Freida Pinto has written an exclusive column about ‘India’s Daughter’ her take on the ban along with the need for uplifting and empowering women in today’s day and age. I recently visited my dear friend Zoë’s beautiful six-month-old-baby girl, Orla. When I looked into her big bright eyes, I saw a raw spark of pure light – alive, dancing to its own tune, full of potential, oblivious to skin color, status or gender. But in more places around the world than we imagine, a new-born girl child has been damned, undervalued, called a burden, or even been killed before she was born. Because to be a female in today’s world is at best an exercise in subtle injustice or at worst a living hell. In the film ’India’s Daughter’ you heard an educated lawyer claim that “in our culture there is no place for a woman.” He is obviously not alone in his sentiments. But I don’t want to indulge in a full cultural history of woman-hating – suffice it to say that from the earliest written accounts, it has been so. From the Book of Leviticus which said ‘menstruating women are unclean and whoever touches them will be defiled’ to Aristotle who referred to a female as “an incomplete male or a deformity”, from Confucius who felt that a hundred women weren’t worth “one testicle” to a certain public figure who stated “boys will be boys”. And that was 2013. So today in 2015, despite the vast improvements in the last century, a complex network of ideological and cultural norms continue to make global misogyny, in my opinion, the great scourge and most pressing issue of our age.

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