The Missing Girls

An exquisite piece of work indeed. It tells us actually about the different stereotypes regarding the acute differences that lay in gender socialisation and gender differences.
This is patriarchy at its worst! :x

Just read this piece from another site. I think our rather liberal and ambiguous abortion laws are also responsible for this state of affairs. If the state permits abortion to be used as a method to restrict the number of children in a family then the law can be misused. This is what has happened in India. Our law was lifted almost entirely from the British law but with a rider that a pregnancy of a married woman could be terminated on grounds of `contraceptive failure`. This is a unique clause which has been misused by the medical fraternity as also couples wanting male children. If indeed the state wanted abortion to be used as a method of family planning then the law should have specified that abortion would be permitted only after a married woman had borne at least two or three children. This was the recommendation made by the Shantilal Shah Committee which was convened prior to the drafting of the law. Now a married woman can abort her first healthy pregnancy on account of `contraceptive failue` which seldom takes place. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act 1971 which was legislated to provide safe abortions to women in need has been hijacked to produce male children. There is an urgent need to look into this aspect.

Your right Ritu, parents need to change their mind set,.,,,but we all need to be togather to help each other changing their minds,.,,, and i think involvement of Government is necessary...otherwise its really hard.

Any ways ,,,great job done.

Re: # 10
Hello!
Thanks for your comment on my article about missing girls.I saw it today only there on the site and hence this delay i replying to you.
Well, I guess you are very right when you say that we need to change mindset of socity but then parents of children are part of society and hence they too need to be changed.
What do you think?

The mindset wont change till the society changes....where women are treated with dignity and without harrassment at every turn.....where perverts are beaten silly.....

Don`t blame the parents...blame the SOCIETY......which prepares the crime....and the criminal commits it

#7:

``Maybe government should give incentive for parents to have a daughter for e.g. no income tax on a family with two daughters.``

Great idea. Another great idea would be for the police to have a quota of at least 1000 non-bailable arrests each year for dowry related cases. And a mandatory dismissal of any policeman who uses this quota to harass the innocents.

These are draconian measures, but we do have a draconian problem.

The mindset wont change till the society changes....where women are treated with dignity and without harrassment at every turn.....where perverts are beaten silly.....

Don`t blame the parents...blame the SOCIETY......which prepares the crime....and the criminal commits it.

#4 mehul
kudos to you for such a wonderful act.
This article paints a bleak picture and might not be very far from truth. This article is very much like the movie matrubhoomi.
Cannot understand why the government would not crackdown on those mobile abortion ultrasound machines and the doctors or anyone who performs sex selective abortion.
It might be difficult to prove that an abortion is sex selective or not thus should government completely ban abortion except in cases of rape or incest.
Maybe government should give incentive for parents to have a daughter for e.g. no income tax on a family with two daughters.

Re: # 5

erm....I did not write that.....but I think its fierce!

actually, the late great edward said dealt with some of the issues bought up here in the following essay which also mentions friedman. also mentioned is tom delay who currently is in the dog house. few weeks ago, i posted an essay in which edward said critiques judith miller`s book on the m.e. judith miller, like friedman and delay, was also a big supporter of iraq war and like delay, she also ended up in the doghouse although only for a short while.

enjoy:

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/652/op1.htm

Dreams and delusions

``Meanings are not imposed from one culture on to another any more than one language and one culture alone possesses the secret of how to get things done efficiently, writes Edward Said

...,,,the unreality, the delusional unreality his statements share with so much of official Washington so far as discussions of (and policy towards) the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam are concerned. This has reached new levels of intense, even inane, abstraction in the period since the events of 11 September. Hyperbole, the technique of finding more and more excessive statements to describe and over-describe a situation, has ruled the public realm, beginning of course with Bush himself whose metaphysical statements about good and evil, the axis of evil, the light of the almighty and his endless, dare I call them sickening effusions about the evils of terrorism, have taken language about human history and society to new, dysfunctional levels of pure, ungrounded polemic. All of this laced with solemn sermons and declarations to the rest of the world to be pragmatic, to avoid extremism, to be civilised and rational, even as US policy makers with untrammeled executive power can legislate the change of regime here, an invasion there, a ``reconstruction`` of a country there, all from within the confines of their plush air-conditioned Washington offices.


...But that is not all. Arabs are always being berated for their inability to deal with reality, to prefer rhetoric to facts, to wallow in self-pity and self-aggrandising rather than in sober recitals of the truth. The new fashion is to refer to the UNDP Report of last year as an ``objective`` account of Arab self-indictment. Never mind that the report, as I have pointed out, is a shallow and insufficiently reflective social science graduate student paper...

....who don`t have the honesty to say straight out, yes, we are superior and reserve the right to teach the natives a lesson anywhere in the world where we perceive them to be nasty and backward. And why do we have that right? Because those woolly-haired natives whom we know from having ruled our empire for 500 years and now want America to follow, have failed: they fail to understand our superior civilisation, they are addicted to superstition and fanaticism, they are unregenerate tyrants who deserve punishment and we, by God, are the ones to do the job, in the name of progress and civilisation.

A very apt and good piece. As someone who has been married for a long time without children and in bad health, I recently decided, along with my wife, that we would adopt a ``cradle baby`` from Tamilnadu, a girl who has been given to the government instead of being killed by the Gounder caste. I hope that I live long enough to see her grow up into a bright and educated young girl, and, if I don`t, I am sure that she would give my wife the love that only a daughter can give after I am gone.

Best wishes and keep up your very good work!

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To admit that there is no solution and the future is bleak.. is to step into a fallacy. One`s future lies not in another province in a randomly aligned national geography, but individual actions leading to responsible parenting of one`s own daugthers and sons.

To worry about the `daughters of the nation` of various peoples familiar to you only through TV and a misguided sense of collectivism.. is like worrying about the millions of aluminum cans out on the street when all you need to clean up is a locus of what.. 10 miles around you?

Just the fact that the trends and statistics mentioned in the article disgust and upset you, while there are morons indulging in the actual motherfuckery.. should clue you in that you and those people are not the same. Their problems are not your problems. Their lives should not intersect with yours. The trick, supposedly, is to think of yourself as not part of a nation but a whole nation apart which is what kaka does on his website broadcast called kakanation.