Jasmeen Patheja: A Space Odyssey

One evening a group of design students got together in Bengaluru’s Yelahanka neighbourhood. They looked around for the darkest, loneliest and dirtiest alley that they could find in the area. A passerby recommended they try their luck at ‘Rapist Lane’—a short street off the main road which had earned its threatening reputation and nickname thanks to its lack of street lights, commercial activity or homes, rows of empty parked buses and a growing number of daily wage labourers who came there to either drink or urinate. The students hurriedly made their way to Rapist Lane, with two big dining tables and four chairs in tow. They reached the lane and set up the tables and chairs. Then they sat down, poured themselves a cup of masala chai and unpacked a dozen hot samosas, right in the middle of the lane.

A few days later, the students returned—this time, with a couple of strangers. They set up their tea tables and began one-to-one conversations with the newcomers who had signed up for the project via email. They talked about family, religion, the art of flirting, laundry and health—any topic was up for discussion except sexual violence. These tea-time meetings became so popular and frequent that the street soon lost its fearful reputation and is now known locally as the Safest Lane. The project itself, known formally as ‘Talk to Me’, became the first in a series of successful anti-fear campaigns conducted by Blank Noise, a volunteer-led organisation founded by Jasmeen Patheja, a 23-year-old student, in 2003.

“I grew up in Calcutta and moved to Bengaluru in 1999 to study design at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. I was a student of fine art and interested in feminist art practice, community and public art. I was also part of a year long lab at Srishti focussing on the role of the communicator, artist and designer in facilitating social transformation,” reflects Patheja, who received an Ashoka Fellowship for her work on human rights in 2005. She is now 35 and still living in Bengaluru. “I was new to Banglaore and I felt sudden fear, threat, defense and a lack of community to share experiences of street sexual harassment back then. It wasn’t as though I was being harassed each time I stepped out of the house. But there was a constant sense of threat and being alert. I was becoming aware of that change,” she says. “When I spoke up about it I was confronted with both silence and denial around sexual violence back in 2003. Feeling unsafe was a given and most of my friends worked around it and made everyday decisions accordingly. For example, they went out in groups or didn’t talk about harrassment even if it happened to them. The casual acceptance of sexual assault and the silence that surrounded was infuriating and I wanted to do something to bring attention to it.”

When it was time for Patheja to graduate college, she decided she wanted to fight fear, especially fear of sexual assault. “Blank Noise was envisioned as a safe space to talk about sexual violence; a place of listening, sharing and healing. I wanted to address sexual violence as a collective issue, that which citizens and individuals step up to tackling sexual and gender based violence. Our efforts were to be volunteer- led, so that the ownership of every project is collective,” says Patheja, who was inspired hugely by public community art. “I love photography and art and I wanted to find ways in which the two of them could be used to transform society and harmful stereotypes.”

Before officially starting Blank Noise, Patheja decided to do some preliminary research. She called together a group of students at Srishti and asked them to put down the various emotions that they equated with public spaces. “It was really interesting because almost everybody put down a negative association with the concept of public space. People were scared of being outside and some of them didn’t even know why. I realised that our first project should be to fight the fear of public spaces.”

Talk To Me had over a hundred participants and was conducted in Delhi, Calcutta and Bengaluru. Every person who volunteered with Blank Noise received the title of an ‘Action Hero’. “All our projects are built on the premise that each and every individual is an Action Hero and has the ability and power to influence a safe space. It goes beyond what we normally associate with the term. It is about people having the courage to own and invest in a public problem. Every single human being can become an Action Hero because we all have the potential and capacity to create a safe community,” explains Patheja.

On the subject of Talk To Me, she says, “It was aimed to breakdown both the stereotype of a stranger and a public street at the same time. The project called to attend to discomfort and question our misinformed biases. Action Heroes had to find something in common with a complete stranger. We fear the unknown. A conversation has the potential to create familiarity and real ‘knowing’ .This creates empathy and respect.” The project, which made it to several national news channels and newspapers, caught the interest of people who decided to volunteer for Blank Noise and become Action Heroes themselves. “Preparing for Talk To Me was a tacit process and a challenging one. The Action Heroes had to arrive at a place of willingness and agency to be at one side of the table. The challenges faced by me as a facilitator were different from the journey of the participants.”

Today, Blank Noise has a volunteer base from 16 different countries including Australia, France, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Germany, Hong Kong and Japan. Together they represent nearly 58 cities and towns from around the world. “Our volunteers come from different backgrounds, age groups, gender and sexualty and have been instrumental in building public discourse on sexual violence through a range of campaigns and projects designed across media (video, audio, live action, performance, posters). Projects are designed to shift the fear-based relationship that women have been taught to have with their cities. The collective creates a safe space for survivors to be heard, and is built entirely on the lived experiences of its Action Heroes,” says Patheja.

Not every initiative taken by Blank Noise involves a full-fledged project, though. Back in 2005, they often invited individuals to be Action Heroes by being idle in public spaces. According to Patheja, “We were interested in learning what would happen to both the participating ‘Action Heroes’ and to the street itself to suddenly experience idle women. In participating, Action Heroes dealt with fear. These actions would happen simultaneously across cities on the same day.”

Along with a group of Action Heroes, Patheja also started a widely read online blog that allows anyone from around the world to share testimonies and experiences of gender-based violence; experiences that are often suppressed for fear or ridicule or humiliation. “We wanted to build safe ways for people to speak about their experiences of sexual violence. We wanted to build a space that would not judge or question the survivor. Our blog has become a place for speaking, listening in, and building collective insight. ”

In 2012, the community launched its second major project to protest against the Delhi gangrape. The project was called the Safe City Pledge and called upon people to step up and pledge ways in which they can make their city a safer place for women. Over two hundred pledges were made over the course of the project. Some of the pledges made were by teachers who wanted to spread awareness of the difference between ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch’, men who pledged to stand up for women being eve-teased on the roads, teenagers who vowed not to let others stop them from doing the things they love, students who decided that they would no longer be afraid of taking the last metro or bus home, and by mothers who promised to open up their homes for women who were seeking shelter from alcoholic husbands or parents. “There is power in numbers. One Action Hero inspires another, to step out, to speak up, to not have to speak up unless she consents to. All of our projects have been built entirely on the lived experiences of its Action Heroes and are rooted in building trust and empathy instead of defence.”

Last month, Nidhi Rao, a 29-year- old social media marketing specialist in Bengaluru, decided to take an extended lunch break. She drove from her office in Indiranagar to Cubbon Park. After finding a patch of grass with no ant hills and relatively few stones, she spread out her yoga mat, lay down, and, covering herself with a blue cotton quilt, went off to sleep. Her inspiration for the impromptu nap was the Meet To Sleep project run by Blank Noise since January this year. “I read about it on their blog and just decided that it was something worth trying. I tend to get really tired in the afternoons because I wake up at 6 am to go to the gym. I can’t go home to take a nap because I live in Whitefield, which is on the other end of the city. So I decided to try napping in the park and it was an unbelievable experience. I slept so well and woke up so refreshed that I could not believe that I had never tried it before. Public parks are for everybody to use and we should not fear them,” says Rao.

For Patheja herself, Meet To Sleep goes beyond just the physical act of sleeping. “It is about building collective desire for something. We all want a safe and convenient place to nap. Why not create a desire to go nap in a park? Such collective action and effort makes a difference. Sleep is protest. Meet To Sleep is a process of fighting the fear that we’ve been taught to carry. It is a process of unlearning warnings. It calls to initiate dialogue on trust and being defenceless,” says Patheja.

Blank Noise is now focusing on the project I Never Ask For It. A collaborative campaign designed to tackle victim blame as experienced by those who have faced any kind of sexual violence, threat or intimidation . There is no excuse for sexual violence. The I Never Ask For It campaign works to arrest attitudes of victim blame. The campaign asks for individuals to send in garments they wore when they experienced sexual violence; the garment being witness, memory, evidence and voice.The project reaches out to victims of eve-teasing or sexual assault and asks them to send in the garment that they wore at the time of the incident. “It’s time for change,” concludes Patheja.

city streetsfearpublic spacessmart citySocial Psychology