A man helps a woman escape the unruly crowds while the police struggle to put an end to the mass molestation of women on New Year’s Eve in Bengaluru. Pic/AFP

When I awoke this morning I had this memory of a dream where I’m walking through an alley at night. A man approaches and presses himself against me without my consent. When I try to shove him off, he overpowers me, drags me towards a friend of his seated casually on a scooter, who joins in the molestation. Then I’m cast off to the ground as the duo takes off, feeling neither remorse nor responsibility. When consciousness kicked in, I realised this fragment from my dream was in fact my memory of someone else’s reality. It was essentially the footage I’d seen the night before sourced from a CCTV camera from a suburb in Bengaluru, depicting a woman being molested; a horrific scene, one of many that have been emerging from the IT hub in the aftermath of a traumatic New Year’s Eve, when women were openly molested by men who felt neither shame nor embarrassment in behaving like the monsters from every woman’s nightmare.