Laddu means boy, barfi means girl

Cyberbrahma has a very interesting post on the missing girls – a new take on gender imbalance – too many ‘brides wanted’ – too few available!

I had written long ago about a novel method devised by unscrupulous doctors in the rural north to circumvent the banned prenatal diagnostic test – I was reading that and have posted it here

Laddu means boy, barfi means girl…… let’s meet on Monday means rejoice, you are carrying a son, oh blessed mother; come back on Friday means, you are carrying a daughter, come back for an abortion….

The Government, concerned with the declining sex ratio in our country has banned the test in a bid to control female infanticide….. And ruthless doctors and desperate parents have resorted to other means to determine whether the foetus is even worth keeping or not…..

Keep that aside for a minute and read this. Girls being sold into prostitution by their own fathers, with their brothers fetching beer for the ‘customers’ and their home serving as the brothel…..

Harsh as this may sound, think about this : is it better for an unborn female foetus to be slain than for the baby to come into the earth and live unwanted and oppressed all her life…… if this sounds dramatic, stop and think about it….

Born into poverty, declined the right to education, forced into surrogate motherhood nurturing her siblings….. denied the very concept of childhood, the girl grows up…. To face gender violence, sexual abuse, harassment in the name of dowry, dependence on others until death…..

The ‘son’ complex is rooted so deeply in the Indian psyche that it is scary…. From the days of the Ramayana, we see that King Dasharatha prayed not for offspring, but for a male heir…. To take over the reins of his kingdom and find a place in heaven after death. For it was and is still believed that he whose last rites are not performed by the male heir is cursed and his soul never finds peace.

This quasi-religious aspect apart, parents are desperate for a male child because they believe the son will live with them all their life and support him in their old age. The daughter is always treated as paraya dhan and is conditioned to look for the day when she leaves the house, fully trained in domestic skills and carrying her stree-dhan, the price paid for her marriage. What started as a sensible idea of ensuring that the daughter gets a share in her father’s wealth has today transformed into dahej, the dreaded D word.

And this desire for a son, and regret in a daughter is further fanned by consumer advertising. If only our ad gurus could invent a cream that would turn a beti into a beta! But since they can’t play God, they do the next best thing. They invent a cream that promises to transform an ugly duckling into a fair daughter capable of earning as well as the son, if not more!

Understandably, the birth of a daughter is not an occasion for joy, given that the baby is allowed to come into the world. Till something is done to address the other greater issues at a societal level, the horror of female infanticide cannot be tackled so easily….