India has a unique label: "the world's largest open-air toilet".
According to statistics, the number of outdoor toilets in the world has dropped to 950 million in 2015. According to the 2017 World Toilet Day report, about 730 million people in India still have no toilets available (about 56% of india's population).
In Mumbai's slums, public toilets are accessible to all, with an average of one toilet shared by every 81 people, and in some poor areas even one for every 273 people.
In Indian culture, toilets represent something filthy, unclean, and unsatural, so they are reluctant to build toilets in their homes, at best outside their doors.
Indian men can go to the toilet open in their own backyard, while women are influenced by traditional culture, and it is considered "unclean" to go to the toilet at home, and they can only go to the remote place to go to the toilet when it is not dawn, so many women will be harassed or violated.
Therefore, under the influence of this traditional concept, toilets in India are basically public toilets. And India's public toilets, which are basically open-air, are built on the street, or next to the park, and the open-air toilets are dangling, and there is no door, only a wall.
In 2017, India released a film, Toilet Hero. The film is based on a real story in India in 2012, focusing on the reality of Indian society, telling the story of the divorce incident caused by "one toilet", the husband in order to save his wife, dare to fight with the whole family and the whole village, dare to fight against the local traditional culture and doctrines.
<h1>01, a toilet triggers a divorce</h1>
In the film, a group of women go to the toilet in the sparsely populated jungle before dawn, crouching in the jungle while vigilantly observing their surroundings. When a car passed with dazzling headlights, they quickly covered their faces with turbans.
The male protagonist, Keshav, marries his wife Jaye, who was born in a middle-class family, is highly educated, and has a toilet at home since childhood, so she has never felt the trouble of going to the toilet in the wild. When she married Keshav, she learned that there was no toilet in her husband's house.
So the hostess, Jaye, was also woken up by other women in the village on the second day of their marriage and joined the army of outdoor toilets.
Within a few days, his wife Jaye could no longer bear the pain of going to the outdoor toilet, she once went to someone else's house to rub the toilet, and also went to the 7-minute train station platform in the village to solve the toilet problem, and even went to the crew to steal the temporary toilet and was caught.
But in the end, Jiaye, who couldn't bear it, made a request to her husband: there must be a toilet at home, otherwise she would get a divorce.
<h1>02, more difficult than building a toilet is the "human mind"</h1>
Jaye asked her husband to build a toilet for her at home, and the husband understood his wife's difficulties and agreed. However, Jaye's father obstructed in every way. Because in his eyes, having a toilet in his home is unclean and goes against their teachings and culture.
In order to change his wife, the husband built a toilet in his home overnight. However, his stubborn father and the village chief sent someone to smash the toilet.
In the conflict between building toilets and smashing toilets, it is also a clash of tradition and change. In order to win his wife's heart, Keshav really did not hesitate to "resist the whole world" just to build a toilet for his wife.
And the film is not just "building toilets", but the breaking of thousands of years of traditional culture and the transformation of modern consciousness.
<h1>03, a woman's legitimate needs are regarded as unreasonable demands</h1>
After Jaye ran back to her mother's house because the toilet was smashed, Jaye's mother strongly advised her daughter to return to her husband's house, and she felt that it was normal for women to go to the toilet outdoors for thousands of years, and the daughter should not sacrifice her marriage for a small toilet.
And her husband Keshav's grandmother also made a special trip to "visit" just to teach her granddaughter-in-law, she claimed that being a woman was like this, and she thought that Jaye did not respect traditional culture.
In the conception of these women and of society as a whole, she is a person who is pretentious and an object of condemnation.
Only Jayer's father stood by his daughter's side, and he replied to Keshav's grandmother: "You are a woman, and you actually said the same thing." You women are your own enemies, and if you all fought like my daughters, you would have used the toilet a long time ago. ”
<h1>04, the "toilet revolution" was stirred up</h1>
Keshav asked local officials to repair toilets in the village. The staff told him that they had long wanted to repair the toilet, but the villagers obstructed him and refused to let it be repaired.
However, it takes at least 12 months for the approval and stamping of toilets to be built by local officials. Jaye saw that the toilet was difficult to build, so he made a "big news of divorce" and made a big deal out of it.
Sure enough, the divorce of the newlywed wife because there was no toilet made headlines, which touched the villages that did not have divorces in 1700, aroused the desire of women across the country for toilets, and made more people aware of the "toilet problem." ”
In the end, the local stamping process lasted only 12 minutes.
And the end of the film is also very dramatic. The father who once smashed the toilet, because his old mother fell and had difficulty moving, had to use the smashed toilet, which made the traditional diehards begin to reflect.
In the end, the once-smashed toilet was put back into use, and his wife, Jayer, finally returned home.
<h1>05. The film brings us thoughts</h1>
In the film, it is too difficult to build a toilet, and the biggest obstacle is not the problem of funding, but the deep-rooted ideas of Indians and the concept of male superiority and female inferiority.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said:
"We must straighten our waists and fight for freedom. No one can ride you unless you bend down on your own. ”
It is precisely because of the persistence of the male and female protagonists, especially the heroine Jaye, who dares to break the traditional pedantic ideas, and finally the stubborn father-in-law attitude has also changed, and they have won the benefits of the "toilet revolution" for the whole family, the whole village, the whole region, and even the women of all India.
"Toilet Hero" is undoubtedly a film that awakens women's consciousness, after the release of the film, not only let the film company earn enough box office, but also for the indian women's rights to give a voice, promote the improvement of women's social status, and cause unprecedented repercussions in Indian society.
A woman can change a world, and a movie can change a country.
If you don't change anything, nothing will change for you.
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