Flying Fish and All Things Beautiful

futurejournalismproject:

Daughters Are Precious

My morning reading in the Hindustan Times today. A new column by actor-activist Amir Khan. He writes:

Every conceivable reason that I have come across during our research of people explaining why they want a boy and not a girl as a daughter does not seem to make any sense to me. For instance, “if we have a girl then at the time of her marraige we have to pay dowry”, or “a girl cannot perform the last rites after the death of her parents, or near and dear ones”, or “the girl can’t take the vansh, or family forward”…All these are man-made reasons. We have created dowry and are now killing the girl child as if she is responsible for it. We have decided for ourselves that girls can’t perform last rites and then we say the girl is to blame.”

FJP: Agreed, approved, and happy to see this in a newspaper.

I had a really nice conversation with the man who ran the hotel I stayed at in Delhi when I first got to India about his children. His said his daughter was his favorite, because his sons were spoiled and selfish, but she was smarter, kinder and a harder worker than his sons. As the conversation went on he got prouder and prouder of his daughter. You could see him kind of puff up when he talked about her. 

It’s not my country, nor culture so I am not about to sit and judge, but it is always nice to see people talking about such things. And it reminded of the kind man and our nice chat during my first 24 hours in India.