A few days before Independence Day, I asked my daughter and her friends, all aged 13 or 14: What does freedom mean to you?
I told them they didn’t have to answer right away. They could sleep on it and text me their responses. The answers started to arrive on WhatsApp, and were a bit of a punch to the gut.
“freedom to me would be being able to dye my hair, get alotttt of piercings, being able to travel
A few days before Independence Day, I asked my daughter and her friends, all aged 13 or 14: What does freedom mean to you?
I told them they didn’t have to answer right away. They could sleep on it and text me their responses. The answers started to arrive on WhatsApp, and were a bit of a punch to the gut.
“freedom to me would be being able to dye my hair, get alotttt of piercings, being able to travel the world and being able to go out without the fear of a man kidnapping me,” my daughter wrote.
Nadia, her friend, also wanted “freedom to live in this country without fear.” Avantika wanted “the freedom to say ur opinions without being judged”.
Oishani wrote: “I wish there was freedom of not being discriminated (against in any way) or i wish there was freedom of not being harassed.”
Riah bowled a yorker: “Freedom to me would be to have control over myself to be able to do things that I want, say things I want and wear things I want without ppl questioning me on decisions that do not affect them.” That qualification stayed with me: “decisions that do not affect them”.
Nyla wrote: “Freedom to me is… staying in the park after 8pm with my friends and knowing im safe, freedom to me is having the world be such a good place my parents literally have no reason to stop me from stuff (excluding drinking and all obvs).”
I think what surprised me most was my sense of surprise.
I mean, as the father of girls, I worry. I know they worry. But I wouldn’t have put that worry on top of pretty much every list.
What must it feel like to move through the world feeling like this? What priorities get pushed to the side; what choices are never made; and what experiences are missed out on, all because the primary concern is surviving the day unharmed?
It is worth noting that this is a group of teens in Mumbai, famously one of India’s safest cities. Yet, even here, even at 14, they know that what they have to put up with is wrong.
All these young women arrived at safety and freedom in the same breath. Not merely safety from violent crime, but the everyday ease of being able to walk around or sit in a park without drawing eyes, or comments, or attention of a worse kind.
The safety of not having to calculate how dangerous the unwanted attention might be, and how to navigate it: leave, stay, take a bus, don’t take a bus? Call dad? Pretend to make a call? Simply go home?
They’re not wrong.
Meanwhile, I had assumed my daughter and her friends would equate independence with fewer rules, more screentime, later nights. And there was some of that as well. But here too, gender played a role.
Parents call it protection. Society calls it propriety. At some point, girls learn to distinguish between the things they can choose (a dress, but of the “right” kind) and the things they will have to explain (“what were you doing in the park at 8 pm?”).
At 14, they are already tired of negotiating this.
Across our country and around the world, young women face so much worse that freedom gains even darker definitions: the ability to stay in school; to refuse a marriage; to live in a home free of violence and abuse.
I’m glad I asked my daughter and her friends the question. Because adults spend a great deal of time telling children what independence means. We really do need to listen more.
Because now, I am no longer focused only on the celebration of August 15. I’m thinking of the day after, when the flags come down, the speeches end, the country goes back to work; and a 14-year-old has to decide whether she should leave the park at sunset.
We are rightfully proud of how we won our great country back. Maybe, someday, everyone in it will feel equally free, in all the ordinary, unremarkable moments of their lives.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)
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