How are you? I am fine and I hope this letter finds you in peaceful and rationale state of mind. It’s already been a week but it feels as if it was yesterday that I wrote my previous letter to you. I am finding it really difficult to find better introductory statements every time but in vain. Using the same old greetings doesn’t make letter writing as interesting a job as I felt it would be.
This era of instantaneous communication slowly draining out our skill at written word, to find an appropriate word at a pressing moment has become as difficult as finding a bride as and when the moment demands. Well, may be, to find a bride is more difficult than finding a word because unlike brides, words are in no shortage in our dictionary.
Coming to brides, the way we involuntarily invent new words and jargon to suit our needs, Indian parents are relentlessly trying novel ways to find a perfect bride for their sons. Match makers these days are making a fortune quicker than online gamblers. Increasing demand for brides is enabling our girls to demand more from their would-be-grooms; a Government job, flexible work hours, decent pay-scale and reasonably good looks being some of them. Sometimes it makes me wonder how imbalance also occasionally works in favourof the imbalanced.
Our rapidly misbalancing sex ratio is causing a huge concern to human rights activists across the globe. But our matrimonial agents are gaining their best through innovative methods of bride-tracking and profile building for grooms. However, barbarousmethods like child marriages and bride-trafficking are also being employed to meet the demand for brides. Ironically, where finding a bride for each son is becoming a heinous task, forced polyandry is followed by buying one bride for all the sons in the family. Trust me, the story of Panchali might not have moved a nerve in us when we heard the Mahabharata but forced polyandry in reality is an everyday terror lived by many innocent Indian women. To satisfy the needs of multiple men every night in a country where rape within marriage is not even recognized as a crime is a punishment meted out to women for no fault of theirs but for not dying the death of a rejected fetus.
When I was going through an article about this forced polyandry in practice, I tried to identify the reason behind this shortage of brides across the country. Though it is not in the hands of man to decide the gender of an unborn, nature can rarely be so unbalancing. In its due course it wouldn’t fail to produce equal number of either gender to keep its creation stable and running. Then, what might be intervening in this process of child births? How can there be more number of boys in need of a bride than the number of girls available? A basic research pointed out to the crystal clear fact that sex-selective abortions and female feticides done two decades ago are now effecting the availability of girls in matrimonial markets.
Beyond sex-selective abortions, one thing regarding the statistics caught my attention. Though few girls are being saved at a fetal stage due to prohibited pre-natal-sex-determination, they are facing the axe as soon as they are born. Post-natal-sex-selective behavior is leading to deaths of countless infants in our country and the irony in this fact is that those deaths are avoidable in many cases.
Dear society, when it comes to girls, why does your mind turn so irrational and narrower than a road-side gully? When an infant dies of hunger, lack of proper care, disease or lack of proper medical facilities, you do not fail to raise your finger against the government for not doing its part to save those tender lives. But when it comes to sex-selective-infanticide, you do not ever bother to acknowledge it as a social crime. For you, it is up to the parents to decide the way they treat their children. If a child dies out of neglect just because she is born a girl, you shall be the first to sympathize with her for her ill fate rather than fighting for her right to live.
In one instance, I heard a friend of mine tell me that a lactating mother need not take as much care of her diet if she is feeding a girl as much as she would if she is feeding a boy. All the food restrictions that we carefully impose on lactating mothers are eased significantly based on the gender of the newborn. Many similar myths that are deep rooted in our system make sure that girls receive way lesser treatment than boys, right from their day 1 under your care. Only strong girls of all the perceived weak beings make it to live a longer life into childhood only to encounter more hurdles along their pathway.
Dear society, if this trend continues, there shall be lesser girls to mother our future and in due course this shall lead to the collapse of human species. Though we need not actually count ourselves a necessary species on this planet thanks to all the imbalance we create in it.
Hope you try to convince your loyal followers that girls do need to live if not for their own good, at least for the survival of humanity.
Yours shamefully,
An Expecting Mother.
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