GOOD GIRLS DON’T TALK to Boys. And vice versa, although an exception may be made for good boys who are simply lured by bad girls.
Recently, I came across this new item that talked about a young girl in a Chennai engineering college who killed herself because she was ticked off for talking to a boy. It wasn’t just the scolding she received which precipitated the suicide, but the fear that her parents would have been informed of her heinous crime – talking to a boy.
HERE’S A PART IMAGINARY, part real email thread of conversations among faculty members at an elite law university in India. Two developments are being discussed simultaneously – one is a weekly cricket match, and the second is the establishment of a women-only Women’s Law Society. The names of participants in the conversation have been changed to maintain anonymity. I have identified the professors as male and female to pronounce the genderedness of the conversation.
INDIA IS A populous country, and I’m pretty sure the citizens of India have something to do with it. I don’t think the storks are delivering all those babies, or that they are gifts of the Gods a la Kunti. Thus the move to squash teaching of basic sex education in schools is quite surprising. A few months back, the Committee on Petitions, comprising Rajya Sabha members and headed by BJP’s Venkaiah Naidu, said “there should be no sex education in schools” since “our country’s social and cultural ethos are such that sex education has absolutely no place in it”. ”
Let’s trot out that pony again — India’s glorious cultural ethos. Let’s hide behind it again. We won’t do it because it’s against our cultural ethos. Let’s all burrow our heads in the sand and ignore the problem, because it’s “against the Indian cultural ethos”. [Read More]
AT THE PRESCHOOL that I run (where I also teach), there’s a certain action song we sing that goes like this:
Cook like mummy,
Yum, yum, yum, (repeat thrice)
Let’s have fun together!
Drive like daddy,
Knit like grandma,
Cough like grandpa….
…and by the time we come to “Be like teacher, Shh, shh, shh!” I’m ready to pop a vein. [Read More]
MY MOTHER IS a cost accountant. Only the third woman in all of India to get a certificate of practice when she received one, and the first in the Western India zone. She gave her last costing exam while working full time at the age of 28 and then finally deigned to marry my father, her boyfriend of nine years, who had been waiting patiently for her to complete her desired education. At the age of 24, I was done with two Master’s degrees and accepted to a Ph.D. program scheduled to start a few months after my 25th birthday. Thrilled to gain admission to the Social Science program of the #1 School of Public Administration in the United States, I called home to share the news. [Read More]
