little girls missing - But Where Are The Big Ones?

~Arundhati

It is not like I have never heard about infanticide. I have heard about it, read about it, passed an opinion about it. From the college hangouts to the lunchrooms at the office, I have talked about it at length over the years and with much passion. But what have I done about it? Nothing!

Welcome to the comfortable citadel of the quintessential NRI who has an opinion about everything, especially the "backwardness" of the "back home", but never finds enough time or Dollars to make a difference.

I am one of those big little girls who was not thrown in the trash or dunked in milk when I was born. I was actually loved, allowed to live, to thrive, to be educated, to be financially independent and to live in the world with my head held high because I am the woman of the future. But then, my kind live on a fragile island of comfort and believe this is all that is there to the world. Everything else is remote and distant, to be turned on and off at our convenience, just like the movies.

But something changed in me after I read Poonam's post. A friend sent me the link to Komal's post which came around the same time. The fatuousness with which I was looking at the world, was obliterated in a matter of seconds. Looking at all that information I shuddered. The enormity of it, the beastility of it made me hold my breath.

Genocide? Indeed! Is there anything that can me more brutal, more cowardly, more cold bloodedly organized, more unjust and yet more accepted than this? The images in Komal's post have been haunting me for days. Here I am, waiting for a child, any child, to bless my life and there are people in the world who are crushing, wasting, insulting this precious God given gift so callously! Can human paradoxes really surpass the paradox of Nature?

Then, suddenly, I realized that this act of killing a girl child is, in fact, just one manifestation of a many headed monster. It is just another way of expressing the lack of respect for women and the commoditization of the feminine. In the lower classes and the uneducated, this manifests itself in more brutal forms, in the so called higher classes, it manifests itself in more subtle, more pretensious forms.

When a girl gets married she is blessed saying, "May you have eight sons!" . Whenever someone asks me about having children, the 'well meaningly' advice me that, if I could somehow have just 'one' boy, that is 'enough'! As if after this long wait, I would be emancipated only if I have a male child. A family is supposed to be 'incomplete' without a boy. A husband does not stand by his wife in her life decisions. An NRI groom, shamelessly, demands a dowry for getting married to a girl. The physical, mental, sexual abuse of women in their families is a rampant even amongst the educated and the wealthy.

We see all these things happening in different shades, in different intensities, all around us in different contexts, but never think about them as one cohesive problem. We either seek a symptomatic relief for each of the problems or just plain ignore them. We create islands of comfort for ourselves, just so that our so called principles and practices are not threatened. We have a justification for everything. From religion to economics to the laws of karma, we use anything and everything to explain away the problems. We are not willing to admit that our society is rotten to the core, and that we need to go within us and seriously re-examine our values, otherwise, our society and our sanity will crumble and disappear without a trace.

Empowerment of women is not a distant ideal but it is absolutely critical for our survival as a human race. We cannot possibly expect to have a healthy, sustainable society with half of it's members living under dread and suppression. I am not a feminist in the much abused sense of the term. I don't propose the equality of sexes in anything and everything. Each gender has its own set of strengths and its own set of weaknesses. What I demand is equal respect for both, and an environment where both the genders can thrive in their own special way, without fear of suppression or suspicion about each other.

The Man and the Woman are made to complement each other in a way as to create a complete being. One without the other is incomplete, empty, stunted.

All the women and also the men who are reading this, I urge you, for once, look deep into yourselves. If you find even a shred of disrespect towards the opposite sex, please, please purge yourselves of it. It is a small step that we take on the "inside" that will change our environment for the future. We are all small people, but we have a great will that aligns to the collective will of the divine. Please channalize it to what is pure, what is just and what Nature intended us to do.

You may, perhaps, never see it, but rest assured, that your powerful will just saved the life of a young girl, who might have been killed otherwise.