Born to Die!

Check out these proverbs:

“A woman should be a lump of clay.”

“The luckless man looses a horse a lucky man looses wife.”

These proverbs are still the part of the living follklore which inculcates the millions across the country. These oft quoted lines are grim reminders that even in the 21^st century- the age in which most of the modern world is awakening to the call of enlightened feminism – India still wallows in pristine muck of misogyny: mans inhumanity to woman. In majority part of india a woman is still considered to be a burdensome appendage. Shes an economic drain. She’s usually doled out as an non-entity or a non-existant person. Because she crushes her family with marriage and dowry expenses must be raised from childhood – through financial and physical neglect. Her birth, is greeted with silence nd sorrow a boy on other hand arrives to the sound of joyous conch shells. Discrimination begins at birth.

Comprehensive studies conducted by the UNICEF as well as Indian social scientists reveal an organised pattern of discrimination against young girls and older women in India. Their revelations are startling. India is the only country in the world where the ratio of women to men has been declining over the years. The sex ratio declined from 972 women per 1000 men in 1901 to 931 in 1981. And India is one of the handful countries where female infant mortality exceeds that of the male notwithstanding the fact that the female child is biologically stronger at birth. Girl babies are breast fed less frequetly, and for shorter durations than the boy babies. When they grow up they are provided less nutrtion than their counterparts. All this laxity and a silly crave for boy babies showed that most of females in the country suffer from acute trouble of malnutrition. Glaring figures of survey also expound upon the extent to which females are tossed aside and sons are more valued than daughters: boys are taken to hospitals more frequently than the girls, that too only for homespun diseases. Another mind boggling problem attached with the infanticide case and why it happens is the declining literacy rate of females. The general idea is that women DON’T need any education. Why? Because there's no education needed in housework and giving birth to children… exactly that’s what comprises of a woman’s role in an Indian society!! Don’t be aghast and disgusted, this is only the beginning.

It is not a very pretty picture, the plight of India’s girls aged 15 and under – about 140 million of them – cry out desperately for caring and sensitive attention. They form more than 30% of the country’s population but are denied adequate food and care because their parents are themselves the victims nd prisoners of brutal tradition nd economic circumstance in which the female shoulders a horrifying responsibility. For being born as a girl, she suffers each passing day of her life. Burned as an adult bride over the titanic dowry demands nd if shes a child bride(another boon!!!) condemned to lifetime of penurious widowhood upon the death of a husband even before her marriage is consummated.

There are few incidents which will be mentioned in this article, which will have a two fold task:

1. To inform the readers about the recent trends nd methods and ofcourse their effect on the society today, and

2. An eye – opener as to where our society is heading to?

The ruinous day of May, when another infanticide would take place in a small vllage of Madurai which is inhabited by the locals called KALLARS, was no different than any other normal day. Parents of the new born were Chinnama (mother), and Kuppuswamy (father). The new born cried lustily as it came into this world. It was a bonny child, fair in complexion, it is eyes squinting at the sunlight that filtered in. but when the mother laid eyes on her baby, tears welled up in her eyes. They weren't tears of joy…

Chinnammal had seen that it was a baby girl. What crossed her mind wasn’t the anticipation of the joys of motherhood but the trials that lay ahead. How could a family of daily wage agricultural workers belonging to the Kallar group of tear community afford to bring up and marry off two daughters? How could they, when the dowry demanded by the bridegroom’s family is astronomical. The couple had decided to have a second child only in the hope that it would be a boy… but on this sunny day their dreams lay shattered. They found out a solution to this, though that was tough for them too but they had no other choice. Kuppuswamy trudged somewhat unsteadily into a nearby field, plucked few oleander berries known for their lethal poison and returned home. Chinnammal mashed them into a milky paste and fed to the crying baby. The parents then shut the door of the hut, and waited outside for the poison to do it is work. Within an hour the baby started to twitch and tremble fitfully. Slowly she started pouting blood thru her mouth and nose. The parents heard her whining, a few more minutes and everything was quiet. Chinnammal knew that everything was over; she quietly walked over to her mothers hut close by, dug up a little patch of ground inside and buried the dead baby. Don’t be appalled as to how a mother can do that with a new born; that too who is her own child… she’s ready with her reply:

“I killed my child to save it from the lifelong ignominy of being the daughter of a poor family that could not afford to pay a decent dowry… but altogether it was extremely difficult to steel myself for the act….…”

Chinnammal wasn’t the only mother who administered poison to her baby daughter. There have been numerous and incalculable mothers like her who in the fervent hope of saving their families and their daughters from the lifelong penalty of being a daughter, that too of a poor family, killed them mercilessly. The reason of this relentless killing of babies is the cruel dowry problem, and which actually originates from problem of an incomparable magnitude – POVERTY. The families in which female infanticide usually happens is mostly the lower class, the wage worker class, and the lower middle class, where the family is unable to put up with the demands of the whims and fancies of the groom’s family. Undoubtedly, reasons like, illiteracy which enhances unawareness, ignorance among the general class; blind faith that the girl is the weaker sex thus cannot be of any help for the household in future; and the last but the most important reason that India is a male dominated society… and it hasn’t come out of this age-old shell even if it is now in the midst of 21^st century!

Men in India talk as if they belong to the family of ostriches and are unaware of successful women like, Kalpana Chawla, Kiran Bedi, Shobha De, Mira Nair, Gurinder Chaddha, Aishwarya Rai, Sushmita Sen and many more who are ruling the country and of course the world. They have achieved the pedestal which no man has ever achieved. And the best part of this is that men too acknowledge these women. But you know where the pain lies that they cannot recognize the women who are feeding them, giving air to their caprice and fancies, try to make it up for them all the time, trying to do all that pleases them. That proves how they are: insensitive and insensible and incognizant.

But like not a very prejudiced author, I will never blame someone for the plight of women in India. If they are killed right after birth, if they are being assaulted in all streets of India, if they are in a deplorable condition and if they’ve allowed men to dominate them it is all their feebleness, and bitterness which resulted in men doing the honors which they do. On this date people can only write and TRY to make women aware of their plight, they jus make it sure that women know, that in what kind of serious plight they are in. the biggest irony, is this article where a woman herself is gloriously writing an article where she’s describing the pains inflicted on her sex group

If young girls and older women are denied a living in most parts of India, it is only the next step of this cruel logic that they should be denied life itself. Female infanticide – snuffing out the lives of newborn babies, is ultimately the catharsis in the tragic drama of female life in this country. This article should be an eye- opener for all of them who read it and a mirror in which all Indians must look and come face to face with the ugliness that surrounds them. The challenge of developing India into a land of social and economic justice as Nehru puts it is not just the creation of factories, and machinery and of grandiose schemes.

“Ultimately, it is the human being that counts, and if the human being counts, well he counts more as a child than a grown up.”

- Jawahar Lal Nehru.