A song for safety

Big music acts may be coming to India. But it's still unsafe to attend gigs here. It's worse still for women. Organisers, are you listening?

- Karishma Kuenzang

No matter how prepared you are, security-checks at music festivals in India have a way of ruining a woman's prep. More often than not, guards confiscate cannisters of pepper spray at the gates.

Why carry self-defence tools to a ticketed event for like-minded folks? Because, for women at gigs in India, things have been kind of a mess.

At AR Rahman's Chennai concert last month, the stampede-like situation and poor seating arrangements - Rahman later apologised and promised refunds - were bad enough. Several women also shared on social media that they were molested by male attendees. Last week, four students at the Cochin University of Science and Technology in Kerala died and about 60 were injured after a stampede on campus, right before singer Nikitha Gandhi performed.