A few days ago, I wrote a surprisingly controversial post about a baby girl who had been buried alive, in Andhra Pradesh. Stupid me, I thought everyone would find such news abhorrent. But, in a shocking and to some, sickening twist, it would seem that condemning infanticide is wrong because it is more important to engage in the worst sort of cultural relativism.
Disagreeing with a man’s choice to bury his newborn granddaughter alive would be Western and especially Feminist stupidity. Are you perplexed? Wondering what I am going on about? Ah, then enjoy the following amuse bouche of comments from a few lurkers and readers, which that post inspired:
Dont get carried away by sensationalism
Everyone has it bad in India. you’re the only one who choose to single out the plight of women and measure it by YOUR western standards. It MUST be measured by Indian standards, i.e. the plight of Indian men, children, grandpas, grandmas, the whole society. Everyone has it bad in India, not just little girls.
just don’t forget, we live in the West, lets not judge everything by Western standards…If they want to kill their girl babies because girls mean one less hand to till the soil (by hand, of course), that is their buisness.
Poor people will do anything to survive. As long as its their family, and not anyone else’s, no one has a right to interfere.
you, possessing such a craving for attention, would rather start a thread focused on a single baby, a TOTALLY isolated incident, just so you can feel better!
Yes, I felt much better after that depressing thread, especially after I naively attempted to offer a counterpoint to it while proving that feminism can be a desi concept, too. As one of you said via email, after wading through comment-sewage, “I can’t believe there is so much misogyny and so little outrage here.”
::
Isolated. I thought of all those apologist quotes when I read the story which MasterVK was alert enough to submit to our news tab earlier today, about another newborn baby girl, who was also found and rescued:
AHMEDABAD: Her feeble cries help almost drowned in the din of the heavy downpour near Kankaria lake on Monday. Until a fireman found the newborn baby shivering in the rain, abandoned mercilessly without a piece of clothing on her body!
The child’s cries had gone unheard for hours and she had turned pale, lying in the incessant rains, near Kankaria lake. The baby was found by a team of firemen led by Rajesh Goswami who heard the faint cries early in the morning when they embarked on duty to check the oxygen levels in the lake.
Instead of the fish, the firemen found the freshly delivered girl who was dumped from the womb straight into the lake to die. “The girl did not have any clothing on her and had turned completely white. We had become sceptical about her survival,” said Goswami.
The firemen first thought of waiting for the police but were alert enough to realise that any wait may compromise the life of the infant. The fire personnel immediately took the girl to L G Hospital where she was admitted in the neonatal intensive care unit. “The girl was hypothermic as her temperature had dropped due to exposure in the rain. She was also covered in sand,” said Dr Abid Vijapura, assistant professor in the paediatrics department.
Dr Vijapura said that the girl was probably delivered at home as her umbilical cord was cut non-surgically and tied with a thread. “Her condition is stable. We have screened her for infections and will treat her accordingly,” he said.
I’ll close with a different quoted comment from one of you, because I hope someone else declares similar fifteen years from now:
Every time someone (sometimes me) reprimands my 15-year old daughter for her highly “spirited” personality, I can’t help but think that she was born on the streets of Kolkata (one can only guess), spared infanticide, and turned over to an orphanage at the tender age of 5 days.
Just look at her now!
spidy,
Don’t buy into the sensationalism and hype that the Govt. of India sucks and is inept. Anna and others engage in Govt-bashing because readers prefer to read about the lone feminist hero like Anna’s dad taking on the world, or other such romanticized versions of a small group of morally superior people correcting the wrongs of the world. Few want to read about how these problems are solved not by crusaders but by elected officials who – shocking as it is – care about India. It’s easier to have faith in knights errant than in democracy.
Also, don’t buy the exaggeration of people who conflate epidemic with ‘majority’ or ‘dominant’. An epidemic of infanticide means that the level observed is higher in a statistically significant way than the global mean even when normalized for poverty and other factors. I previously posted (here) with links about it, and that the problem is uneven – in some parts of India there are no anomalies in the gender ratio and in other parts it’s grave. What is insulting is when people make baseless statements about the majority of Indians or what the dominant culture is. As I pointed out before, these stories are as much about depravity as they are about heroism. One person leaves a baby to die, but then a firefighter, a farmer, or someone rescues the child. The case is escalated to the police and if the perpetrator of attempted murder is identified, an arrest is made. The sheer number of people engaged on the heroic side, the rescuer plus the police plus the courts, are ignored by most readers who instead point at the criminal and shout “Indians are evil, we morally superior people must huff about it on blogs!”
Also, don’t buy the faulty logic that female infanticide = female foeticide = gender imbalance. All these sensationalist news stories are about female infanticide because that’s obviously illegal and no society would ever tolerate it. Female infanticide is killing an infant – a living, breathing baby. Female foeticide is having an abortion after identifying that the gender will be female. Both are illegal in India, but female foeticide is legal in the U.S. so it’s not reported in the news as much (liberal bloggers may not get as huffy-puffy if they read about abortions) even though it constitutes a far greater chunk of the gender imbalance in India than female infanticide does.
Steps taken by the Govt. of India: 11th Five-yr plan (2007-2012) Item #8 Improve sex ratio to 935 by 2011-12 and to 950 by 2016-17
Top news story about India (here): India to register pregnancies to fight feticide
Wrong. There has been no government bashing. Both posts were about our diasporic culture not the government of a country our parents were once citizens of/certain readers still hold passports from. Your comment is inaccurate and inflammatory.
More unnecessary nastiness. Uncalled for and beneath you. If you have personal issues with Anna, which you seem to, email her directly.
although, the link is interesting. might be worthwhile putting it up on the newstab, sic semper tyrannis
252: “India to register pregnancies to fight feticide”
Great: more bureaucracy, committees, lack of accountability, etc. This amounts to government tinkering and interference, rather than real efforts at solving the problem. This will focus, even more sharply, the scrutiny upon women alone as the site of legal and moral battles, rather than opening the problem up, more widely/generally, towards an examination of the larger cultural (and, yes, economic) factors that contribute to diminished recognition of women’s value as humans. Treating the symptom (and inefficiently at that), not the cause.
excellent. i happen to be scouring for a homely house-husband.
done. it’s time i put that econ degree to some use. i’ll be faxing my (slightly padded)CV to your folks. when my ‘rents come to your house for the groom viewing, please have available: 1. a sperm motility report 2. a school-leaving certificate that establishes you were educated at the equivalent of a “convent” school 3. a sample of suitably round rotis 4. a veena so you can recite to us a demure, devotional song that represents the loving, obedient, and sacrificing attitude you will adopt toward your new and vastly extended family 5. a pen (water-proof ink please) with which you will sign the pre-nup prepared by my lawyers and I recommend this product, because my parents are still stuck in the “we want a fair son-in-law” time warp. after the vedding though, i insist that you get some sun, cuz i have a thing for the tall mocha latte drinks. thank you.
I agree. Another way to define epidemic is just to recognize when the numbers increase over the base numbers normally seen in the given region, irrespective of what is happening in other parts of the world. For example, one case of canine rabies (or even human rabies deaths) in the U.K. can be termed an epidemic. But in India, thousands of canine rabies cases (as well as as human rabies deaths) are seen every year so unless the number of cases rise above the annual average for that country, from the health department perspective, it is not termed an epidemic.
The problem with numbers related to an issue such as infanticide is that it adds a social dimension and comes across as unacceptable (ethics, clash of cultures, etc). Although why thousands of avoidable human/children rabies deaths have become acceptable is something I cannot fathom. Perhaps, bloggers/writers and readers feel the subject of human rabies is beyond them to tackle; perhaps, they feel that it is the area of the specialized, or the govt, or the Public Health Agency, but that infanticide appears to be an issue that is open for all to talk about. This has been my concern too, in general,–to what extent should any blog highlight issues without taking adequate care and responsibility to present all sides of the problem. Blog space is semi-private space after all, the blogger owes nothing to nobody, there are no rules except the rules set by the blogosphere, and at any minute they can threaten to go exclusive and private and ‘by-invitation’ only.
Perhaps, it is the fault of us readers and our human need to network socially.
portmanteau, as with our sharing of g&t, gimlet and tequila-shot candidates, i would like to join you in the homeley husband search. i don’t mind texas-shaped rotis, and i prefer a vioin/tanpura to the veena, though we might have to fight it out for candidates on #5.
malathi, i was partly joking. but you’re right about the two-way street. i only get upset with the marrieds who preach. otherwise, i respect their choice. though i wouldn’t put your sneaky matchmaking technique past most desi wives/mothers!
ak, i don’t mind any shape rotis either (as long as they are made of stone-ground wholewheat, flax-seed enriched atta, and the secret ingredient of luuurve), but what will the relatives say? besides, it’s not only a question of the rotis per se, it’s a question of standards. centuries of house-hold heads have been served with perfect rotis; we cannot have these modern griha-visnus just take liberties with our time-honored traditions. in fact, the rotis symbolize our respect for the eternal cycles of nature – life and death, the turning of seasons, and the passing of yugas even. round rotis embody shunya , both nothingness and transcendence at the same time. moreover, round rotis evoke the divine kama-sutric sound, the big “O,” but I don’t need to explain that to you, wise ak.
no ak, we should not settle for anything less than round rotis. for if the rotis lose their sacred shape, the rest will also go to hell in a handbasket. it’s a course of events that i’d rather not contemplate. and i have to admit, the tanpura sounds much better than the veena to me, but i wanted to have that sarawati allusion in there.
I was just going to suggest buying rotis from the store (surely my rainmaker patnidevi can afford those), but this makes me reconsider my aversion to the process of kneading, dipping my fingers in something moist, and delicately running them over the bumps… for making the rotis.
As a modern man, my abilities are restricted to youtube links, will they do?
Only the best for my Lakshmi. I will buy it on layaway in anticipation of a long partnership.
Can’t we all just get along?
SM Intern,
The posts alluded to a culture and system of intolerance even while only citing specific criminal cases. To look at crimes under the Indian Penal Code and say, “it’s ‘our diasporic culture’ to commit them” is rude, ignores the laws and justice system, and cheapens whatever idea of culture you’re trying to invoke. No amount of culture can rationalize a crime. We cannot simply say that burning down abortion clinics is “Christian culture” simply because that group is overrepresented in that category of crime. Being overrepresented is NOT an excuse for degrading the entire group and calling it a cultural issue. Criminals always try to hold onto something pure and immaculate as an excuse for their wickedness; murderers of abortion doctors will justify their actions through some convoluted reasoning of Christian ideology, but journalists are supposed to be smart enough to separate murderers from Christian ideology, despite however much the murderer would like to consider himself acting on behalf of something pure. These are crimes being reported, and whether it’s a Republican Christian burning a clinic or an Indian Hindu burying a baby, there is no excuse to take that crime – however overrepresented the group such criminals claim allegiance to is – and malign a group constituted primarily of law-abiding, peaceful people.
By the way, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has statistics on filed cases of infanticide (here), and the crime of infanticide is low (500-700 per year in the U.S.). I have to go but I’ll finish writing this later.
i do agree. but this of course brings up the necessary dual public and private groom viewings. veena, roti, and fertility skills/attributes are all good for the relatives, but there are some things that i need to know. for instance, will he be a fellow pizza/bagel/south indian food snob? will he know all the words to one of my favourite songs, or at least sit patiently while i sing along for the full 8.28 duration? what sort of dance skills does he have – like this or this? will he tolerate or even share in my love of celebrity gossip? such questions also should not slip through my review of prospective grooms. you see, rotis i can buy from any local gujarati aunty, but these skills spell out the success of our lifelong partnership.
portmanteau, you are wise beyond your years. you are SM’s own yoda, though i assume much hotter.
a wise woman you are yes. find who you seek, you will. for flattering me, you i thank. go now i must, for a friday night today is. wedded to this keyboard, nothing could more pitiful be.
Words are great and all, but what I want to know is who the trinity are? Buddy Holly, Big Bopper, and Richie Valens, or JFK, MLK, RFK? If you can crack that code…
My vote is the Bollywood Trinity – SAK, AMK, SRK.
Surely, Amitabh has to be God? That’s all in this week’s edition of Separated at Birth… of the universe?
Dear Shah Rukh Khan, First, a very warm welcome to Sepia Mutiny (move over, Rahul; you have been (unceremoniously) replaced). Hearts, P. Manteau
Second,
This trinity is barely acceptable for a menage, but totally lyrically inadequate. I’ll probably have to kick out SAK. And I’ll basically tolerate AMK.
Third,
Mine would be: Dylan, Joni, and Gulzar, for the lyrics In a weirdly romantic mood: Morrison(Jim), Kishore Kumar, and Nina Simone
Plus, an ability to dance uninhibitedly to terrible pop music appreciated, but not in matching polyester outfits. ak, what’s your answer to the above?
As per the rules of agreement of nouns with verb, shouldn’t it be ‘trinity is’ (because it is a single collection of three, rather than ‘trinity are.’ Not trying to be nit-picky, but I’m curious and speak from relative equipoise.
I will just lick my wounds with Bips then.
Trinity is, are.. I realized as I typed it how awkward/wrong that entire sentence was. I should have said “who are in the trinity?” or some such thing. My holy spirit has been crushed by my sin against grammar.
Rahul, Bips can’t dance. She does not have the crisp and precise moves of Indian classical dance, which all good Bollywood dancers incorporate into their dancing, even when it is modern dance.
However, this guys booty shake to the same song almost cuts it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaHqO7t19iQ&mode=related&search=
this is a very tough question, pm. i cannot think of a trinity but i can think of a duo : derek zoolander and hansel (strictly judging fron their walk-off).
rahul, you have some very stiff competition – judging from his stint on kbc, srk is a perfect host/entertainer for many fora.
What about the Tridev of Jackie Shroff, Sunny Deol, and Naseeruddin Shah? They even have a cataclysmic pronouncement preceding their introduction:
Paap se dharti fati….fati…fati…. Adharm se aasmaan…maan…maan… Atyachaar se kaanpi insaaniyat…saaniyat, Raaj kar rahe haivaan…vaan…vaan
Jinki hogi taaqat apoorv Jinka hoga nishaana abhed…bhed… Jo karenge inka sarvanaash…vanaash, Woh kehlaayenge… Tridev! Tridev! Tridev!
The earth ripped.. ripped.. ripped due to sin The air from the destruction of virtue Mankind shivered from atrocities The something-something* are ruling roughshod.
Those will have amazing strength Those who display unerring marksmanship Those who will go medeival upon the evil people’s asses They will be called… Trinity… Trinity… Trinity.
Also, this Trinity is quite acceptable to me.
I think this guy’s gyrations inspired this touching scene: Sometimes there’s so much booty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.
haivaan= demons
too 80s. entirely inappropriate for me. i’m so over men my father’s age. i am impressed, though, by your ‘apoorv yaaddasht.’ and hysterically cracking up.
ak, that hansel is so hot right now (he’s an ambiturner too).
Mr. Computer, ak-ji ka answer ko freeze k-k-k-kiya jaaye. I concede, I possess neither the jaunty angular asymmetry, nor the follicular finesse of Mr. SmiRK.
Medieval. I suck. You’re welcome, NvM.
apoorv yaaddasht = google + remembering key phrases from the tridev incantation. Unfortunate, GooTube did not deliver.