The Stereotype Breaker – Moose Jattana

Moose grew up in Australia in a Punjabi household. She lived in India from age 7 to 14 and has stayed connected with her roots. Though she has lived abroad most of her life, she doesn’t like being labelled as an NRI who doesn’t know about living in India.She has been an extrovert and was very dramatic as a child. She was surrounded by friends and looked up to her family’s elder women. One guiding value of Moose’s life is to not be disrespectful, while not letting anyone disrespect her. She is very vocal about her thoughts, values and spreading awareness, leading her to face a lot of backlashes and abuses online. However, she doesn’t like to retort aggressively. She simply asks people to pause and understand that that is not the right way to talk to others.

As she turned 18, she wanted to form a deeper connection with her country. But she felt that there were many problems in India that were not being solved actively. In Moose’s words, “the more I love India, the more it doesn’t love me back”. She doesn’t like it when people label her as “anti-national” or “anti-India” because she is only trying to help India with the problems it has been plagued with. Moose feels India is great and wants to keep it that way, and for that, it is necessary to address certain issues like the disrespectful treatment of women.An incident that put her on this path of activism was when she was at an Indian club in Melbourne, and a man inappropriately touched her. She slapped him, and everyone expressed disapproval for her actions. She has the privilege of living in a safe space and hence can continue speaking out. She feels that girls in India are a lot more unsafe and poorly treated. Moose started her Instagram recently. Before that, she was on TikTok and garnered up to 50k followers before TikTok was banned in India. She made a lot of her videos in Punjabi to connect with a higher number of people. She was speaking up about things that are usually not talked about, and she faced backlash because of this. But slowly, the support started pouring in too, and many of her videos were caught up in the trending page. She doesn’t have a problem with being threatened or abused, but she wants people to be inspired by her and make changes in their lives.

People have called her up and let her know that her message has helped them, and they have made changes in their lives because of what she says. Through all this, her parents have been supportive. Though people have been sending vulgar content on her to her family, Moose’s parents defended her and never asked her to stop.Talking about her future plans, Moose wants to be a filmmaker and make documentaries. She is also writing a book. She found inspiration from Rana Ayyub and Gurmerhar Kaur. She encourages people to always form their own opinions and contribute to society.