Rise of Women In India..

Its official - In India, its 9th March and not 8th - Women's Day and it took 14 years for Indian politicians  (read men) to rise above petty things and give more rights to women in the highest office in India- the Parliament and also in the state assemblies..

There are several tired old jokes about how women don’t know what they want. Yaaaawwwn! Really??!!! But one thing’s for sure — women definitely know what they don’t want and the list can be pretty long, ranging from the trivial and the mundane to the serious. What women know for sure is that they resent the assumption that any ‘want’ or ‘don’t want’ list has to be about men as if that is all there is to life. And yes, there are going to be howls of protest from women who might not necessarily agree with the entries on this list. But then again, we can always agree to disagree, can’t we? It’s a much more civilised manner of sorting out differences than lunging for shirt collars and settling issues with fisticuffs like some others we know..

DON’T THINK PINK

There is the irritating assumption that marketers make — that any technology or gadget, if targeted at women, will first have to be colour-coded even before its functions are customised to suit the specific demands women might have. So, laptops for women have to be baby pink or red; the same goes for cell phones, scooters and cars too. Sure, there must be some women who have a thing for being girlie, but surely it’s moronic to club all women with their individual preferences into one category. In short, women definitely don’t want to be colour-coded and slotted in the pink section.

UNIVERSAL MS

It is seriously annoying to find men are known by the universal Mr — totally neutral towards their marital status — while a woman has to specify whether she is a Ms — in which case she is supposedly unmarried — or Mrs, which indicates that she is married. How old fashioned! Let’s agree to stick to Mr and Ms irrespective of marital status, shall we? It is catching on and things are changing, but not quite fast enough. Women don’t want to be the missus anymore.

HELLO, WHERE’S MY MOTHER IN THIS?

On all official forms, government and otherwise, a person’s identity is established by the ubiquitous D/O or W/O, decoded as daughter of and wife of. If it is D/O, then it is automatically assumed you will fill in your father’s name. Women don’t want that to be the default choice. Many would like to name their mother in the D/O option and that ought to be both legal and socially acceptable. After all, a woman is the daughter of both the mother and the father. The same option — of naming one’s mother on documents — should be available to men too. Also, can men have an option of saying H/O, meaning husband of, equivalent to the W/O? If women can be identified as the wife of someone, surely the converse should be just as acceptable.

FOOTLOOSE, WEAPONS-FREE

Women don’t want to have to travel with an arsenal of weapons or have to make a hundred enquiries before making travel plans to even the most ordinary of places. Why can’t it be safe for women to travel without them, and their entire family, going into a tizzy about the ‘security and safety’ arrangements? It is almost as bad as the ‘security considerations’ that constantly hamper the itinerary of our netas and cause a public nuisance.

NO-S FOR NEWS

Women don’t want sections of magazines, newspapers or television time apportioned and slotted as ‘women’s sections’. You know what? We are not myopic individuals interested only in news that is supposedly of special interest to us. We are smart, thinking individuals with varied interests and are conversant with the ways of the world. We read and watch everything that is put out there for general consumption. And guess what? Diet plans, recipes, fashion and grooming columns, etc are things that men should be and are interested in as well; so why confine them to the so-called women’s sections?

PULL YOUR WEIGHT, MATE

Help is such a loaded four-letter word. So, we don’t want to hear another word about how men should ‘help out’ at home. Hello! Just who are they doing a favour by ‘helping’ out with household work, whether it is running errands, cleaning up or being useful in the kitchen? Let’s call it what it really is: pulling one’s own weight. In a shared living space, no one ‘helps out’ or does anyone favours. One just does one’s fair share of work. And yes, that includes doing the dishes and supervising domestic helps.

SPOIL US, PLEASE

Hasn’t the world figured out by now that women want it all? So don’t ask us, for the seven hundred trillionth time, how we can fly the feminist flag and also want chivalry. For centuries, one half of the world has been denied most rights that the other took for granted. Even today, though life is comparatively better for women, we still have to keep fighting for basic freedoms and opportunities. We want to live life on our terms. That includes getting the space to be our own selves as well as being attended upon.

CLAWS IN, PAWS OFF

“Women ask for trouble …”. That’s a line we don’t ever want to hear again. Every time there is an instance of rape or sexual harassment (eve teasing is a word that should be banned once and for all), you can be sure that there is some patronising pundit — be it the police, self-appointed custodians of social mores and morality, or a politician — who’ll say that the woman invited trouble because of the way she was dressed. Well, let’s get this straight: we will wear what we want. We don’t pounce on men who are ‘skimpily clad’ and grope them over, do we? So keep your paws to yourself and learn to be civilised.

WE ARE; THEREFORE, YOU SHUT UP

Just who should decide what constitutes ‘pretty’, ‘sexy’, ‘ugly’, ‘sensuous’ or any other category that women are constantly slotted into? We don’t want to be held up to arbitrary beauty standards. Let us just be who we are; there’s no reason why we should be sized up and be pressurised to measure up. My life, my looks. If you don’t like what you see, look the other way.

LOOK MA, YOU ARE FREE

Hum sab ke paas Ma hai. And there is no one gold standard against which we can weigh how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a mother is. We venerate our mothers but forget that they are human too, with their own needs and wants, feet of clay and foibles. If we really want to honour our mothers, and give them their due, how about stopping guilt-tripping them by constantly discussing — in public and private — what good mothers should do and be like?

 

Source: Indiatimes.com

Gendercide- The war on baby girls

IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.


Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $ 12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do?

For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the daughter, try for a son. In China and northern India more than 120 boys are being born for every 100 girls. Nature dictates that slightly more males are born than females to offset boys’ greater susceptibility to infant disease. But nothing on this scale.

For those who oppose abortion, this is mass murder. For those such as this newspaper, who think abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” (to use Bill Clinton’s phrase), a lot depends on the circumstances, but the cumulative consequence for societies of such individual actions is catastrophic. China alone stands to have as many unmarried young men—“bare branches”, as they are known—as the entire population of young men in America. In any country rootless young males spell trouble; in Asian societies, where marriage and children are the recognised routes into society, single men are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity.
It is no exaggeration to call this gendercide. Women are missing in their millions—aborted, killed, neglected to death. In 1990 an Indian economist, Amartya Sen, put the number at 100m; the toll is higher now. The crumb of comfort is that countries can mitigate the hurt, and that one, South Korea, has shown the worst can be avoided. Others need to learn from it if they are to stop the carnage.

The dearth and death of little sisters

Most people know China and northern India have unnaturally large numbers of boys. But few appreciate how bad the problem is, or that it is rising. In China the imbalance between the sexes was 108 boys to 100 girls for the generation born in the late 1980s; for the generation of the early 2000s, it was 124 to 100. In some Chinese provinces the ratio is an unprecedented 130 to 100. The destruction is worst in China but has spread far beyond. Other East Asian countries, including Taiwan and Singapore, former communist states in the western Balkans and the Caucasus, and even sections of America’s population (Chinese- and Japanese-Americans, for example): all these have distorted sex ratios. Gendercide exists on almost every continent. It affects rich and poor; educated and illiterate; Hindu, Muslim, Confucian and Christian alike.

Wealth does not stop it. Taiwan and Singapore have open, rich economies. Within China and India the areas with the worst sex ratios are the richest, best-educated ones. And China’s one-child policy can only be part of the problem, given that so many other countries are affected.

In fact the destruction of baby girls is a product of three forces: the ancient preference for sons; a modern desire for smaller families; and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus. In societies where four or six children were common, a boy would almost certainly come along eventually; son preference did not need to exist at the expense of daughters. But now couples want two children—or, as in China, are allowed only one—they will sacrifice unborn daughters to their pursuit of a son. That is why sex ratios are most distorted in the modern, open parts of China and India. It is also why ratios are more skewed after the first child: parents may accept a daughter first time round but will do anything to ensure their next—and probably last—child is a boy. The boy-girl ratio is above 200 for a third child in some places.

How to stop half the sky crashing down

Baby girls are thus victims of a malign combination of ancient prejudice and modern preferences for small families. Only one country has managed to change this pattern. In the 1990s South Korea had a sex ratio almost as skewed as China’s. Now, it is heading towards normality. It has achieved this not deliberately, but because the culture changed. Female education, anti-discrimination suits and equal-rights rulings made son preference seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. The forces of modernity first exacerbated prejudice—then overwhelmed it.

But this happened when South Korea was rich. If China or India—with incomes one-quarter and one-tenth
Korea’s levels—wait until they are as wealthy, many generations will pass. To speed up change, they need to take actions that are in their own interests anyway. Most obviously China should scrap the one-child policy. The country’s leaders will resist this because they fear population growth; they also dismiss Western concerns about human rights. But the one-child limit is no longer needed to reduce fertility (if it ever was: other East Asian countries reduced the pressure on the population as much as China). And it massively distorts the country’s sex ratio, with devastating results. President Hu Jintao says that creating “a harmonious society” is his guiding principle; it cannot be achieved while a policy so profoundly perverts family life.

And all countries need to raise the value of girls. They should encourage female education; abolish laws and customs that prevent daughters inheriting property; make examples of hospitals and clinics with impossible sex ratios; get women engaged in public life—using everything from television newsreaders to women traffic police. Mao Zedong said “women hold up half the sky.” The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down.
 
Source: The Economist