About two weeks ago, a middle-aged man, hands full of bags, addressing me by name and politely asked my permission to sit beside me in the Istanbul metro. He appeared to belong to a lower-middle class segment of society. He asked me whether we could have a conversation until the next stop and without waiting my response, he began with a question: "Where are we heading to?"

"We," used in our daily Turkish conversation with political content, means Turkey, our country. Turks have a sense of collective identity in employing the word “we” as a synonym of the name of our country.

He told me that he is a retired low-level official living in one of the suburbs of Istanbul known to be a strong constituency of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), where it is almost impossible to have a political conversation or being critical of the government unless one is ready to risk being subjected to physical abuse. He was careful to speak quietly.

Being an individual in Turkey in a tense public climate is getting more difficult these days. Much more difficult is being a woman, with growing trends of women subjected to sexual abuse in a society where gender discrimination is rampant. Since August 2014, 139 women have been killed.