Men, Women, and the state of the World

Before we start, I would suggest that people understand that the blog post would talk of some mature topics.

Raksha Bandhan

While I am or was supposed to share reviews of a couple of books but this would have to be stayed back, maybe would that over the weekend. A few days back saw ‘Raksha Bandhan‘. Sadly the movie flopped. The topic of the movie was dowry, a social evil that has taken millions of lives, especially of girls and women in my country. Akshay Kumar plays the role of Lala Kedarnath, a chaath seller who inherits it from his family that has been doing it for generations. The claim is whoever eats from his chaat would have a boy. That is not his claim but a myth or something people made over time. If one would have used probability or statistics, then it probably would have been 50:50 as nature would have its own balance. It is we who skewed the balance and did infanticide, selective abortion if it’s a girl child etc. etc. even though sex selection or sex determination is unlawful by law now. But those statements don’t even come in the movie. So anyways he has this chaat thing (for those thinking and seeing the video, it is poori, there are quite a few different types and you fill it with a combination of spices and veggies.) The gentleman has 4 unmarried sisters. The whole movie is about his struggle of getting his 4 sisters married. The first sister he is somehow able to get married by paying 17 lakhs where he has to mortgage his shop. He is under the belief that his sister is happy and is in the struggle to get the rest of his three sisters married.

A social activist comes and says that dowry is evil. He asks her how many daughters she has, and she says two. He says that’s why she has the thoughts she has. If she had two male children, her thinking would be different. This is somewhere they should have gone more but events overtake them. He literally sells one of his kidneys illegally so he can raise money for the remaining three sisters. He is still under the impression that his first sister is happy.

Suddenly, he gets the news that his sister is dead. While there is a Police investigation, one of the neighbors who is seeing from the balcony says that the husband used to beat her and demand more dowry. apparently, the husband wanted a fridge or a scooter or something.

In India, we have the custom of Raksha Bandhan where the sister ties a colorful thread and the brother gives her gifts and vows to protect her. On the day she is supposed to tie the rakhi, she is murdered :(. If you leave aside the movie for a moment, NCRB data shows that violence against women has only grown instead of coming down. Many might not have known that for the last two-three years the data has been incomplete or there is no data. If one were to drill down into the reports, they would be more shocking.

After the death of his sister, he goes through a sort of catharsis and vows that he would make his sisters so educated, so badass that people would line up to marry them and there would be no more dowry. Over a period of time, the three sisters did find their mates and he is able to marry his crush/lover but it pushes them to their 60s (Around Akshay’s real age.) While I liked the movie, I knew it would have flopped. The reason is simple, most people in my country believe in tradition. And anything that goes against that belief system has automatically flopped

After seeing the movie, I couldn’t literally sleep for the next couple of days as thoughts came swirling around. The laws are made by men and for men only. The 2012 Delhi Rape case, supposed to make changes didn’t make changes at all. Just recently, a young woman/girl was gang-raped and when she went to the police station to report the rape, the cop raped her too. An investigation did take place and the cop was found guilty and was suspended. Are a cop’s suspension and the dignity of a woman are same? In law, in justice, there is a concept called proportional punishment. Unfortunately, Indian law fails to follow them in implementation.

Just a few days ago, there was news about how the noted lawyer Indira Jaising is rudely addressed by her peers and judges alike. Ideally, she should have been one of the twelve Supreme Court Justices by now but has always been overlooked because she is fiercely independent and non-corruptible. As can be seen from her Wikipedia page she is passionate about fighting for women, and human and environmental rights, all of which is a big no-no in the present Government’s eyes. While she is more than capable of defending herself, most women aren’t. And yet, I see most women are not with her as well which is a shame 😦

Other countries, a similar Environment

It would be a mistake to think that it only happens in India. For e.g. a few weeks back, around my birthday a 22-year-old Iranian woman was murdered in a police lockup because she didn’t wear a hijab. That death intensified in protests and of course, the Iranian mainstream and conservative media and folks blamed it all on the US and Europe. The BBC has done a lot of reporting on it while in India there was virtually no reporting of the same. If you see the interviews of the Iranian cops that have been shared and the accused (later criminals) in the 2012 gang rape case, except for the words the tone, and the idea, everything is the same. The rapists did it because she was corrupting people, the cops killed her because she is corrupting other women. Not much change. While this would have played in the press, GOI didn’t want it as they were trying to mend fences with Iran and wanted cheap Iranian oil rather than the expensive American Oil that we have been importing. In fact, the U.S. sanctioned an Indian Company over an alleged Iranian Oil deal and that story was also killed in the press. Today, GOI holds the most power as to what news gets widely disseminated and what does not. Both of these would be another couple of topics that probably need their own article/blog post so will not venture further.

Now again, if we thought it was just up to Iran or Muslim states, nothing could be further from the truth. Bigotry knows no bounds. Whether it is the Haredim and Chassidic Jewish communities, the Duggar family, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women, or Fundamentalist Baptists the list goes on and on. Imagine almost 50% of a country is against abortions due to whatever reason. Could you guess which country it is, if you guessed the United States of America, you guessed it right. It took me a while to understand why women voted against their own rights. The American right and the Indian right are similar in one way, both of them believe in conspiracy theories, that some recent research has shown may be an addictive disorder. And one side of the political spectrum does it more than the other. No prizes for guessing who.

I actually stopped listing as sooner or later it would involve all religions, the only difference would be in some degrees here or there. Indian mythology, for example, has most of the time shown women in a bad light. Even though Sita is blamed for her own abduction, victim blaming and victim shaming have a history in Indian mythology since the 4th century. In such a scenario, how have we changed?

Even in Parsis, there is a lot of conservation and quite a bit of in-breeding happens in them. There have been quite a bit of mental cases and their population has shrunk.

In almost all Asian Societies say Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Korea, etc., etc. in all these countries the population has been stagnant to failing. One of the reasons being they want to maintain the purity of the blood and they are failing because rearing a child is expensive in those countries.

Just last week came to know about this – In some Islamic societies require men to grow beards, apparently the sight of a smooth-cheeked man is apparently enough to invoke “immoral thoughts” among other men.

I am probably going to update the blog post over the weekend as there are still a lot of thoughts going on still in my mind. Haven’t been able to sleep for the last two days because of these and similar thoughts, probably not even tonight, but maybe on the weekend when I’m not so disturbed. I am fully aware, this is nothing viz-a-vis the women who are literally going through hell at any point in time.

Update – Just came to know that the U.S. State Department has reduced its India Travel Advisory Level to 2 on a scale of 4 & asked its citizens to exercise increased caution while traveling to India due to crime & terrorism, it identifies rape as the fastest growing crime in India. This may partially be in response to a string of high-profile rape cases and the rapists who were not just freed but felicitated in the Bilkis Bano Rape case. While Jaishankhar would try some sort of feeble response, he can’t say much as his own sons are all working and situated in the U.S.