Male Techie behind SlutWalk website
By Suneetha B

The long and difficult battle for gender equality in India is made easier by the fact that many emancipated men are doing all they can and stand shoulder to shoulder with the female campaigners.  Meet FOSS Evangelist, Hacker and self described ‘Friendly Geek’ Techie Pratul Kalia who not only walked the walk in the Besharmi Morcha demonstration, but also helped create their site.

Techgoss (TG): Tell us about Pratul the techie first.
Pratul Kalia (PK): Relatively, I'm still nascent but it has been an awesome journey so far. I have a lot of pro-bono and commercial programming under my belt, and I've organized, presented and led many workshops and events on the benefits and advantages of open source programming and practices.

TG: How did you come to know of SlutWalk?
PK:  Like most people, through Facebook. However, I had heard of SlutWalk Toronto in the past so the concept was not new to me. But I was very interested in understanding how people were planning to do this here, considering the Indian society mindset.

TG: What prompted you to get involved and what was the level / sort of involvement you had with the event?
PK: The fact that someone was trying to do something different for this cause was one of my major reasons to get involved. This is not an unknown issue; it is something that all of us see every day. A lot of my friends have had bad experiences, and I felt that this was something that I could help with in some way.

My main role in the organizing team was to build and maintain the website, besharmimorcha.in. Other than that, I was also active in a lot of planning, tweaking and generally making the event objectives and motives clear.

TG: Tell us about the SlutWalk website, what precautions did you take / what preparations did you do as a pre-cursor to creating the website?
PK: The website runs on Drupal 7. Drupal was my natural choice, since I've been a Drupal programmer and contributor for a long time now. Also, since it was going to be a content focused website, Drupal was one of the best solutions I could've picked anyway. The design part of the site was handled by Guneet Narula. There weren't really a lot of precautions that I took; Drupal in itself is a very secure and stable platform. I just ensured that the website ran as fast as possible, because I knew it would get a lot of traffic.

Considering the sensitive nature of the event and the topic, I also knew that there was a chance someone might try to mess around the website, so I ensured I kept the features (read: potential break-in points) to the minimum and limited to what we needed only. I also used a monitoring feature that would intimate me if someone felt or went wrong. Thankfully, no alarm bells ever went off.

TG: What has been the response to the website?
PK: The response was pretty good. We averaged more than 200 unique visitors a day that went up to more than a 1000 uniques as we approached the day of the event.

TG: Were any patterns to the traffic that came to the SlutWalk website?
PK: 50% of the traffic was direct and 50% was via search engines and other referring websites. Amazingly though, 85% traffic came from India. And not just Delhi or other metros/large cities, we saw regular traffic from all corners of the country, including far away places like Assam, Gujarat and Kerala. The average time spent on the website was more than 3 minutes so we know people did not just glance through the site.

TG: Did you join the demonstration / walk as well? What is your take on the event?
PK: Yes, of course. We knew the turnout would be large and we had around 20 organizing team members and 50 volunteers to help out with everything on the day of the walk. There was a lot of running around to do!

It was obvious to me that just a walk would not change anything. The society or the mindset of people takes a long time to change, but I knew the event would trigger a dialogue and a discussion, which might later on lead to other changes. It was amazing to see not just teens join the walk, but grandparents, parents with toddlers and school children as well. Our open debates saw people from all sorts of backgrounds and organizations come up and talk about their experiences. Not just people working in this field, but people who were affected by it as well. This just shows that everyone knows the issue exists but most of us choose to ignore it. It is time we stop doing that and speak up!