Thirty-year-old Srishti Bakshi has embarked on a 3800-kilometre journey from Kanyakumari to Srinagar on foot to sensitise citizens about violence against women.
There were many trigger points behind Srishti's move to make a difference. She talks about a bus ride back home in central Hong Kong last year, when she read the news about the gang-rape of a mother and daughter in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh.
“Women in this country are not safe even as a family unit. This incident left me questioning and changed my life completely,” she said.
She believes that technology is a long-term solution to all the issues faced by Indian women. She has tied up with several companies like Google to assist her in providing the required resources and teaching material.
Srishti has named her network of change-makers ‘CrossBow’. Her goal is to take the movement forward by harnessing the power of the internet to assist women to empower themselves. The marketing professional (who has worked with companies like Red Bull and Otterbox) is confident that she isn’t alone in her modern day Dandi march and has described the response thus far as “fantastic”.
Walking through the expanse of the country has taken a lot of preparation from Srishti’s end. She expressed that planning the entire walk was a ‘logistical nightmare’. The walls of her house were filled with huge maps of India, crisscrossed with threads running through the various places she intended to cover.
Srishti is neither an athlete nor a social activist but, has been walking 25 kilometers every 24 hours for over 46 days. She spent an entire year training for the grueling journey.
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Published: 11 Nov 2017,05:37 PM IST