Can you imagine anything more embarassing and depressing?
Growing up, we would travel everyyear to my grandparents home in Muzzafarnagar and Meerut in U.P. ; my time for the 4 hour drive was spent either sleeeping or staring out of the window (or puking from the pollution/car sickness (I know, I know no one wants to know)) and I'd read the painted walls of homes which were being used as advertisments that screamed "Pay Rs.500 today and save Rs. 50,000 in 20 years!!!"
Of course, the multitude of aspects inwhich this statement is socially wrong is beyond words for me. Then there was the "Sex Doctor! Call today and satisfy your in-laws! 100% Guarantee!"
If I travel in the city, I am treated with bill boards and posters of NGOs saying "Women are goddesses; rever them; don't kill them". But, you don't see these posters in the villages. Maybe this is just a north indian trend or maybe all Indians are born and bred to think that women are a 'bojh'.
But how do you look at a woman whose husband earns Rs 600 per month, who tries to make her mud house prettier by putting soap packets on the walls, who lives in a world where noone was willing to marry her unless her father took loans, sold his cattle to pay for her dowry, who hasn't bought a saari in 10 years and her only hope of getting a new one is from the dowry that her son gets, who is homeless if her husband decides to leave her one day, who eats after the men have eaten in the house, who sleeps on the floor while her brother sleeps on a bed, who gets beaten by her husband and her father tells her that she must have done something to deserve it, and tell her that 'Sweety, women are equal. You should look forward to having a girl'
It just can't happen. Who can I blame? The men? they are also just a pawn in the system. Wasn't it her mother who told her not to sleep on the bed? So, is it the women's fault?
How do you change a society whose every fibre works on the belief that men come first and women are an expense to have? Where letting them work means that the men in the family are incompetant or as people put it, sterile?
How the do you change it? And all you city people reading this, I know your sisters work and you thnk thats a great hing. But do your moms? What will happen once your sister gets married? When she has a kid? Will you be one of those people who says 'leave it for the family. Kid is more important'? What will you do if she does and 20 years later she gets a divorce and she has no way of supporting herself?? Will you be the one to tell your wife to make a sacrifice to keep the 'family' happy? Don't answer to me. Speak with yourself. Be honest.
And the biggest problem is that I have no idea how to go around even initiating a change. Of course, economically independent women will even be raise a voice and not forced to call their husbands their sons after being raped by their FILs. But how do you get women to work in a society where they are not allowed to? Where even the smartest ones are asked to come back before dark from work and hence are left behind in every career race?
