And she was a mother too....

"Amma, Lakshmi akka fell there, run fast" shouted sharadamma, the maid at house.

The whole house rushed like a storm to the kitchen, Mr. Varadrajan shouting to call doctor- his wife was expecting a baby and doctor had confirmed the date of delivery in a day or two.

The father-in-law called the doctor, while shanthi, the only girl kid of Varadrajan and lakshmi stood in the corner , looking at everything around with daunted wet eyes and a pumping heart. Her mother is not well , there is something wrong, dad is crying."Don't worry , you are going to have a little brother to play with" consoled the maid and hugged Shanthi.

Ambulance came, they all rushed in, with the Mother-in-law sitting beside the stretcher on which Lakshmi was lying, crying with the pain and clinching on the stained sheet covering the stretcher. Varadrajan was panting and querying every moment with his mother "Is she alright?, do you need anything?, do not worry we will be reaching soon..damn this traffic!!"

There was a silence in the corridor, the father in law was walking restlessly back and forth, Varadrajan was resting on the wooden bench with his eyes resting on the roof and his mother resting on his shoulders. There were prayers going on in all their hearts and wait for the joyous moment was just too restless.

"COngratulations, Mr. varadrajan.. you are blessed with a little cute angel, you can walk in and see the baby in some time". Varadrajan thanked the nurse and rushed to his dad, he hugged him and whispered in his ears - it's a baby girl , we are blessed.

The father in law had his heart thumping like he is going through a downward swing on a gaint wheel. He knew his wife is going to be disappointed. she was expecting a boy who will take her generation ahead. but, who can question the wish of the almighty. He walked to his wife , hold her by shoulders and said - you need to be strong, it's a girl!

The mother in law was stoned , she closed her eyes, thanked god for the unkown and plunged into the woooden chair kept aside.
Varadrajan was near his wife, he took the angel in her hand like any proud father and whisphered - "Thank you God, I am a blessed father".

Both the parents moved in one by one and assured the wellness of the baby and the mother and were congratulated by the staffs there.
It was 3 in the noon , Varadrajan was busy walking on the corridor , talking to his friends and relatives and spreading the news about the proud moment. His father had gone to get some eatables from outside.

Shanti, the kid , was playing with the polybags lying on the floor and her grandma was sitting by the side of her mother Lakshmi.
Lakshmi was lying on the bed with swollen dried eyes and her weak body, she had brought a new life to this world and closed her eyes to relax like the mother earth.
The new born baby suddenly started crying, Lakshmi slowly parted her eyes, things were hazy around, she could see her mother in law holding the baby in her hand , she could hear the old lady trying to pacify the baby and Lakshmi, the weak mother could not hear the crying of the baby for a while, there was silence around , she opened her eyes to see again a hazy view. A view of the baby girl burying her head into her grandma's breasts. Lakshmi's heart pumped, she opened her eyes, she cried with no voice coming from her throat, her mother in law was feeding the baby. Lakshmi knew what the old lady was doing, she was helpless, tears rolling down her eyes, she felt a small hand touching her arms as if it was asking for help, Lakshmi was twisting in the bed, so was the baby.

The baby gasped for a while and then abated for eternity.
The grandama had fed her little angel with some milk laced with yerakkam paal (the poisonous juice of the oleander plant)

In the corner, Shanti the girl kid was standing with her eyes looking at her mother who had just given a life to this world and another mother who had taken a life ...life of another mother ... had she survived!


The above story is based on a cruel tradition prevalent in Tamilnadu and many other states in India. The purpose is the make people aware of girl infanticide issue and encourage them to take an action towards it.

Note: The oleander plant yields a pleasant flower,but also a milky sap that, if ingested, can be deadly poison. It's one of the methods families use to kill newborn girls. "Female infanticide" is the intentional killing of baby girls due to the preference for male babies and from the low value associated with the birth of females." In some part of rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action.
In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu [state], as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances [in 1993] ... Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death...(The Source of the information in the note section is relief project website)

Being a prisoner in India: The story of Jails

When we think of a Jail, we visualize one of the scenes from those retro bollywood movies with a dark room where the inmates are neatly dressed in a striped attire, there is a huge space behind those walls where people do stone hammering and also sing and fight. The atrocity which is shown on the reel is mostly inhuman behavior of the Jailer, sometimes even funny when the jailers are ‘Angrezon ke zamane ke jailer’. The reality is different and more ‘inhuman’.
The real jails are a 10’x10’ room with toilet instilled in the same space, a bunch of weak, delirious people with some disturbing sad stories. There is an acute lack of hygiene and a dearth of even basic requirements to live. The jails are overcrowded, as clean as a stable of horses and inhouse a number of people who are trail cases and waiting for their luck to take a turn. A few are abandoned, a few say they are not guilty, then there are women prisoners who face a different degree of stigma and humiliation.
In India, We still follow Prisoner’s act of 1894. The application of a century old law in the changed socio-political scenario is absolutely bizarre, and is out of tune with the entirely transformed picture of human society. During the past some decades several organizations, intellectuals and committees set up for jail reforms have expressed their views on the importance of reviewing the Act which is not comprehensive.
Overcrowding is a huge problem, the number of inmates on an average in a jail in India is 3 times of the capacity.
Below are the figures from National Informatics centre for year 2003, and the situation has worsen since then. I am sure we should atleast know of this fact, write about them and ideally act on them.

• Total Number of Jails in the country : 1,140
• Total Capacity of Jails in the country : 2,33,543
• Total Number of Jail Inmates : 3,26,519
• Male : 3,13,739 (96.1%) Female : 12,780 (3.9%)
• Convicts : 91,766 (28.1% of total inmates) Undertrial Prisoners : 2,17,658 (66.7% of total inmates)
• Male : 96.3% of total convicts Male : 96.5% of total undertrials
• Female : 3.7% of total convicts Female : 3.5% of total undertrials
• The highest number of 50,531 inmates (49,410 male : 1,121 female) were reported from
Uttar Pradesh (15.5%) followed by Bihar 37,323 (36,274 male : 1,049 female) at the end
of the year 2003.
• 339 Women Convicts with their 334 children and 1,132 Women undertrials with their
1,131 children were reported in the country.
• The highest number of Graduate and Post Graduate Convicts were reported from Punjab (648) and Uttar Pradesh (137) respectively at the end of the year 2003.
• Murder alone accounted for 58.6% of the total Convicts under IPC Crimes.
As they say, we should kill crime not the criminal that too this way!

Child Abuse - Protect that smile

by
Gaurav Kumar

The dark scar starting from somewhere between his hairs and crossing across his eye-brows stopped at his left cheek like a line of ignorance and apathy on the face of the nation. Mohsin, the 6 year old was rescued from one of the chudi factories in Faridabad, Where he had to eat mica-bauxite wrapped bread loafs, puff in the long rusted pipe in a furnace above 700 degree Celsius and cut himself with an oxidised blade piece to take leaves. Mohsin is not just one such story, he is a tale of 40% of the 440 million (19 percent of world) child population in our country. Mohsin was rehabilitated in one of the schools run by a child welfare organization in Noida.
Every development issue in India has an implicit effect of poverty or may be poverty seems to be root cause in most of the issues, but brutality and discrimination with children has lot many crucial factors involved out of which one of the most important understands the meaning of "abuse". Many of the erudite directly correlate abuse with either child labour or sexual harassment.
To understand it properly, abuse is constitutionally divided into four categories which have a grotesque face as revealed below.
Physical Abuse
1. Two out of every three children are physically abused.
2. Out of 69% children physically abused, 54.68% are boys.
3. Over 50% children in all the are being subjected to one or the other form of physical
abuse.
4. Out of those children physically abused in family situations, 88.6% are physically abused by parents.
5. 65% of school going children reported facing corporal punishment i.e. two out of three children are victims of corporal punishment.
6. 50.2% children worked seven days a week.
Sexual Abuse
1. 53.22% children report having faced one or more forms of sexual abuse.
2. 21.90% children face severe forms of sexual abuse and 50.76% other forms of sexual abuse.
6. Children on street, children at work and children in institutional care report the highest incidence of sexual assault.
7. 50% abuses are persons known to the child or in a position of trust and responsibility.
8. Most children do not report the matter to anyone.
Emotional Abuse and Girl Child Neglect
1. Every second child report facing emotional abuse.
2. Equal percentage of both girls and boys reported facing emotional abuse.
3. In 83% of the cases parents are the abusers.
4. 48.4% of girls wish they were boys.
The data may look exhaustive and redundant to many of the readers , for it all just flashes the poor face of a child in plight and may be there is a pinch of sympathy of an iota of time, but it has larger meanings and more detailed implications.
I see a link of the child abuse in the our so called , so much boasted tradition which talks of dictatorship in the smallest unit of society, our families. Our basic psychology of considering punishment as a tool to make good people. Why were we beaten up in schools for not completing home works, Is discipline complementary to punishment? I strongly believe that the act of slapping your own child for not completing his own task is extended to burning your child servant in tandoor for not completing his work.
If I talk of sexual abuse , again I see a reason to curse the same stereotypical boasting of our culture and traditions which makes sex a taboo and subject of curiosity which leads to the frustrations and rapes. Most of the cases registered under sexual abuse are as shameful as exhibiting private parts in front of minors and sending them into a state of trauma. Do you a see a link of opposition of sex education here??.
Forget about being a human activist and volunteering for child protection movements, we need to start with talking about the denigration of innocence and understanding the root cause of the existence of the shameful issue. It makes more sense to stop the reason of creating abusers in society rather than rehabilitating a raped girl child and giving a life sentence to the person who commits the sordid crime.

Hunger - Strive, Not to Starve

by
Gaurav Kumar

After 62 years of independence, It gives me a feeling of exasperation and suffocation to write about “lack of food” as a pertinent issue , an issue which seems to have a perennial root in the wet roots of Indian development journey. Starvation is one of those issue which remain unnoticed on an awareness platform by most of us on a public norm. The revelation of the incidents and monstrous extent of malnutrition and scarcity of food, takes a lot of people to an amuse , amusing me on the apathy of an average indian citizen.
When we are hogging in the restaurants and wasting food at the rate of 1/3rd what we consume in our designed and fashioned restaurants where we boast of our increasing spending powers and paced crawl towards a developed economy, many of us might not even know that we rank 94th in the global hunger index of 119 countries.
More than 27% of the world's undernourished population lives in India while 43% of children (under 5 years) in the country are underweight. The figure is among the highest in the world and is much higher than the global average of 25% and also higher than sub-Saharan Africa's figure of 28%.
When we are overweight on our spends on cricket and charisma of bollywood, it might be an unheard fact that around 40% on the babies born in India are underweight.
We still have population in our country which feeds on rats and grass because they can not afford the grains and in the development reports it is not accounted as a case or count of starvation because starvation in English dictionary means “empty stomach death” and in the post mortems , the bladders of all these demised population contains traces of grass and rat excerpts.
It is not because we cannot feed such a huge population, it is not because we cannot think of a system, rather it is because of lack of awarness in the minds of so called educated people and implementation on huge budget PDS(Public Distribution System) and other development programmes.
I know it is not a time to crib over why it is not done or why do we not know that millions of people die without food, it is important to understand the need of taking one step ahead and developing a thought process to live with our heads high and stomach filled.