Friday, April 13, 2007

Curiouser and Curiouser !

'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,
'I don’t know where. . .
'Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,'
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
India feels like the ' wonderland' ,only that most of the times it's a rather murkier version of it !
Just imagine this - "In Bhopal Sindhis have slapped a code of conduct on girls" - to the extent of banning mobile phones and two wheelers to girls of their community ! The trigger to such atrocious bans being the recent elopements of two girls of their community with Muslim boys. The local Sindhi panchayat in Bhopal has asked parents to keep their daughters in check and not give them too much liberty. It even goes on to say " sometimes too much liberty becomes a burden on society".
Whatever be the reason for administering this kind of atrocious moral policing and whatever be the small/local/politically motivated group of young/old people involved in this -
this is REGRESSION. Isn't it true that these days one seems to find that we are actually regressing in a number of basic aspects of life behind the veils of development and democratic freedom.
This issue seems quite trivial at the preliminary level, but deep down we find manifestations of this gender- biasing very prevalent in our country. We have not made any progress, in fact we have regressed quite a long way back in terms of respecting women for what they are.
Everyday there seems to be mountains of evidence for this..so much so, that this has become more of the norm than the exception. Another example that highlights the callousness with which women get treated in India, be her at the lowest rungs of society or at the highest echelons of corporate life - " In the new appraisal system for the Indian Administrative sevice, there are specific queries for women on their menstrual cycle and the last confinement"...All this while the male counterparts had no questions regarding any of their health issues !
Is it then an exaggeration that I call India the wonderland ? It is here, and only here that you will find such episodes of high drama that feed and poison a system that is already corrupt beyond its limits , inflicted with systemic infections both of the mind and the body.

2 comments:

bee said...

call me unpatriotic if you want to, but i think india is a highly hierarchical repressive society and nothing can sugarcoat that.

where else will you find ads in newspapers asking for 'fair skin' for marriage proposals? the sexism, casteism and racism is so blatant in every sphere of life. women seem to encourage this.

Santhi said...

Yes, bee...Awareness levels and exposure is so abysmal and stereotypes get reinforced through media and society...it is really a struggle to keep wading through it day in and day out :-(