DO WE CALL THIS HELL?

(8-YEAR-OLD YEMENI CHILD BRIDE KILLED ON HER WEDDING NIGHT DUE TO SEXUAL ASSAULT BY HER 40-YEAR-OLD HUSBAND AND STILL MUSLIM NATIONS HOLD MARRYING WOMEN BEYOND 17 YEARS IS UNISLAMIC)


When an eight year-old child bride dies in Yemen on her wedding night after suffering internal injuries due to
sexual trauma, one wonders if I am witnessing Hell on Earth itself, or if Heaven and Hell are utopic ends of a myth. Child marriages were legally banned in India even before my mother was born thanks to some visionaries like Raja Ram Mohan Ray and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar who along with the British rulers had the good sense to abolish many such inhuman practices against women that plagued the society. And though in many Indian rural areas girls are married off before attaining 18 years of age, (the official age of getting married in India), atleast they are not married off to men five times their age.
However, in Mulsim countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, such practices are rampant and their law and society is bound by the same with not a single sane voice to be heard anywhere from the often rich oil producing nations. It is reported that over a quarter of Yemen's young girls are married before the age of 15. Not only do they lose access to health and education, these child brides are commonly subjected to physical, emotional and sexual violence in their forced marriages. A law was created in Yemen that set the minimum age for marriage at 17. Unfortunately, it was repealed after more conservative lawmakers called it un-Islamic.
I first got a taste of the Hell as I mention when a few years ago I chanced upon Sultana, a book that delves into the life of a Saudi Arabian princess, a woman born to fabulous, uncountable wealth but who in reality rebels against the practices where girls as young as five are raped repeatedly by older men of the family who wish to have sex with virgin girls. Sultana cries for freedom, she had private jets to enjoy, jewels, mansions all across the world, but when her own brother and his friends rape young Egyptian girls as young as six for just fun and pleasure, when her own sister is assaulted by her husband who was five times older to her on her wedding night, she decides to break free. However, to little avail. And as I went through the pages, gripped by the tales of thirteen-year-old girls forced to marry men five times their age, young women killed by drowning, stoning, or isolation in the women's room, a padded, windowless cell where women are confined with neither light nor conversation until death claims them, I realised behind the veil of religion, and a secret society there still are nations in this world where sex, money, and power reign supreme. And for me that’s Hell for a woman.
Human rights organizations have called for the arrest of the Yemeni husband, who was five times her age.
Al Nahar, Lebanon, reported that the death occurred in the tribal area of Hardh in northwestern Yemen, which borders Saudi Arabia. This brings even more attention to the already existing issue of forced child marriages in the Middle East. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), between 2011 and 2020, more than 140 million girls will become child brides. Furthermore, of the 140 million girls who will marry before the age of 18, 50 million will be under the age of 15.One of the main issues is that there is currently no consistent established definition of a "child" that has been agreed upon worldwide.  This leaves various interpretations within countries and little protection for those who are affected.
And as we are short of days celebrating another International Woemn’s Day, I wonder at times, have I already known what Hell is? Thank God I never witnessed it, as I was born in a nation and in a society where women atleast have a voice that can be used to protest against atrocities. 

LEGALISING PRE-NATAL SEX DETERMINATION IN INDIA WILL NOT STOP FEMALE FOETICIDE

(WHAT WE NEED IS RESPECT FOR ANYTHING FEMININE, BE IT FOETUS, GIRL, WOMAN AND A WOMAN RESPECTING A WOMAN)

Recently, India's Union minister for women and child development, Maneka Gandhi, proposed to legalise
sex determination of the foetus which was so long illegal in India unlike the West to stop the practice of female foeticide, that is particularly rampant in North and West India. So much so that the male female sex ratio has gone down to 550 girls to 1000 boys in states like Haryana and Punjab compared to above 950 girls to 1000 boys in states like West Bengal and Kerala. Once made legal, the government will be able to keep a track of cases of female foetuses till they are born ensuring they don't get killed in the womb. It's more like exposing you to porn sites at an early age to teach what you are supposed to see and what you are supposed to censor. Such a proposal will also help doctors to shrug off responsibilities, who for all these years had earned large sums by helping patients abort female foetuses.
Even if we consider Ms Gandhi's proposal will help the government in tracking the abortions and will be easier than punishing the doctors and laboratories that illegally carry out such practises, one wonders what happens when these female children are born.
Apathy alone can kill female newborns who have been forced down a family by the government allowing them to be born instead of being killed as a foetus. Every newborn needs lot of care, nutrition and love while growing up in the initial months. Which obviously many girl children do not get in India.
In the west, pre-natal sex determination has worked because it's a society where men know how to respect women, fathers are happy with both sons and daughters, such practises of aspiring for a male heir was evident in 17th and 18th century Europe that in India we still practise in the 21st century. It's surely a shame on us but what's more shameful is when such practises are found to be more rampant in urban than rural areas where the so-called educated rich and middle classes thrive.
What is even more alarming is the way women (mothers and grandmothers) either keep on giving birth if the first few children are girls in hope of having a son, and how they also participate in the illegal sex determination practice. I have personally experienced a female classmate of mine who was married in Delhi long ago calling me and saying how her mother-in-law took her to have an ultra-sound test to find out if the foetus was a boy or a girl. Thankfully it was a boy! When I gave birth to a boy I have seen women in the nurseries who had girls welcoming me and literally crying at their misfortunes for giving birth to daughters. And that too I had my baby in one of the costliest leading hospitals of a city that is considered to be utterly progressive in ideas compared to the rest of India. When my so-called progressive and USA settled brother-in-law once mentioned that my husband's income is vital despite my earnings as Man is the Provider!
So when shall we change? We shall change only when our fathers not only give us their sperms to shape us but also their respect, when our husbands will not return home and ask for a cup of tea and snacks perfectly knowing that they themselves can make their own dishes and that wives too are working in offices and tired at the day's end, when we stop stereotyping the responsibilities, when we teach men since childhood that Man is not the provider, when men will voluntarily become stay home dads and allow their wives who are talented enough to earn what they earn themselves and become the provider instead, when women learn to respect women and mother-in-laws rise up to daughter-in-laws' causes and stop allowing the family from doing sex determination tests, when women defend themselves against atrocities instead of asking brothers and fathers to accompany them on streets to protect their modesty and ofcourse when we respect the birth of a healthy child instead of asking "What's the news? Girl or a Boy?" We should instead ask "What's the news? A healthy child or not? Is the baby kicking, is the mother keeping well?     

ON REPUBLIC DAY INDIA FAILED TO GIVE HER WOMEN THEIR RIGHT TO PRAY
(1000 WOMEN ARRESTED WHEN THEY TRIED TO ENTER A SHANI TEMPLE WHERE ONLY MEN ARE ALLOWED)

India is truly a diverse nation. Our 67th Republic Day saw members of an all women regiment performing

daredevil shows along Rajpath that was so long in India considered a male domain, while in another part of the country, a few hours from the hip and happening business capital of Mumbai, a group of 1000 strong women was barred and arrested by the Maharashtra government when they tried to enter a Shani temple that has closed doors to women since ages.
The protest was led by Bhumata Ranragini Brigade which had announced to worship Lord Shani at the sacred platform as a symbolic gesture to break the gender barrier at the shrine.
The president of the organization Trupti Desai had earlier threatened to use chopper to enter the temple if stopped by security forces. And Maharashtra government was prompt in arresting the protesters, who had squatted on the streets after being prevented to proceed to the temple. Only if they were this prompt enough when Dalits are murdered or children in slums are raped.
What was more amusing is the manner in which ministers and Hindu sadhus and sadvis maligned a religion that has forever been considered as a philosophy rather than religion. They went on to say Hindu scriptures bar women from entering Shani temples just like Islam bars women from entering mosques.
Shani Dev is one of the Navgraha devtas for the Hindus. The Shani temples are considered as a home without doors that has no restrictions for his followers and visitors to his temple. The devotees are considered to acknowledge fear but not of enemies. The fear of the wrath of Shani Dev is what keeps the devotees away from sins and evils.
The priests have come up with hilarious reasons stating legends unable to quote one single scripture that might suggest only men are allowed to put oil on Shani Dev in the temples. They tried to put in illogical explanations as to Shani idols being swayambhu idols, meaning that they regenerate on their own from the Earth, which incidentally many Shiva idols are too. The oil can be put only by men as the effect of Shani Dev’s wrath is considered to be less on women. The wrath of Shani Devta destroys the life, health, wealth and reputation of a man. Women are largely unaffected from the effects of Shani Dev.
In a bid to relate to women, it is believed that since women are not affected by Shani Dev’s effect, they need not get close to the Shani idols to pour oil.
Many in the patriarchal temple and worship sites in India assert the chastity of women is very delicate. It can be maligned even by the moonlight Women prefer to stay away from Shani Dev’s idol as a mark of respect, just like the Indian women have for their elders.
It’s not that women like me are interested in entering the Shani temple or for that matter any temple. But what surprises is a country whose Constitution provides equal rights to all its citizens irrespective of caste, creed, gender and religion has temples and mosques barring women from entering and worshipping at their free will. Some maulvis even supported the ban on women from entering the Haji Ali Dargah stating its a part of the Islam law, something that is not practised in a democratic republic called India.
Shani or not, Allah or not, what we women need for sure is our freedom and not our chastity.

THIS IS WHY I HATE FEMINISTS: THEY WILL MAKE ANY STATEMENT TO PROVE THEY ARE SMARTER THAN MEN

(CELEB FEMINIST KATIE HOPKINS CALLS FOR EUTHANASIA VANS TO GET RID OF ALL THE OLD PEOPLE AROUND)

Here’s a woman who says ‘People with Dementia are blocking beds and there is no point to their lives.” And when that woman happens to be celebrated feminist, British television personality and newspaper columnist, Katie Hopkins, then one wonders is feminism a word defined beyond the boundaries of humanity?
I have occasionally felt curious to know why many women deliberately try and need to prove they are superior to men just by doing and saying things that they otherwise do not believe in or are definitely shocking and negative to the society at large.
Do they need to prove they think different, they are forward, they are superior to men by making explosive statements like the one Hopkins makes? Else, how could Hopkins at the age of 40 even be “super-keen on euthanasia vans” and say there are “far too many old people around?”
She feels “it is ridiculous to live in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people!”
Her comments come shortly after she admitted regretting some of the extreme language she used against migrants in a column she wrote in the Sun entitled “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants”.
In an interview by Michael Buerk in Radio Times magazine, Hopkins says: “We just have far too many old people.” When asked for a solution, she goes on to say: “Easy. Euthanasia vans – just like ice-cream vans – that would come to your home. It would all be perfectly charming. They might even have a nice little tune they’d play. I mean this genuinely. I’m super-keen on euthanasia vans. We need to accept that just because medical advances mean we can live longer, it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”
Hopkins prides herself on never having apologised for anything she has said. Well, that’s exactly what most so-called feminists believe in. Making sensational statements that have little standing in this world and theoretical solutions that have little practical needs. Hopkins is definitely a mad woman and she says stuff undoubtedly to get a bit of publicity that she is looking for, in whatever form it is. But doesn’t she join the bandwagon of feminists who have over the years tried creating more of a male-female divide, rather than putting forward rights of women as rights of citizens of a civlised world?
I would love to give more points to my cook and maid who have worked hard all these years to raise their respective daughters and have finally sent them to colleges. They have stuck to one girl child. They didn’t produce any more so that they can give education to the daughter and she gets a chance to study and join a proper job in a country like India where in many states a girl child is killed in the womb.
To Katie Hopkins I can just say, she is 40 now, just my age, and I would hopefully wait to watch her turning old in a decade or two and taking help of an euthanasia van to end her life. And anyway, even now at 40 we really do not need women like Katie Holmes. They are a sham and a shame to the human world. 

MY STANDING OVATION TO THE 'MENSTRUAL' MAN

(Here comes an Indian man who wore sanitary pads himself to understand the menstrual cycle, its needs and came up with a low cost sanitary pad for Indian women across rural India)


Well, he had seen his wife Shanthi hiding something behind and leave the bedroom one day. He was curious

as to what she was hiding and then realised it was a piece of dirty cloth that she would have to ‘wear’ to take care of her periods. More than 80 per cent of women in India still don’t know the use of sanitary pads during  menstruation or the pads are too expensive to be bought. Hence majority of the women both in rural and urban areas still rely on the cloth that they get around. This practice is indeed utterly unhygenic. But it was not a woman who thought of doing something to stop this practice. On the contrary it was a man who realised a woman’s sufferings and decided to come up with a low cost sanitary pad that every woman across India could make use of.
Arunachalam Muruganantham, who worked at a workshop and came from an economically backward class was someone who was ready to research, experiment and innovate for a woman’s cause.

He realised most sanitary pads in India are made by multinational companies and hence the cotton used in the pads as a soaking material though costs less than 10 paise, each pad is sold for not less than Rs6-8. That shows what a huge profit the companies were making and how the Indian women at large suffered because they couldn’t afford the pads.

But it was pretty surprising that in his entire effort Muruganantham didn’t get the support of any woman. Take the case of his wife and mother. The wife separated and asked for divorce, while the mother thought his son has gone insane when she saw one day he was experimenting with various sanitary pads on his table and trying to find out exactly what material they were made of. Even the medical college girl students whom he took as case studies, either filled in the feedback forms writing wrong things or were frightened to speak to him thinking he was a pervert.

Still, Muruganantham was undaunted. While he tried to make his wife and later his sisters the test cases for his sanitary pad trial run, they deserted him thinking he has gone insane. So he had no other alternative but to wear a pad himself regularly and using liquids as viscous as blood to realise how much absorbent his pads are. Thus started the trail run. A man wearing sanitary pads to support women hygiene.

He understood that though the raw material was cheap, the machines where the sanitary pads were made ran into crores. That was the biggest investment which could not be done on a small scale. So he thought of designing his own machine. And he did it. He sent his model to IIT and his innovation got the first prize in a competition.

Now its a successfully running self-sustaining sanitary napkin business, called Jayashree Industries. It has 2003 units across India, including the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, employing 21,000 women, from rural areas making them self supporting too. For his innovation and efforts, he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2014.

So for a man who was just a meagre worker at a workshop, it was a daunting task to make the cheapest sanitary pads and reach it out to lakhs of women in India who were so long forced to give up their hygiene at the cost of ‘Mesntruation’ a biological phenomenon that is still considered a taboo.

MY RED LETTER DAY

To all you ignorant Hindu priests and so called Hindutva leaders, my religion happens to be one of the

most inclusive religions ever on earth, like many I call Hinduism a philosophy of life, not just a religion, so stop maligning it. It's probably the only religion on Earth that worships 'Nari Shakti' or goddesses as a symbol of woman power. Since Vedic age, my country has given highest seat of power to women who had the right to choose their husbands, where men attended 'swayamvar' to prove their worth before a woman before she chose, where women participated in ruling a kingdom and were not just producers of children.

Even when India was under British rule, there were social reformers like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Rammohan Ray who with the help of British implemented laws to stop evil practises against women like 'Sati', 'Child marriage.' 

So now, when my country claims to be one of the decisive powers in the world how come Hindu priests go back to the middle ages and bring back the dark era of suppression? You will not allow menstruating women from entering temples? You will make women go through body scanners to check if they are menstruating? The head priest of Sabarimala temple forgot if his mother didn't menstruate he would not have born. 

Kashi Viswanath temple of Varanasi, where i loved to visit I will not see you again. I am not ready to wear a saree to enter you. I would prefer to wear a revealing choli and blouse that Hindu women in Vedic age wore. I am not ready to cover my arms and legs for the priest's satisfaction. 

I am ‪#‎Happytobleed‬ and here goes a verse in favour of that.

RED LETTER DAY

And then the drops of scarlet dews trickled down her singed thighs declaring the fertile her.
Not the crimson blaze of the setting sun
Nor the red lights of a traffic snarl or rose petals carrying lost dreams
Strewn on her sleepy eyelids.
Not Scarlett O'Hara gone with the wind in search of her Rhett.

The cunning wizard turned the wand of crimson shame between her legs.
Throbbing head, aching limbs,
Cleaning the stains in vain on her innocent skirt.

Why cringe in shame?
Why hide your stains?
You are the fertile land prepared for the seed to be sown.
Rejoice another month of life with Venus whispering his charms.

WHEN WOMEN SWAYED TO DRUMBEATS

(ALL WOMEN DHAKI TEAM THIS DURGA PUJA)

Dhak or the Indian drum has always caught on my fascination. Its throbbing elusive rhythm swaying the inner me every time it plays on. Unlike the African or the tribal drum-beats that create an aura of a haunting charm, dhak happens to be one instrument that flows with ease and a pleasure that kicks you to a new height. But what this year’s Durga Puja has to offer is the all women Dhaki team, playing on their beats at a Kolkata puja pandal.

Durga for me is an epitome of female power, where a Goddess has been given the power to put an end to all evil forces when even the Gods failed. In a country where a regular woman has to fight her way through, since childhood to even earn her basic needs, its definitely a welcome change when women are allowed to take up a profession that has all along completely been a male domain.

In India gender bias has percolated on and off even in the arena of performing arts and instruments unlike the West. How many of us have seen women playing tabla or ghatam? Very few. Same with dhak. I have even heard men saying it’s a heavy instrument that has to be picked up on one’s shoulder and played. It’s too much for a woman! I knew such men had never known thousands of rural Indian women who carry greater loads than the dhak  when they fetch heavy vessels of water from distances while carrying their kids on backs or side laps. A dhak should have been easier to handle. 

And that’s what Uma and her band of five women are doing this year at a city pujo pandal. They had started playing in 2011 but none took much notice. It was only after they performed at a TV talent hunt reality show, that they earned the typical hype and publicity that such shows usually bring along. At least in whatever form, Uma and her girl gang of dhakis got their due share of recognition in a typically masculine instrumental world.   

Since the earliest documented puja was organised by Raja Nabakrishna Deb of the Shobhabazar Rajbari in Calcutta in honour of Lord Clive in the year 1757, the men have heralded Bengal’s most important festive season. Coming from rural Bengal with both her father-in-law and husband being well-known dhakis themselves, Uma was encouraged by her father-in-law to start playing after he visited a pujo in the USA as a dhaki. He saw a woman in a New York shop playing all kinds of musical instruments. He thought he should give a chance to his daughter-in-law as well and even made a special light-weight drum of fibre glass to lessen Uma’s burden and help her to play. 

Then some of her neighbours joined. As it’s always in Indian society they got a stiff resistance from the villagers who tried to point out that women performing before Maa Durga is against scriptures. Little did they realise almost all Hindu scriptures have always celebrated women power. But Uma was hell bent to learn and so was her father-in-law who felt if all over the world women can be performing artistes then why not in India. Now they have more than 25 women who are taking dhak lessons from Uma to become full time dhakis. For women like Sumita it is also a source of sustenance after she was abandoned by her husband with two sons to raise. Music and empowerment has surely come hand in hand at last.