Remember when as a child, you'd go to the store with your parents, and stop at the meat counter? Your dad or mom would move from one to the next, occasionally ask the price or origin of one piece, move on, settle for one, and then proceed to instruct the salesman behind the counter on which pieces to select, asking about cut, origin, commenting on quality, and finally, pay the man and leave. An arranged marriage in India is pretty similar.
If you are born Indian, and god forbid, Indian female, you are a piece of meat. You have an expiration date. It is vital that you are put on display well before that. People will move from one to the next, for you are not alone in this exhibition. Interested parties will ask a few questions, not to you, but to the parents, the salespeople. They will make their comments, talk about features they don't like, which the salespeople judiciously assure the customer will be removed from you before delivery. With meat, it's the fat. With girls, it's their loud laugh. Or them wearing jeans. They haggle some more, finally settle on a price, and you are sold.
If all this sounds fantastical to you, count your blessings. If you agree all too much, know you are not alone.
Just like the meat, all this happens right in front of you. Constantly. You are discussed, criticized, measured, dismissed, all in your hearing. You are sold without your consultation. You are given no choice but to go home with the people who bought you.
Bleak? Sure. Real? You bet. It doesn't matter if you were a lovely, frisky calf who dreamt of grass meadows. And it matters even less if you were a brilliant, accomplished person with dreams in your eyes and a fire in your soul to achieve them. You will be slaughtered and sold. When the time is right. To the person with the best offer.
What you are, what you can be, what you can achieve, what you have achieved, your personality, character and everything else pales in comparison to whose wife you are. That tag is the only one which can validate your existence. Your whole life revolves around that one moment. When someone else, and often, someone who you have known for a matter of mere months, claims you as his. Nothing remains of you, not even your name. You leave subdued, bought, owned.
Of course there are happy marriages. And ones that work far better than anything you could have found for yourself. Who knows you better than the people who brought you into this world, right? Granted.
Then why the negativity? Because India has one of the most skewed sex ratios in the world. In some states, it is a mere 820 females for every 1000 males. Because girl children are slaughtered. Inside the womb, or minutes outside it. Because in places no one talks about, women are forced to marry more than one man, often brothers. There aren't enough girls to go around, you've killed the rest. Because there are people begging others, or mortgaging the only piece of land they own in the world, or spending every last paisa they have saved during their lives. To give a daughter away.
Because the following comments are heard in the houses of educated, open minded, worldly - wise, well earning individuals :
1. People are already asking us how she's working in Delhi. Does she live with relatives? Do you have someone there keeping an eye on her? And now she's saying she wants to go study in the States. Can you imagine what people will say after that? We said no, obviously, it's not going to happen. Who will marry her?
2. People say she's smarter than most of the boys in her class. And they're fellow doctors, aren't they? Can you imagine what she'll be like if she does her M.D. as well? Who will marry her?
3. She makes more than most of the boys we've looked at, even if they're more educated than her. And she doesn't want to compromise by looking for another job. Who will marry her?
4. She says she want to study medicine. And she's even got admission. But we can't just spend all that money on her education, we have to marry her off also. Is she's a doctor with no dowry, who will marry her?
5. She got chicken pox last month. I'm not letting her leave the house for another 3 months. If it scars her face, where will I find a husband for her? Who will marry her?
5. (A husband to his wife) Why didn't you immediately say that you could have her when that lady (with a son) asked you if you have plans of getting our daughter married? If you don't catch onto clues, who will marry her?
And so on. And so forth. Until they find someone who can put that blessed piece of thread around your neck, you are a burden, a constant worry that bites into their very souls. And the whispers...
"she's 23 and you're not looking yet?" "27 and not married? There has to be something wrong with her." And of course, it is everybody and their third cousin's problem, "are you looking? I know a few boys. Why aren't you looking? How long do you think you can wait? Do you know how old she is? Do you want to pay more? Do you know how much they ask for a girl of that age? And the inevitable "who will marry her?"
Marriage isn't a bad institution. But in India, what it has been reduced to, is pathetic. And the evils it has spawned is devastating. Female infanticide and foeticide aren't pretentious intellectual terms, they are everyday realities. Parents who kill their girl children simply because they say there is no way they can possibly raise enough money for a dowry. Parents who bury their girl children alive. Parents who weep when a girl child is born. All because of what marriage has become. A show for relatives and neighbours. "Look at the catch we landed for our girl. Do you know what we had to give to get him?" And did "your girl" agree? Who cares? We need a wedding to show the world. We need to give our daughter away.
Girls are raised constantly reminded that they are loans, to be returned with interest when the time comes. And while the situation of someone who can't marry off his daughter because he doesn't make enough to buy a Maruti may seem comical, it is anything but. The whole lives of most Indian parents with a girl child revolves around making enough to convince somebody to marry them. Oh and of course, dowry is illegal and punishable by imprisonment." And the constant string of comments all beginning with "when you're married..." reduces your existence to a being who will be worth something only, and only, if you have a husband to name.
Stop. Girls aren't androids incapable of feeling or intelligence. They dare and dream and hope and think and rage and pray and imagine and wait and work and aim just like your precious boys do. Stop raising them as commodities to be sold, and adding value to those commodities by making them gain degree and certificates of your choosing as embellishments. Raise them as self - respecting, considerate, honest, hard - working individuals, and send them out into the world to make their own way. Let them marry if, when and whom they choose, if they are settled in their own lives as mature individuals.
Don't bring a daughter into this world only to make them feel every single day of their lives that the only thing that can make them worth something in your eyes, and the only way you think their existence can be validated is if there's a ring on her finger and a man of your choosing in her life.
And stop treating them like milk which will revolt everyone they come into contact with if not used by a certain age.If you can't, kill us in the wombs. We'll never know that we weren't wanted.
2. People say she's smarter than most of the boys in her class. And they're fellow doctors, aren't they? Can you imagine what she'll be like if she does her M.D. as well? Who will marry her?
3. She makes more than most of the boys we've looked at, even if they're more educated than her. And she doesn't want to compromise by looking for another job. Who will marry her?
4. She says she want to study medicine. And she's even got admission. But we can't just spend all that money on her education, we have to marry her off also. Is she's a doctor with no dowry, who will marry her?
5. She got chicken pox last month. I'm not letting her leave the house for another 3 months. If it scars her face, where will I find a husband for her? Who will marry her?
5. (A husband to his wife) Why didn't you immediately say that you could have her when that lady (with a son) asked you if you have plans of getting our daughter married? If you don't catch onto clues, who will marry her?
And so on. And so forth. Until they find someone who can put that blessed piece of thread around your neck, you are a burden, a constant worry that bites into their very souls. And the whispers...
"she's 23 and you're not looking yet?" "27 and not married? There has to be something wrong with her." And of course, it is everybody and their third cousin's problem, "are you looking? I know a few boys. Why aren't you looking? How long do you think you can wait? Do you know how old she is? Do you want to pay more? Do you know how much they ask for a girl of that age? And the inevitable "who will marry her?"
Marriage isn't a bad institution. But in India, what it has been reduced to, is pathetic. And the evils it has spawned is devastating. Female infanticide and foeticide aren't pretentious intellectual terms, they are everyday realities. Parents who kill their girl children simply because they say there is no way they can possibly raise enough money for a dowry. Parents who bury their girl children alive. Parents who weep when a girl child is born. All because of what marriage has become. A show for relatives and neighbours. "Look at the catch we landed for our girl. Do you know what we had to give to get him?" And did "your girl" agree? Who cares? We need a wedding to show the world. We need to give our daughter away.
Girls are raised constantly reminded that they are loans, to be returned with interest when the time comes. And while the situation of someone who can't marry off his daughter because he doesn't make enough to buy a Maruti may seem comical, it is anything but. The whole lives of most Indian parents with a girl child revolves around making enough to convince somebody to marry them. Oh and of course, dowry is illegal and punishable by imprisonment." And the constant string of comments all beginning with "when you're married..." reduces your existence to a being who will be worth something only, and only, if you have a husband to name.
Stop. Girls aren't androids incapable of feeling or intelligence. They dare and dream and hope and think and rage and pray and imagine and wait and work and aim just like your precious boys do. Stop raising them as commodities to be sold, and adding value to those commodities by making them gain degree and certificates of your choosing as embellishments. Raise them as self - respecting, considerate, honest, hard - working individuals, and send them out into the world to make their own way. Let them marry if, when and whom they choose, if they are settled in their own lives as mature individuals.
Don't bring a daughter into this world only to make them feel every single day of their lives that the only thing that can make them worth something in your eyes, and the only way you think their existence can be validated is if there's a ring on her finger and a man of your choosing in her life.
And stop treating them like milk which will revolt everyone they come into contact with if not used by a certain age.If you can't, kill us in the wombs. We'll never know that we weren't wanted.
