MIXED MESSAGES

My seven year old daughter is obsessed with reading out loud every poster, hoarding, shop names and every bit of words and statements that she can see from the car window. She also asks the adults sitting in the car to explain what these terms and statements mean. Yesterday she saw a poster somewhere where it was written, ‘save a girl child’. She kept asking me what it meant. Usually I and my husband are a bit wary about explaining to her, because her questions do not end there as she asks us in the most unusual places and inappropriate places (Once during a serious meeting she wanted me to clarify about menstruation and Sex). But this was one statement which I had to clarify to her. When I explained why it is important to save a girl child especially in India and how precious they are, she still did not understand.

So I had to take the story of Balika Badhu ( a television serial which I utterly detest, which is regressive and actually promotes certain key traditional practices like child marriage, widow repression and no education for a girl child and which should be abolished/banned). What is great about the serial is that it is currently the most popular serial, and even in workplaces colleagues of mine discuss about the serial and react positively to the story line.

Did my daughter understand after my explanation? Not really, as previously I had told her that Balika Badhu is just a story and not something to be believed in.

Shiny Ahuja the brilliant actor involved in raping his own 18 year old maid. There will probably be two kinds of opinion, if it is rape then he should be jailed, if it is consensual then probably he is not at fault. EXCUSE ME which ever way it goes it is rape. A young susceptible 17/18 year old girl from a poor marginalized background who is uneducated works in your house as a domestic maid for a paltry sum, who is lead/seduced by a married man in his thirties, who is a film actor ( Mr. Shiney Ahuja who proudly claims to be a thinking actor) to indulge in sex, when his wife and child are away. Do you still feel that this is right if it was consensual?

I think the media(print, audio, video) throws a lot of questions which need to be looked into and pondered before community becomes the judge and jury and pronounces a verdict.