This is Chennai-based photographer, Vasanth Paul.
Paul told BuzzFeed that on Friday night, at around 11:30 p.m., he had stopped for a smoke on his way back from a friend’s place, when he heard a woman's voice crying out from an empty plot of land behind him.
"I was about to leave to avoid trouble but decided to check anyway," Paul told BuzzFeed. He heard the woman shouting for help.
"I don't know any Hindi, but I know enough to have understood someone screaming 'Bachao'," he said.
When he got closer to the source of the shouting, Paul saw three men, two of whom were trying to undress a woman on the ground. "I got into a fist fight with one, when a second man strangled me with a rope," he said.
According to Paul, he distracted the men for long enough that the girl was able to escape, and she came back with an auto driver who helped fight off the three men.
The three men escaped, and the woman decided not to file a police complaint. Paul returned home injured and wrote this status on Facebook, narrating the story as he knew it.
Paul's message is to not be a passive bystander when one witnesses violence. It's garnered more than 7,000 shares in just a few hours.
Paul added, "I wrote the status because I was angry and hurt at the way things were last night. I just wrote it to express that. I have been overwhelmed by the response from people since then."
