Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws

by Laura Pedersen

  Such as it is, a number of men are experiencing dowry remorse, and after agreeing on an amount, they soon decide it’s not enough and then want a flat-screen TV. This and the failure to produce a son can result in harm to women. It often takes the form of a horrendous cooking “accident,” known as bride burning, which is a subset of dowry death, where murdering your wife is passed off as suicide or an accident, which is a subset of violence toward women. Much the way Bangalore is known for information technology and Goa is famous for its beaches, the northwest state of Rajasthan would appear to be the cooking accident capital of the world.

  Unfortunately, this tradition is on the rise, with more than eight thousand recorded cases per year, which is up 50 percent from a decade ago, and many go unreported. The low survival rate keeps these crimes from being prosecuted, and of those that are prosecuted, few convictions result. Cases move through the courts slowly to allow plenty of time for the accused to bribe officials. Like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House, the long wait for a court date occasionally outlasts the litigants. Men accused of bride burning can easily remarry, while the women who manage to survive, about 10 percent, are considered damaged goods and for the most part cannot. The sad fact is that many more women are killed in bride burnings in democratic India than in honor killings throughout the Muslim world.

  As a result of demands by women’s rights activists, the Indian government has changed inheritance laws and permitted daughters to claim equal rights to their parental property so they’re not entirely dependent on their husband and in-laws. Women who control money and property are less likely to become victims of domestic violence. People are also being encouraged to rein in the tradition of spending so lavishly on weddings.

  Otherwise, one bizarre custom appears to be on the way out entirely. The Hindu tradition of suttee is where a perfectly healthy wife climbs atop the funeral pyre of her dead husband as an expression of her (undying?) love for him. Suttee began to disappear after the British banned the practice in 1829, but in Rajasthan it still occurs in some of the more distant villages, with about fifty cases thought to have taken place since Independence. The government is firmly against suttee and not only denounces the archaic practice but treats it as a criminal offense. The problem is that despite having been outlawed, suttee is still glorified to some extent by dint of people worshipping the site where it occurred, elevating the victim to a goddess, and professing admiration for her courage. Talk about mixed messages. As it happens, one can see how suttee was considered the better alternative for a widow than to face a life of abuse from in-laws who frequently blamed the daughter-in-law for her husband’s death or forced her to beg in the streets.

  The Elements trilogy is a series of films dealing with social reform by Indian-born Canadian film director and screenwriter Deepa Mehta. Her Academy Award-nominated Water (2005) is about a married child who becomes a widow in 1938 and after having her hair shorn and jewelry removed is dumped at an ashram that forces young women into prostitution to cover the group’s living expenses. (In the first few minutes, you can see the aforementioned swastikas.) The young but perceptive child asks, “Where is the house for men widows?” And of course there isn’t one, just as there were never homes for unwed fathers in the West. Fire (1996) deals with the issues of homosexuality and arranged marriage in patriarchal India, and Earth (1998) centers on the religious strife associated with the creation of Pakistan. All three movies have caused controversy, but Fire and Water received particularly heavy criticism from conservatives who viewed them as attacks on Hindu culture. After Fire was released, Mehta required twenty-four-hour police protection for almost a year. The struggle to make Water is depicted in the nonfiction book Shooting Water: A Mother-Daughter Journey and the Making of the Film, written by Mehta’s daughter, Devyani Saltzman.

  Indian women gained the right to abortion in 1971 without a battle, a year and half before Roe v. Wade made it legal in the United States. However, the subcontinent still maintains a high birthrate, despite thousands of unnecessary deaths due to the lack of access to medical care and a fear that it’s bad luck to give birth outside of the home. India has the highest rate of maternal deaths in the world, with seventy-eight thousand women dying every year during pregnancy, childbirth, or within forty-two days of delivery, of which 75 percent would’ve been preventable with some rudimentary fixes. The old Sanskrit saying “May you be the mother of a hundred sons” can seem more of a curse than a blessing. Such enormous value put on the birth of males over females results in not only infanticide but also the neglect of girls when it comes to nutrition, immunization, and education. In rural areas, a female child is often suffocated or poisoned, while wealthier people will have an abortion following sex determination, even though sex testing is supposedly illegal. Still, 914 girls are born for every 1,000 boys and the gap is expanding. In 2011, a man who was employed as a leather worker took his two daughters, ages two and three, and drowned them in a village well, while sparing his four-month-old son. He later told police that he couldn’t afford to keep the girls.

  In India, the death rate among female children allowed to live tends to be higher, despite a biological tendency to be stronger at birth than boys. In other words, infanticide is occurring because girls are less desirable than boys. A daughter can’t take over the family business because she must be given away in marriage to another family. Marrying her off will be enormously expensive, whereas a boy will one day bring home a dowry, which will increase the finances of the entire family since sons are supposed to care for their parents in old age. Also, according to Hindu tradition, a son is necessary to light his parents’ funeral pyres.

  Meantime, women are often treated poorly after giving birth to girls, especially if they haven’t yet had a son. Someone needs to remind their husbands that it is the man who determines the sex of a child.

  Surely you’ve heard a version of the quote “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, except in high heels and backward.” Proportionally, more women work in India than in any other country, despite having more children than women in most other countries. Women can be found in almost every type of job, including construction, road building, farming, and mining, even at the lowest levels. They often keep up a full schedule while pregnant or breast-feeding and go home to cook, clean, and take care of elderly parents.

  Furthermore, the current level of rape is high but impossible to quantify, since most go unreported due to the stigma associated with being subjected to this hideous act. If women would start reporting rapes, then incidence would drop swiftly, since men currently feel they can attack with impunity as almost no victim wants the world to know that “her honor has been destroyed.” Obviously, educated and supportive families and communities are also necessary to bring this particular change about. Women shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed for being assaulted.

  The situation of women and children (especially girls) clearly has much room for improvement, but before examining some solutions, it’s a good idea to remember that there’s plenty of violence against women in the United States including rape, and there are people who believe that a woman who is the victim of rape and incest should be forced to carry the child to term.

  Women’s groups in India are busy advocating for reform and educating people as I write this. The birth rate is currently 2.6 children, way down from twenty years ago. One sterilization campaign offering cash prizes became so popular that a number of men went back two and three times. However, my favorite program has to be the short-lived 2008 offer of guns in return for vasectomies, so a man wouldn’t be left shooting blanks. Some states currently offer monetary incentives of about a hundred dollars for newly married couples to delay starting a family by a few years.

  As always, it’s not just about changing laws but also expectations and traditions, which takes time and diligence. This will have to be part of a concerted campaign against bride burnings, infanticide, and other forms of violence agai
nst women, such as depriving them of healthcare and proper nutrition. Here are some ideas for change that deserve our support and encouragement:

  1) Abolish dowries. In many countries, people pay for a bride. Let’s just split the difference and no cash changes hands.

  2) Stop marrying off young people. The law says that males must be twenty-one and girls must be eighteen, but this isn’t enforced, and couples much younger still marry, especially in rural areas. And what’s the joke with the age differential for males and females?

  3) Provide social security so old people aren’t dependent on children, especially daughters-in-law.

  4) Reform healthcare. Every year, there are 2 million new cases of tuberculosis, an easily eradicable disease, which is the leading cause of death among people between fifteen and forty-five, the core of India’s workforce. Public hospitals are overburdened and underequipped, leaving 80 percent of medical services in private hands, and it’s common for “doctors” and “technicians” not to have any medical training at all. Healthcare costs are the most prevalent cause of personal bankruptcy. Despite India’s emergence as a top destination for medical tourism, when Sonia Gandhi required treatment in 2011, she traveled to the United States.

  5) Organize, computerize, supervise, and deputize. Free and discounted rations (similar to our food stamps) tend not to make it to their destination as a result of corruption, bureaucratic bungling, or because people aren’t aware of their entitlement.

  6) Lose the expectation that women be virgins when married. Why does this only apply to women? After all, the ancient Hindu text Kama Sutra recognizes that women also have sexual desires.

  7) Require all children to attend school. Everyone agrees that better education for women will solve a multitude of problems. A study commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation showed that educating young women resulted in saving the lives of more than 4 million children worldwide in 2009. The classroom is also a great place to learn about family planning and HIV prevention. In countries with mandatory schooling, people marry later, have children later and fewer of them, and regularly begin their sentences with “My therapist says….” Smaller families place less of a burden on an already strained food and water supply. The Right to Education Act of 2010 promised schooling to every child from age six to fourteen and now it needs to be fully implemented and enforced.

  8) Extend a small monthly benefit to poor families who keep their daughters in school as an incentive to prevent girls from being sold into prostitution, put to work in fields and factories, or married off at a young age. “When you educate a boy, you educate an individual; but if you educate a girl, you educate a community,” says the African proverb. Educated women have better job prospects and earning power and are therefore less likely to become victims of domestic violence. (This has been successful in a number of Indian villages.)

  9) Issue birth certificates to children born outside of hospitals so they have access to government schools and services rather than spend their lives classified as undocumented, despite being born in India. (A program is currently under way to create a database of all citizens and issue identity numbers.)

  10) Upgrade schools with better facilities, supplies, and more teacher accountability.

  11) Offer free breakfast to schoolchildren in poor communities. (This has also been attempted in a few places on a small scale.) Once women and girls are properly nourished, the multibillion-dollar diet industry can get a proper foothold in the country, and we’ll know once and for all how many Weight Watchers points to add following a dinner of rasam, rogan josh, and gulab jamun. Spinning, Jazzercise, buttrobics classes with “I’m Too Sexy for My Sari” playing in the background, and Tasti D-Lite franchises are just around the corner.

  I’ve heard many people say that the way women are treated in certain countries is cultural and nothing should be done about it, or, at the very least, it’s none of our business. However, humans are interconnected, and I think we should care whether or not others are being treated poorly or unfairly. I first heard the following idea from Warren Buffett, but I don’t believe he takes credit for it. What Buffett likes to call the Ovarian Lottery and others have termed the Luck of the Draw essentially goes like this: You’re not born yet and you have to create the world that you’re going to live in. The problem is, you don’t know whether you’re going to be male or female; white, brown, or black; blind or sighted; handicapped or not; born to a Brahman or an untouchable, a Catholic or a Muslim. If you’d be satisfied being any combination of these things in the world you’ve created, then it is indeed a wonderful world. If not, change it.

  India Unbound

  For decades we’ve been hearing that prosperity is just around the corner for the subcontinent. So where’s the proof that this is finally India’s moment? It’s in the mouse. Disney is coming. An amusement park that will franchise Disney rides is currently in the planning stages by Bollywood mogul Manmohan Shetty. It’s a small world after all.

  I was just kidding about that being the sine qua non of success, but the report is nonetheless real, and it’s going to require a lot of mouse ears. India is one-third the size of the United States, with four times as many people. It’s the world’s largest democracy with the second-largest army of any country (after China) and possesses nukes, as do neighboring Pakistan and China. A president serves as the head of state with a prime minister as head of the government and a two-house parliament that is elected by the people (the lower house directly and the upper house indirectly, through state assemblies). It’s largely based on the British system, so rather than the people directly electing their leader, the president is chosen by members of Parliament and state legislatures, and then he or she appoints the prime minister, who is the head of the majority party. Many constituents feel that they should be voting directly for their leader, the way many in the United States would like to eradicate the electoral college and simply have a one person, one vote policy.

  Signs of progress are to be found almost everywhere throughout India today, from the towering skyscrapers in its big cities to the small computers that have been placed in rural homes so locals can bank long distance. Ironically, IT came late to India, particularly in government offices, banks, and the stock market, with many managers kicking and screaming against modernization and agreeing to install computers only because air conditioners came with them (so the circuitry wouldn’t melt).

  Nowadays, more than 750 million people have cell phones and an additional 15 million are sold every month. And while providing increased business efficiencies, they’re also giving young people a new degree of freedom and privacy. Almost every person with any sort of an income carries a phone, as these devices have officially entered Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right after curry, sleep, and shelter. Heck, even die-hard Communists have cell phones, which might be considered the ultimate capitalist tool. (Did they not like the old system where a bureaucrat decided if and when you could have a phone?) Furthermore, connectivity is so comprehensive that from a tiny West Coast fishing village, I was able to call my father in the New Mexico desert and have it sound as if he was in the next room, whereas the same phone cuts out every time I take the Central Park transverse road in Manhattan. Should someone be studying the fact that al-Qaeda is running an international terrorist network from caves in the mountains of Southeast Asia using mobile phones, while New Yorkers can get only partial service on north–south avenues and none at all on east–west cross streets?

  On a similar note, if you decide to climb Mount Everest in the Himalayas, a Nepali telecommunications firm offers 3G service all the way to the summit, which gives you access to high-speed Internet and video calls using a mobile phone. I don’t know if they have a tower on top or a Sherpa covered in tinfoil with a wire hanger sticking out of his pack, but either way, be careful when backing up to show Mom the panoramic view.

  Technology is even having a positive impact on the traffic situation in India. Concerned citizens are po
sting pictures of rule breakers on Facebook, which the police monitor and use to issue tickets. Interestingly, a percentage of those photographed violating traffic laws are police officers who are not in pursuit of renegade drivers and are left to prove that they were somehow involved in official police business. If you think you were framed, it’s possible to appeal and get a hearing. Just don’t take photos and create postings while driving since that’s also illegal.

  India currently has the fastest-growing economy of any democracy, or “democrazy” as it is sometimes known, due to the chaos that accompanies progress on such a massive scale. In the 1990s, the country began moving away from socialism and toward a free-market economy. Since then, there’s been a decline in agricultural output but substantial growth in the service industry, which includes banking, communication, and particularly information technology, with the rise of companies such as Infosys, HCL, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy Services. It’s home to world-class universities like Hyderabad’s Indian School of Business, top-drawer medical facilities such as Mumbai’s Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, and sprawling corporate campuses like the one operated by Infosys in Bangalore. For those who can afford it, there are modern shopping malls selling international brands, dozens of new high-end hotels, neatly manicured suburban enclaves, fancy restaurants, fast-food chains, espresso bars, private schools, luxury cars, and toll highways. If that’s not enough, Starbucks has just announced that they’re on the way to rescue Indians from reasonably priced coffee and chai.