We look at our mobiles before we brush our teeth,we tweet random strangers online..and create the illusion of conversation,and we believe the internet has fostered new friendships and equations that were never possible before.And yet,the basics have broken down, the sense of community,kinship and humaneness appears to have evaporated.More brutal than the murder is the image of the onlookers who refused to help.Are we awfully apathetic or brutalised into numbness???? or both???

        "KEENAN SANTOS" N "REUBEN FERNANDES"  who were stabbed to death for standing up to sexual abuse on the streets of Mumbai. They did what most of us do not do.They took a stand, they did not look away.And for doing the right thing- what should have been another evening out with friends ended up being the last day of their lives. When a bunch of mobsters and boors started heckling and pawning one of the girls in their group, Keenan and Reuben retaliated and stood up to the abuse. Within minutes the assaulters had knives and swords out and soon the boys were lying collapsed in pools of blood.

 It would not be unfair to say that more than the mob it was urban apathy that killed Keenan and Reuben.

The Keenan-Reuben murders have forced the ugly underbelly of modern urban lives into full public glare.The facts are so blazingly brutal that we cannot ignore what they say about us,even if we try. They have exposed the irony of how emotionally unconnected we are as people in an otherwise hyper connected age.

       The murders have also confronted us with how anachronistic the phrase we use to describe  sexual abuse is 'Eve teasing' is such a feeble little phrase.It fails to capture the intense invansion of space and privacy a woman feels when abused by men.

Most importantly,the murders have made us confront how we teach our daughters to accept sexual abuse as an  inevitable part of modern living.

   while we are disgusted with the bystanders who allowed Keenan and Reuben to die, as women we must ask ourselves : are we becoming inured to abuse????