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Going home

Social campaigns are vital in our society to shed light to issues with the help of a platform as vast as social media

Sonal Arshad Siraj December 23, 2014 1 min read

Recently, a social awareness campaign in India created quite a stir on the social media platforms of both Pakistan and India. The videos with these messages are so strong that they will stick with you for a long time, making you think.

The first video, called ‘Going Home’, shows a girl driving alone at night when her car stops working. A group of boys come to help her. They have shown a Utopian world where a girl, alone on the road, will not be taken advantage of and where boys will not succumb to their impulses. At the end of the video, they ask us. “Can such a world exist?”

As much as I would like to believe this could happen, believing in such a world would not just be idealistic but also would be bordering on delusional. Such a situation cannot happen in our country, or in any part of the world for that matter.

Having said that, I would like to thank this campaign, initiated by Vogue India, because apart from showing us something out of our reach, they put in front of us a mirror so that we can see ourselves. So that we can see the horrible, despicable species we have become and this world that we have created, where our own daughters, mothers and sisters cannot go out alone without fearing the worst.

We hear and read news of the most atrocious cases of assaults against women and children and yet we choose to remain silent. This is not the resilience of our people, this is denial, this is choosing to become blind and deaf to things we do not want to talk about. A five-year-old child is raped and we do nothing.

While there are many NGOs in Pakistan that do give a voice to such concerns but I feel they need to come up with more innovative ways to bring their message across. They need to make some noise. Such social campaigns are vital in our society to shed light to such issues with the help of a platform as vast as social media.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 23^rd, 2014.