Gutsy girls tackle eve-teasers

KOLKATA: Their petite looks belie nerves of steel and fists of fury. Eve-teasers have tangled with them and ended up being knocked out cold.
Moumita Chatterjee, a black belt in taekwondo, took on three drunken rowdies to save a girl a few weeks ago. It was 5 in the morning and the roads were deserted. Moumita was approaching the Lake Town swimming pool for her morning workout when she heard a girl scream.In the darkness, she could make out three men molesting a girl. She rushed to her rescue.
“I instantly realised what these men were up to. I kicked one of them in the stomach, he slumped. The second one tried to attack me but I ducked and kicked him in the face. He was knocked out cold. The third one lost his nerve and ran away,” said Moumita, who now works as a medical transcriptionist.
Salt Lake girl Ruma RoyChowdhury, also a black belt in taekwondo, recounted her own experience with an eve-teaser when she was a teenager. “I was in Class VII then. Some Calcutta University students were giving us a crash course in taekwondo in Howrah’s Banipur. I was alone in the dressing room when a youth entered through the window and attacked me. I screamed but there was nobody nearby. I took him on alone for 10 minutes but eventually I fought him off. It was only my knowledge of martial arts that gave me the courage and mental strength to face the hoodlum,” she said.
Just a few weeks of martial arts training gives enough confidence to a girl to defend herself. As Kidderpore girl Shikha Dhali found out. The graduation final year student thrashed a man in Khirpore a fortnight ago when he grabbed her chunni on the road. “I warned him to behave himself but he mocked me. So I kneed him in the stomach and knocked him out. I could not think of combating this man even nine months ago, when I was not exposed to the skills of taekwondo,” she said.
Taekwondo gold medalist Krishna Mondal was waiting for a train at Maslandarpur when a bunch of rowdies on another platform made cat calls. When they did not heed her warning, she crossed the tracks and took them on.
Even schoolgirls have taught eve-teasers a lesson. On a rainy evening a few days ago, Sankhabela Mukherjee — a Class XI student of Mahadevi Birla Sishu Vihar — was walking down Jodhpur Park Post Office Lane when she heard some motorcycles approaching from behind. “Four bikers started circling me. They switched off their headlights so that I could not identify them. I warned them to stay away. But when one of them tried to pull me, I kicked two of the bikers. Both of them went crashing down,” said the karate black-belt holder, who has been mastering martial arts since she was five years old.
Shankhabela now coaches children in martial arts at Ballygunge Circular Road.