A movement to keep stalking out of films

Chennai: After causing nationwide furore for over two months, Infosys techie Swathi's murder case reached an abrupt anti-climax with the alleged suicide of the sole accused, Ramkumar, at the Puzhal Central Prison. Even as the weeks to follow are likely to throw up several questions on the probity of the investigation, a team of youngsters are parallely working to keep the focus where it should be the horror of being stalked and ways to stop it.
Iswarya V, a 28-year-old research student of British drama, put aside her thesis two months ago, to start a movement against the glorification of stalking in mainstream Tamil cinema.
She started a petition on Change.org, reaching out to the public and the Tamil film industry to discourage movies that portray stalking as something swag. "More so because we live in a time of broken families, isolation, high stress and easy access to information," she says.
Her target of contention are movies such as Thiruvilaiyaadal Aarambam and Oru Kal Oru Kannadi, where 'stalking is trivilased as something casual.' But her bigger fight is with the highly popularised narrative in Tamil cinema that puts a man in a position of virtue and the woman as heartbreaker.
"What they fail to show is that after stalking the girl for some time, a deranged lover may kill her; or that she goes through psychological trauma to change cities and educational institutions. And we've seen enough such cases in real life to know this drill," says Iswarya. So far, while she has gained little support from the film fraternity - except director Lakshmi Ramakrishnan and actor Karthik Kumar who have signed the petition - she says she's already 1000 signatures in from the rest of the public.
Iswarya has joined hands with The Red Elephant Foundation to reach out to educational institutions across the city to hold awareness drives and presentations on how to confront and report stalkers, now that stalking is a punishable offense under Section 354 D of the IPC, following the Nirbhaya incident. "We support Iswarya because this is exactly what we work for," says Kirthi Jayakumar, founder of the NGO.