Ram Sarangapani wrote: > quality airports, good roads, and last, but not the least of all, make sure > women visitors are safe in the macho streets of Mumbai, Delhi & Kolkata.
India is not, I repeat not, going to become safer for women, especially for those who want to be treated just like another free human being anytime soon and by that I mean not in the next couple of decades probably. I had to comment on this one because I feel strongly about it. I judge a country, culture, civilization and all aspects that dovetail such concepts by one and only one yardstick and that happens to be - the freedom of a woman in that society. Note that it is not "respect" for women that I care for but "freedom". Having respect is good but what is more important is freedom. We have a lot of dodgy "respect" for women in most Islamic countries but very little freedom. In India this is often worse because on paper and by the constitution everyone is equal. But the society is so wretched and disgusting that that is hardly ever the case. The society may be great for some and may have done supposedly awesome things in the past but if the women are not free, in my books, that society is vile and worthless. The sexuality of an Indian woman is, in the vast majority of the cases, owned (either outright dictated or subtly nudged or pressured) by just about everyone in the family except her - the husband, his in-laws, the village elders, her parents, the brothers, other self-appointed wizened ones/neighbors/relatives etc etc. Young people rarely ever have the avenues and the opportunities to meet, mingle, and experiment in life. Even within a marriage it is not supposed to be for pleasure but for procreation! Right from choosing the partner to the sending of the symbolic glass of milk, just about aspect of a woman's life is charted out for her by everyone except her. Is it any surprise that such a country is unsafe for single women traveling alone or going about their lives on their own? No amount of public policy or intervention from the government can do anything about all the pent up frustrations among the males in the society. I, therefore, do not think that the police, who are often themselves lecherous, or the government can do anything about it. Besides, they often tie themselves up in a knot trying to handle simple things like whether or not to extend spousal treatment to Sarkozy's girlfriend. So long as the society remains as judgmental as it is, nothing is going to change. Often I find, and often so in the US, educated and supposedly enlightened Indians rebutting me on the above that women are free in India, especially these days, to do whatever they want. I then ask them about their sisters and they quickly get defensive not only about the FACT that their sisters studied at a local college while they (males) were sent to study at a faraway (and a better) college or that their sisters would never have been allowed to travel alone. It gets even more farcical when they defend the case for how they should be able to provide inputs about whom their sisters should choose as partners but not the other way round. When I traveled in India last winter (after almost a decade and thus expected things to be different) with my girlfriend, we found that the most pleasant places were those that did NOT have what many would call "main-stream" Indians. Darjeeling and Sikkim were awesome - no one batted an eyelid who you were or what you did; bars were cool (very balanced gender mix); and most important no one gawked at her the way it was in disgusting West Bengal, Delhi, and a lot of cities elsewhere in India. Insofar as hope for India is concerned, I take heart at the fact that divorces are shooting through the roof in India, at least in urban India. For me, such divorces, largely fueled by the new-found financial freedom of women, is a great thing to happen in the Indian society. In the past because women outside of marriage had no financial freedom they would have put up with suppressive and oppressive husbands and in-laws. With a career of their own that the new economy, slowly but surely, is affording them, they can at last walk out on their husbands far more easily than Indian women ever have been able to. I am sure things will change but not anytime soon. _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
