Ah...the clash of tradition and modernity.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/30/asia/girls.php
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"Freedom is the deepest need of every human soul."
- Theodore Roosevelt
About Me
- Carlos Reyes
- Washington, District of Columbia, United States
- Carlos Reyes is a senior in the Edmund A. Walsh, S.J. School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
1 comment:
All right, I will grant you that female feticide is a HUGE problem in North India. I will grant you that the sex ratios, particularly for the age-group of 0-6 years, is really skewed. I will grant you that I personally know people that have gone in for sex-selective abortion when it came to their third child (who they wouldn't have wanted to conceive in the first place had the first two not been girls). I will grant you that the position of women in general in North Indian society is not one to envy. I will also grant you that I have been really bothered by all th things I mentioned above (if you want to read some of my writing on this, tell me -- I might still have some).
I really want to throw in a "however" into this comment, though I feel that might be biased.
Yes, I did grow up in urban North India (even though I was born in a small town in Punjab) -- in possibly THE most rapidly developing part of the region/country. Yes, I have had privileges that other girls born in the same nursing home as me, on the same day as me, would not have had access to. But, really, I would like to, want to, believe that the situation is not as bleak as this article (and countless others, including my own) make them sound.
Also, just a quick comment on the article's title: I would think it is somewhat inappropriate since the biggest problem is not just the deeply-seated gender-motivated bias, but the fact that the girls are not allowed to come into the world in the first place. India is already facing a shortage of girls, and that's going to worsen if mindsets don't change. Legislatures alone cannot accomplish everything.
And finally, THE worst place to be born a girl? I wouldn't go so far as to say that. I've lived for four years in a little town in Saudi Arabia, and if I look at somehting really close to home -- say, how much freedom my mother had as a woman, why, of course she is INFINITELY better off in India. So, might it not be worse to be born a girl in a society that you cannot grow up to be in an independent woman in? And this comes from just my experience of the two places I have lived in -- I probably don't even know about others.
Shruti
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