When I talk to people, I keep telling them one thing: don’t tell me a hundred ways how you cannot respond to this problem. Can you apply your mind for that oneway that you can respond to the problem? That’s what I’m here for, asking for your support. Demanding your support. Requesting for your support.”
These lines, first spoken by Sunitha Krishnan at her TED Talk in 2009, and now reproduced in her autobiography I am What I am, gives an insight into the mind of the woman who co-founded Prajwala, one of the largest anti-sex trafficking organisations in the world. Her life and work has been a cry for action to rescue and rehabilitate survivors of trafficking and sex slavery.
I am What I am is not a light read. While it deals with Sunitha’s childhood, passion for social work, and growth as an activist, it also exposes grim realities and raises uncomfortable questions. The Prologue plunges straight into the issue, with Sunitha rushing to the rescue of a four-year-old girl who was raped by her own father and five other migrant workers and thrown onto the railway tracks behind the Falaknuma railway station.
Early on in the book, Sunitha speaks about her own experience surviving a gang rape at the age of 15, and how the identity of a survivor is often reduced to that one instance of brutality, overshadowing everything else the person may have achieved in their lifetime, thereby preventing them from getting closure.
The book traces Sunitha’s five-decade-long journey as an activist. There are tales of rescue; her first one was that of a minor and the operation left Sunitha with a deviated nasal septum and a perforated ear drum. All of this makes one understand why she has been recognised as one of the most ‘Fearless Womenin the World’.
