hour! The reading will feature some of Chennai's most powerful poetic voices discourse on violence, equality and emancipation. The poets featured are Sharanya Manivannan, L. Ramakrishnan and K.Srilata.

The reading will also feature submissions from Prajnya's call for poetry, No Violence, No Silence. The open call for poetry encouraged both aspiring and established poets to send in haikus or tankas in English, Hindi and/or Tamil around the theme of gender violence. These poems can be read at: http://notsilencebutverse.tumblr.com/ Origami chapbooks, featuring some of these submissions, will be also be available at the poetry reading.

The poetry reading has been organized in partnership with Chamiers on Chamiers Road and Origami Poems Project.