Dear All,

This may come as a rude surprise to many of you.

A bad lapse of judgment, an awful misreading of the situation, has led to an unfortunate incident that most unfortunately revealed the faces of alleged sexual assaulters and their defenders at Tehelka. What really riles us is that we have often admired their courage for standing on the side of the oppressed and the wronged. Sigh!

We feel atonement cannot be just words. We must do the penance that lacerates us. So we, at The UnReal Times, have decided to hire Shoma Choudhury as our editor on social issues with special focus on women’s issues. This may look less like penance and more like opportunism but hey, we are not the ones going on a six month holiday to write a book on sex.

She brings with her a stellar record of not only demanding very very angrily but also getting unconditional apologies within 24 hours from alleged sexual assaulters. We work with tight deadlines here at URT and we sure as hell platonically love a lady that can squeeze apologies out of assaulters in 24 hours.

Shoma has been particularly impressed by the structural integrity of our office. By structural integrity, we mean we have physically built steps in our office so sexual assaulters can either step-down or step-aside based on the seriousness of the sexual assault. Shoma demanded she be in charge of picking up the rights steps for atonement. We immediately agreed.

When we made an offer, Shoma asked if we do events like THiNK. She liked that we did. Us folks at URT are very thoughtful people. We like to think just as much as THiNKers. We like even more to think we are funny even when we are not. We organized a Think event once. Our motto was “Eat, drink, laugh, make merry & sleep with whomever you want.” It was fun. We ate, we drank, we laughed, we band of brothers looked awkwardly at each other and went home to sleep by ourselves.

We, at URT, are no sexual assaulters. No, sir. Not when we are young and our hands are strong. But we have often wondered how it would be when we grow old and full of lust but our hands are rough and weak. Recent incidents have given us hope and we moved quickly. Let’s just say we would be more comfortable being old and full of lust with Shoma on our side defending us than without. Oh, yes. As we know, she can be a fearsome fighter against sexual crimes when she’s not on your side.

Shoma’s first assignment will be to write on work-place violence. She insisted on writing with a straight face, a series of reports on the work place violence against women, exposing the absence of preventive steps and anti sexual harassment cells, the lack of implementation of Supreme Court issued Vishaka guidelines and the highly prevalent practice of influential women defending the influential perpetrators of sexual assaults.

She also promised to make guidelines for quick response to sexual assaults at our office. We quickly noted some ideas for a start including:

Don’t go to the police

Confront assaulter very angrily

Demand an apology

Don’t go to the police

Ask assaulter to step down or step aside

Act in victim’s interest as long as not in conflict with assaulter’s interest

Don’t go to the police

Confront assaulter again, this time very very angrily

Demand apology again, this time unconditionally and within 24 hours

Assure the victim that this is more than what she wanted

Don’t. Go. To. The. Bloody. Police

We are very excited to have a great personality like Shoma in our organisation and we look forward to an enduring partnership of exposing sexual crimes outside and speedily sidestepping assaults inside.

Yours assaultingly,

URT.