------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Documented by Goa Desc Resource Centre Ph:2252660 Website: www.goadesc.org Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Press Clippings on the web: http://www.goadesc.org/mem/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------- The Child's Destiny ----------------------------- A series of suicides has taken place in the state. They are not a series in the sense they are all connected, but in the sense that they have happened one after the other. The deceased were from different areas of Goa; and they were of varying ages and had different educational qualification. They were from different family and social backgrounds. The only common thing about them was that they were all women.
Why would women commit suicide when men are supposed to be the bearers of all the burdens and stress and all the responsibilities and frustrations of life? Suicide is preceded by perilously powerful thoughts that the major problem or problems would never end; that there was no point in living; no point in suffering 24 hours a day and 365 days a year; the better option was to end the suffering by ending life.
Why were the women driven to suicide? Full stories are not known about what built up and eventually drove them to take their lives. But from the fragments that are available from various sources, a very high level of stress due to various factors seems to have driven them to the tragic end. The subject matter in which the stress originated varied from poverty to educational performance to marital discord. All these would lead us to think that the life of women in Goa is not as rosy as some of us would like to think it is.
Usually, Goan women are talked about as ones who grow up in a relatively free, liberal and egalitarian environment; who are not treated badly by their parents and husbands; and who are not denied opportunities of taking up a career or going up in a career. However, the recent series of suicides by women would tend to point that it may all be sham.
Young women taking their lives looks a bigger mystery than an older, married woman taking her life. It is difficult to perceive what stresses and frustrations can a teenaged or adolescent girl have when she has parents to take care of her and give her all love and help her solve her problems. But there might lie the real problem.
The series of suicides could well be taken as evidence that the picture of loving and caring parents is dented, if not bust, in Goa. Rather than protecting children from stress, parents are transferring their stress to them. In this competitive world, parents want their children to become something of their dreams. In this lethal passion parents of all classes are engaged. They make the dream for the child: and it is here that the trouble begins. The child has to perform excellently or suffer physical and mental torture of parents.
All parents must learn a lesson from the recent series of suicides. Plato advocated a principle that a child should not be taught anything up to the age of 12. He should be allowed to do whatever he liked, because only then we will know what the child likes to do. By the age of 12 most children have known what they would love to do most: maybe singing, maybe painting, maybe playing a sport, maybe observing stars, maybe solving mathematical puzzles, maybe studying the classics.
That was Plato and his idea might not be held valid by us today. But the essence of his principle remains as relevant as ever which is that the children must be allowed all the world's space to discover their love which will be their destiny. Only when a child is allowed to do whatever he likes to do he will be the maker of his destiny. Otherwise he will be a maker of his father's destiny and reaping frustration and acute stress in the process.
But education, as we said, is not the only area where the stress originates. There is poverty, financial hardship, adultery, physical and mental torture and other areas too where the stress originates. In these areas too, women suffer more than men.
Low income generates its own web of problems in a family: suppressed desires, denied acquisitions, feeling of inferiority, social shame, flying of expletives, sulking and token protests by women, like no food cooked for the evening all this triggers off recrimination and causes the level of irritation, anger and stress to rise among all members of family.
The persons who are psychologically most vulnerable are women and the children. This is not to say that men are made of satanic steel. They as breadwinners suffer psychologically too. Their own situations in their workplaces could lead them into deep stress.
Since they are unable to stand up to the system and demand and get all the financial and other comforts they think they deserve, they transfer their anger, irritation and stress to their women and children and driving some of them to suicide. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Editorial in The Navhind Times 26/11/03 page 10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
======================================= GOA DESC RESOURCE CENTRE Documentation + Education + Solidarity 11 Liberty Apts., Feira Alta, Mapusa, Goa 403 507 Tel: 2252660 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] website: www.goadesc.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Working On Issues Of Development & Democracy =======================================
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