Dr. Vimal Raut, right, just informed Joti Kale, center, and her mother, left, that she is pregnant. Kale has been married for 2 months.
Ganpati was a blast! Our friend Sonum had us all over her house for dinner (which was amazing). Her house is on the main road that the parade went down, flats pulled by tractors hauling huge Ganpati statues. Everyone was throwing different colors of gulal, I escaped with green spots on my bag and red streaks across my face.
As usual, the light skinned visitors drew a crowd of their own.. at one point when we were walking the street making photos of the parade, the police escorted us back to our friend's house because the parade was slowing down because of us. HA.
Umarkhed is sick, and not in a good way. 70% of the town has conjunctivitis. Yuck.
On Sunday 8 of us piled into a car and went to a waterfall about 30km away. 5 adults and 3 kids, who played musical laps for the drive. It was great!! When we reached our destination, we had lunch that Mrs. Raut had brought with her, and I played hide and seek with the two little girls. It felt like a weekend retreat with the family...
I'm starting to feel like six months is not long enough here.
Dowry is such a frustrating topic. Everyone does it. Everyone suffers because of it. So why? In fact, women's rights and freedom is also really frustrating to me. The women here talk about how they want their freedom, how they want to be able to choose their husbands, how dowry is bad, how they want careers.... but then, after they say this, they take a deep breathe and say, "But that's our custom, what can we do? We cannot change it."
A few nights ago, the boys who live in the hostel were talking about what they want to do in life. I could not believe how many said they wanted to move to the US, or to Sweden.. they didn't have any particular field or study they were interested in, only in moving abroad. It makes me really sad to admit to myself that the majority of these boys will never have the opportunity to travel. Most of the people here in Umarkhed have never traveled in their own country before. Most have not seen the Taj.
6 comments:
What would women do with imagined "freedom"? Buy lots of products they don't need? Spend their lives working for a company instead of raising a family? If a man spends the majority of his time working a foolish job to pay for his family, why should a woman desire the same sacrifice? For what purpose? Why so passive and eager to serve companies? Surely women could think of something better to do with their lives than submit to wage slavery.
India has copied America's hippie revolution and accelerated it, ending a culture that was thousands of years old. Now everyone in the cities is a money chasing whore. Families are dead, tradition is dead, but at least you can follow the latest purchasing trends and consume all the hip entertainment to show off and feel important.
After these changes effectively destroy Indian tradition, rendering its society meaningless what else could anyone desire but to move away from it? To desire separation from one's origins and one's family is a combination of sickness and madness.
Youth is so ignorant of the value of culture and the wisdom of traditional ways. Like children, they imagine that they know everything despite having never taken any effort to study what they oppose.
That their desire to move to other nations is a quest for quick, easy wealth shows how depraved Indian society has become.
Choice. Choice is freedom, choice is priceless. If you cannot see that it is one of the worst fates to be left without choice, then you obviously have always had such luxury at your disposal. Freedom to chose encapsulates so much more that "serving companies"; freedom means that a woman does not need to rely on a man, is seen as something more whole and more complete than a breeding machine, something more than a mother or a wife. It allows her the autonomy to be an individual, a thinking independent being, which is something that so many men take for granted.
So many men take for granted that they can stick it in someone and walk away, unaffected. They take for granted that in so many cultures of the world, they can choose to be a father, choose to be a husband, choose a career path. They take for granted that women want to be dependent on them.
Newsflash, Tom Brokaw: we don't.
Families are not dead as a result of women's freedom-- perhaps it is as a result of men's resistance to contribute more to domestic life, once again taking for granted that women want to be the nesting bodies of hearth and home.
What good is tradition if it doesn't evolve throughout generations, but remains stale, like murky pond-water? What good is tradition if it means nothing because it is simply traditional because it is archaic? Traditions that continue to last through time are those that evolve with society, not resist it.
I find your question, "What would women do with imagine "freedom?'" so positively ironic, as it is delivered from a mind obviously in bondage.
I have never heard of any man thinking of a woman as a breeding machine. That is only what feminists and gays say of women as a strawman so they can propose even more absurd alternatives.
No one is an independent being, even if you think society is just a bunch of solipcistic islands where people do whatever they feel like at the moment. We are social and interconnected, not separate free agents. People imagine themselves as individuals, but then see all others in society as easily categorized. Cognitive dissonance anyone?
How could anything intelligent occur in society if everyone is sheltered, paranoid, money hungry, and looking for selfish gain instead of working together? That is a description of modernity's dysfunction, not a roadmap for a healthy society.
Men only desire a career path so they can provide for families. Do you really think working some stupid office job is rewarding or desirable? No man needs very much for himself, but he'll sacrifice his one and only life to a stupid job because he is inspired by the woman he loves. If you want to waste your life on a stupid job and then just buy lots of shiny plastic junk for yourself then go for it, but that will seem a foolish choice to most people.
Tradition endures because it is correct and validated by a long history. You can try any modern variation on family, but they are all inferior to a father and a mother taking active interest in their children's lives to guide them into adulthood. Since society is founded on the notion of families, attempt to destroy the family will only destroy society. Such progress! Such evolution! Do you think these ideas of rebellion have helped or hurt society? Are the increases in broken families, divorce, distrust, and distance between people within the last 30 desirable? Onward to great utopia!
Modern men seem to carry the burden of domestic work. Modern women don't know how to cook or clean or do much of anything that women have known how to do for the last 5000 years, so many men have learned those things and now easily take care of them. Just as women don't rely on men, men have learned not to rely on women for anything. So how to play out the standoff? This doesn't benefit anyone.
Men and women work the same amount
Again, I will say this: who the hell are you to decide that men should work and women should be domesticated? How is that "working together"? Isn't that really just one way to live, simply your limited opinion? The connection that you attempt to draw between women's desire for financial independence, for education, and your opinion that "everyone is sheltered, paranoid, money hungry, and looking for selfish gain instead of working together" is flawed and incoherent at best. While we all are obviously individuals that are each part of a large whole (we breathe each other's air, share space, just to begin)it most certainly does not mean that we all must fall into categories based on our sex, or any other arbitrary trait beyond our control. (Didn't you criticize those who "imagine themselves as individuals, but then see all others in society as easily categorized"?)
"Men only desire a career path so they can provide for families. Do you really think working some stupid office job is rewarding or desirable? No man needs very much for himself, but he'll sacrifice his one and only life to a stupid job because he is inspired by the woman he loves. If you want to waste your life on a stupid job and then just buy lots of shiny plastic junk for yourself then go for it, but that will seem a foolish choice to most people." I suppose that perhaps I am the only woman, then, that works a non-profit job, and intends to earn my degree as an educator, and who builds her life around notions of conservation and not perpetual consumption. Again, to draw a connection between women's freedom of choice to work, to not work, to get an education, to not get an education, with living a consumerist's lifestyle, is completely idiotic.
If the only options open to you are jobs that you hate for companies for whom you do not wish to work, I am terribly sorry for you. But, for many, one's place of employment is a vehicle for self expression and the ability to contribute to society in a meaningful way; for many, it is satisfying and hinges upon much more than consumption.
Regardless of your views on work and consumption, however, your arguments regarding women's freedom and women's place in society, are still very much reliant on an archaic (although you might say "traditional") system which limits and oppresses in the name of chivalry. However, you apprently fail to realize that if you place something on a pedastal, there is really no where it can go but down.
Yes, everyone should work as they have for the last 5000 years -- what has been lost in the last 50 years is remembering specifically to work only on things that matter. But if someone is single and unfit for being a part of a family then they are an evolutionary dead end and totally free to do whatever feels fun without restraint. Total liberation! Chase your selfish dreams with absolute freedom for you will soon be eternally severed from the chain of humanity!
Adults who want a life together should be complimentary forces, not oppositional. If a woman pretends to be a man and behave like a man, then the man's failings and weak spots remain vulnerable. Likewise, as modern man is increasingly feminized, there is often a failing of few or no masculine traits. Human coupling has evolved to match widely differing traits into a complimentary array of traits, but modern idiots struggle against nature by futilely trying to make men and women identical. Though metrosexuals and trendy women are abundant and popular, among healthy people the masculine is attracted to the feminine, and the feminine to the masculine, so the problem of ideological fashion solves itself.
All of our traits are beyond our control. Who has ever decided to be smart, creative, tall, or what their personality or natural physical features would be? How do you "choose" to give yourself ideas? Or do they just appear however and whenever they want? We aren't free to choose our defining traits but instead can either accept them and ride proudly to the end in our given chariots or we can ignorantly deny them or comedically pretend they don't exist. You might succeed in fooling yourself by denying what you are, but no one else with open eyes will be tricked by your charade.
It is interesting that you believe your life to be about conservation instead of consumption. What precisely are you conserving? Does your approach not instead consume family and society by positing a radical departure from nature? Once you have turned men and women into oppositional forces, neither of which serve any purpose on their own, what is the point of living other than personal amusement? When you devalue society and family, you also devalue people as isolated entities stuck in personal crusades. Perhaps you imagine people as just selfish individuals separate of society, but this is a vision of human despair and hopelessness, not health and sanity.
Humans are still and always just animals, so even when you depart from nature, the laws of nature remain and penalize those who attempt to deny what is real. If a few insane rats convinced cats to behave as dogs, they might be able to fight for their rights to pretend to be dogs, but it would neither serve normal cats who would have no interest in the
nutty pseudo-dogs, nor would it benefit the pseudo-dogs who would be lost following what a bunch of insane rats told them to do.
Why do you attempt to fight nature instead of recognizing that males and females belong together, not apart? While you might prefer a comfy office job and a plethora of amusing entertainment products to having a family, nature will grant you that "freedom" and laugh as your lineage is extinguished.
I suppose I cannot debate any further with anyone who sincerely believes that humans are still and always just animals, any more than I care to debate with someone who, instead of evolving, would prefer to remain part of a cyclic, limbic, turning over of the population. Our earth is, good sir, greatly overpopulated right now and filled with incredible suffering as a result. While I am assuming that you are in the camp of those who assert that we should just let "nature take its place," I have to retort that, having been born with privilege, the privelege of living in a wealthy nation, I believe that there is a greater responsibility to humanity, and that species have been evolving throughout time as should we. I don't believe that women or men should be denied the ability to chose for themselves, when, as a wealthy country in an overpopulated world, we need not adhere simply to biology when making decisions. We all know how babies are made, but this doesn't mean that our lives or society as it is have need to revolve around this, any more than it means that simply because the female births the baby, she needs to be the partner to raise it. (I do not even wish to read your comments on homosexuality if they are founded in any sort of the stale, primitive ideals you have obviously set for yourself;I could just as easily pick up a bible or flag down an evangelist.)
Once again, I am terribly sorry that your life of parading around the capital of our great nation as Jesus, hanging about with barbie dolls and advertising sensuous bubble baths, and staring at a computer screen all day does not enthrall and fulfill you. (Perhaps your grim outlook on humanity, on evolution, is a result of your own cyclic routine, your attachment to a life that dissatifies you? Or perhaps you're attempting to emulate what you view to be the most productive use of intellect and all with which you have been priveleged to have been born?)
In any case, our blogger has moved on to greater posts, and, I'm sure you feel as I that we should agree to disagree and live our chosen modes of existence. From all the women who have done so much more for the world than birth and raise children, ciao.
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