Hi everyone, my name is Ram Devanani. I am the creator of an amazing augmented reality comic book called Priya Shakti. It features India’s first female superhero who is a rape survivor. This project is a great fusion of art, culture, social activism and technology. For me, this whole project started back in December 2012. As many of you remember, there was a horrible gang rape that happened on a bus in New Delhi. Why was in New Delhi at that time and was involved in the protests that were happening in the city and all over India? Most of them were against the indifference the government showed towards the survivor. At one of those rallies, I spoke to a Delhi police officer and asked him what he thought about what happened on the bus and more particular what happened to her. What he said really got me started on this entire project. He said, no good girl walks home alone at night. Implying that she either deserved it or she provoked the rape. I knew immediately then that the problem of gender violence in India and probably all over the world is not a legal problem but a cultural problem. I also knew from those protests that in order to really tackle this, we have to engage men and especially teenage boys because at those protests, equally numbered were men protesting and marching with women. I began a long journey. I traveled all over India, Southeast Asia talking with poets, philosophers, NGOs working in gender-based violence issues and then eventually with rape survivors and gang rape survivors. You can actually hear their stories in their own voices through the augmented reality which I’ll explain a little bit later. I’m just going to recount one of the stories and a heroic story which inspired the creation of the first comic book. What she told me was she was gang raped by a group of men who videographed the rape on their cell phone and threatened her that if she ever went public, they would release the video to her family. That night, she went home, burned her clothes, took a shower, never told anyone and never got medical help. For an entire week, she lived with this trauma and went to school, was completely isolated. When this same group of men raped another woman in a neighboring village, that’s when she decided to go public and seek legal recourse. It was a long ordeal. Going through the Indian judicial system is not easy. Throughout the whole process, the stigma and the shame was put on her. Her family was ostracized, were isolated and sadly, her father committed suicide because he couldn’t live with the shame of what was happening to his family. She eventually did get legal justice and recourse and the men were put away. When I interviewed her several years after this case ended, she was still being guarded by a police officer with a semi-automatic machine gun. This was several years later. Just imagine what incentive is it for rape survivors to seek legal recourse if this is what they have to live with for the rest of their lives. She couldn’t go to the mall, she couldn’t go shopping, she couldn’t go on a date without a cop following her with the semi-automatic machine gun. Here are the numbers. This is in one year. 34,000 reported rapes in India, but only 21% of them make it to trial. Obviously, many more do not make it to trial. What I learned from all of these stats and just talking with the women is this creates a vicious circle where certain men feel empowered to commit more rape because they know they can get away with it. I wanted to approach this from a cultural context. First thing I did was looked at Hinduism because at the core of Hinduism, it’s about conquering your fears. Hinduism in India, it’s not just a religion, it’s also part of the culture. The mythological stories are imbued in every part of Indian culture. I also looked at the Indian mythological comics, books that I grew up as a kid in which a very common motif always popped up. It was always a local villager would call upon the gods for help when they were in a dire situation. I thought it was more dire than sexual violence in India. This two things came into being and into developing Priya Shakti. I partnered with my friend, Dan Goldman, who is actually a Florida native as well. He and I developed this whole project. We first looked at American comic books and American female superheroes like Wonder Woman and Power Girl and we said, no way, we’re not going to create an over sexualized female character. We had to take a radically different approach. What we did is we created our character Priya, who is just a local villager and also a rape survivor. She’s raped in the comic book. She, like in all mythological tales, calls upon the gods for help. In this case, the gods cause more problems than helpful. She realizes it’s eventually up to her to really address this problem. I won’t go into the entire story because you can actually download all the copies of the comic book for free digitally on our website in every format conceivable. I just sort of describe the very end of it. At the very end of the comic book, Priya is thrown out of her village and she’s living in the jungle and she’s being stalked by a tiger. Tiger is a metaphor for fear. One day she climbs down the tree, looks at the tiger in the eye and speaks a very powerful mantra. She says, speak without shame and stand with me and bring about the change you want to see. With that mantra, the tiger turns from fear into power or shakhti and she rides this tiger back into the village, the village that threw her out. At first, villagers are of course scared. They’ve never seen a woman riding a tiger into town and they start running away but she speaks this very powerful mantra and soon they start following her and go from village to village to fight patriarchy. Very similar to what happened in those rallies, those marches in Delhi. Now one of the really important things we did with this comic book, we actually field tested it. This is kind of a radical concept for art, our comic books. We field tested it with teenagers in India, in Mumbai, in Delhi and we quickly determined that it really does work for pre-teens. Because pre-teens are at a very critical age in which they are learning about sexuality, gender roles, relationships and we think this project is a great tool to have them understand that. One of the amazing things about this project is the use of augmented reality. How many of you played Pokemon Go? Or have kids who played Pokemon Go? Well that’s augmented reality but we developed AR two years before Pokemon Go was released. And not only that, we developed it in the slums of Mumbai in Darvi. That was the first rendition of this project, was in the slums of Mumbai. And literally you can scan any page in the comic book or any of the street art or any of the exhibitions. In fact we have an exhibition at Changeville and literally popping out of the page will be animations, videos, interactive elements, the interviews that I did with the rape survivors and asset attack survivors. They’re all part of there. It’s a really cool technological interface. And one of the things we started doing is we started creating street art. We wanted to reimagine or subvert the image of the goddess Durga. The goddess Durga is the ultimate goddess of female power. Instead of putting a goddess on a tiger, we decided to put a rape survivor on a tiger. And wherever we created these murals in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, everyone would always say that’s a strong and empowered woman. So this project got, the first comic book got launched in December 2014 at the Mumbai Comic Con. And immediately it went super viral with over 500,000 downloads and close to 500 news stories worldwide reaching almost 26 million readers. And what was really important was in India itself, it changed the level of discussion because the discussion was always about perpetrators and punishment. And we helped change the debate to focus on empathy for rape survivors and how society treats rape survivors, which was not being discussed. Soon after the UN, UN Women honored Priya Shakti, the character with the title gender equality champion, one of the first comic book characters to be honored by the UN, even before Wonder Woman. And then just last October we launched the second chapter of Priya’s mirror, which is about acid attacks. And again, like the first one, it involved me interviewing many women, many acid attack survivors in India, in Columbia, and also in the United States. And those characters are in the comic book. Their stories and themselves are in the comic book. And we launched it again at the Mumbai Comic Con. And it also went viral, not a super viral but viral. And what was the most important thing for us is we held events in Delhi, in Agra, at a cafe run by acid attack survivors. And when we gave them the comic book in which they were the main characters of, they looked at us and started crying because they never seen themselves being portrayed as heroes, because often in pop culture, acid attack survivors are portrayed as villains. In fact, through my interviews, what I learned is acid attack survivors face the same cultural stigmas, the patriarchy, everything that rape survivors face. But of course, their wounds are more apparent than physical. So what’s next? We’re working on the third chapter, which is going to be about sex trafficking. Priya will continue her adventures. Starting in April, we are going to be released in the comic book. In fact, we’ve given out almost 20,000 physical copies for free through the comic cons. And now we’re going to be distributing them in the Delhi school system through the Lions Club of India. We’re going to test it out, see how it works, and hopefully expand to more cities or school systems all over India. I’ll be at Changeville. Please come and see my exhibition. Talk to me. I also have comics, so if you come to Changeville and talk to me, I’ll give you guys comics. So just one last thing. What did I learn from all of this? What I learned is that first, men have to be engaged to solve this problem. Sexual violence is not just a woman’s issue, it’s also a man’s issue. And then, thank you. And then secondly, no one wants to talk about these topics. These are really difficult, complex topics, not only in the media, but also in the public. Giving them in the context of this comic book character, a superhero structure, made it accessible, made it available for teenagers, for just regular people to read it, and to be really moved by it. Thank you very much.