Are we changing ?
The other day I was out for my usual 7 kms evening walk when I heard loud voices approaching me. Two cyclists having a high decibel conversation drew me to their talk.
One was happily exclaiming to the other that he had just returned from his native place and he had been blessed by the birth of a baby boy! The other immediately exclaimed his happiness to hear the same and in typical Indian fashion exclaimed – Mithai toh khilai nahi aapne ? (You never offered me sweets for the same). The proud father exclaimed that in his area sweets aren’t distributed till one month of the birth of a son getting over. He promised to distribute sweets to all and sundry once getting past that landmark. The talk got fainter as they progressed ahead…
It got me thinking that in the past child mortality was so high that parents used to delay celebrating a treasured moment in their lives by delaying it due to lack of medical care to the newborns. However, today with the phenomenal advances in medicare and reach of caregivers having risen exponentially do such rituals honed over decades still find a relevant place in the common man’s life? I am certain that this proud father would be using modern means of communication, booking his travel tickets by leveraging the Internet, making a video call daily to check on his new born using apps on his smartphone but yet his mindset is still stuck in a time warp. Why is that so ?
Take another case where recently I visited a colony of government employees as part of my official routine. Having stopped at an employee’s house I enquired about his children when he came out to greet me. The wife appeared with an almost one year old child with long curly hair. I enquired how old the girl was? To my surprise I found that it was a boy and they were just following the custom of their native place where a boy’s hair is made to grow for a year and only then the ‘mundan’ ceremony was performed. By disguising the boy as a girl they said the ‘evil eye’ is bluffed. It left me baffled. Post child birth are only boys victim to infant mortality or are they more celebrated ? Who made this custom and why ?
Having customs as such these boys born in modern day India are being brought up to instil in them a feeling that they are superior to girls and would it not creep into their personalities that boys need protection in their infancy as they are more treasured than the girl child? Is this one of the underlying factors that boys in their teens and as young adults are getting caught after countless rape and assault incidents against women in India ? The mindset needs to change. The gender of the child should as such remain irrelevant to parents of modern day India. The change has to occur with the parents’ behaviour. In each home, village, town and city. Then only India can change for the better.