Wake up people!!!

Though i wrote this last year, sometime around the Women's Day, even today, i feel the sentiments expressed in this article quite as strongly if not with greater intensity. I hope it acts as an eye-opener!

A few weeks back, on the, “Women’s day”,I found many articles in the newspaper about Women’s day celebrations and women empowerment schemes by the Government and also by some NGOs. As I continued flipping through the pages I found two other articles which immediately caught my attention. One was about a woman who had committed suicide after giving birth to her fifth daughter since she was so depressed at not being able to conceive a boy, the other was about how 9 male teachers of a teacher training college for women assaulted their students.

Here we are on one hand ‘celebrating’ women and everything wonderful about them while on the other hand we turn a blind eye to such reports of exploitation, which appear almost everyday. I found the contrast both pathetic and horrifying. Why did a mother (who obviously was a woman herself) think of her own daughters as curses and crave for a boy? Why do people indulge in female infanticide and feticide? Why should the parents of the bride pay dowry to the groom? Such questions and many more often leave me baffled.

Today, India boasts of a female President, a female speaker, a woman of our motherland made it to the space and we also have many eminent sportswomen. When women have achieved so much and have been proving their mettle over and over again, why are they still not treated on par with men? Is it because of our society’s baseless yet rooted prejudice against women or is it because we simply refuse to change our mindsets?
In cities, we find girls pursuing higher education, taking up jobs and holding esteemed positions, they also manage their household and kids. We have working mothers, wives or daughters, so, we may feel that ‘women being ill-treated’, is too cliché and irrelevant in today’s modern world. But we need a magnifying glass to get the clearer picture.

The number of high school dropouts amongst girls is not showing a declining trend. Many people from the Below Poverty Line families either want their girls to work as maids or they want to get them married off early while they may consider educating the boys.
Its high time we all woke up to this and realized just how inhumane this is.