A star spangled tricolor..
Saturday, April 6, 2013 at 6:54PM This year marks a half way point in my life. I have spent exactly the same number of years in India as in the United States. Considering this blog has been going for years now, you know my views on India and the USA evolve over time, partly because of changes in the two countries and partly because of a change in my own perspective as I grow up and grow older.
In spite of all the changes accompanies with a lot of continued soul searching, there are some basic truths about what my perception of right and wrong are which have not changed over time. Think of it as the BIOS program that is written into my Hard Drive. Could be running Windows for a few years and switching to Mac OS for a few years but my dislike of Powerpoint may not have changed.. again, may not be the best analogy and I do like Powerpoint, not that there is anything wrong with it!
It does feel every now and then, that India and the USA are going through some kind of role reversal between the late eighties and now, especially with respect to big social norms.
Right now the "guys" (guessing this is a majority guy thing) in Kansas are coming up with a severe restriction on abortions. The odds against a woman from a poor community are now stacked up even higher. If she gets raped or is forced into a pregnancy by her husband, she cannot do anything about it. The state is not going to support her well to raise that kid either or improve her day to day life in anyway. Looks like it is a question of time before the Christian version of Shariah laws get passed as bills in some mid western states.
There is no middle ground. Most of these states have middle aged white males running the show (sorry for the racial profiling here, but it happens to be a theme) who seem to either be really ignorant (anti science, blind faith folks who believe the earth was created 7000 years ago!) or evil (they know what they are doing.. keep the people stupid so they can continue to get votes.. just like the ROmans had the folks high on wine with cheap tickets to watch the gladiators while the State of the State was degrading) with some powerful backers and the overall population doesn't get it.
On the other extreme we also have gun control laws that are going through which everyone agrees is not going to solve anything. The one thing that everyone agrees is a check to see who gets the guns and a restriction to take away guns from folks who have mental health issues. In all the debates I have seen and participated in, be it conversations in person or on the new debating platform called Facebook, this is the only thing folks agree on. Not restricting the number of bullets, not putting armed gunmen in schools etc.
Background checks and periodic registration checks to make sure your gun is still with you! However, that seems to not get traction across the board. It makes sense to hire more people (especially gun knowledgeble Veterans) and put them to work to do background checks and cross checks against medical conditions. Get all guns registered just like we treat cars.There seems to be an extreme position taken by pro and anti gun supporters with no middle ground!
Women have a raw deal in India. Even the few women in power seem to start taking an anti-woman stance the minute they get to power. Indian women never band together as a group. Have seen this all through my life. The older women seem to have an attitude that says "I suffered all through my life. Why make it better for the next generation!". It is heartening to see some of that change in recent times where women are challenging a Male dominated system.
Then again, a select subset of women seem to have it good. Thanks to female infanticide in the mid eighties in India when Ultrasounds came to India, there is a shortage of girls in a certain age group in certain communities and the guys outnumber girls 3-1 or 4-1. The girls in these communities get to do some kind of "natural selection" and are now demanding dowries before selecting a boy. So it gets interesting as this seems to be a demand and supply thing. However in other communities which are relatively poor, the same thing has led to frustrated male youth who cannot find a partner and resort to violence against women.
Then there is gay marriage. The hate and oppression against this segment of society in the US is mind boggling, now that it is out in the open. However, their fate seems to be a lot better here than in other countries. If gay folks in USA are living in a bedroom closet, in India they are in a closet that is located in an underground bunker. I do not forsee gay people in India having any rights or openly fight for their rights in my lifetime. Heterosexual widows are treated like outcasts to this day, so chances of gay rights? Slim to none.
Right now there is a belief system clash that is happening in both countries to the point where the average citizen has to take a one way or another stand on some of these issues.
The "American way of life" or the "American Dream", terms that meant something to me twenty years ago seem to have taken on muddled connotations. There seem to be two American ways of life and the dream seems to be taking on a bipolar character in itself.
All said and done, the only thing we can hope for is that there is constructive debate across the globe and people can resolve things with debates instead of extreme measures.
There is a lot of hate out there that needs to be changed to love.
Wish when our kids grow up to be our age, the world will be a better place, but my hopes of that keep dwindling, a little bit each day.
India, USA, all part of life in all part of life
Reader Comments (5)
The ninth paragraph, last sentence. Really, Mr. Narayanan?
Educated or uneducated, the excuse seems to be common from Indian men.:-( There is no excuse for violence against women. None.
But thanks for the perspective on the Kansas issue. Strange how the Americans are wailing about Arab women not having rights but women in America can't choose to have an abortion.
Sundar,
I have to say your views on india are frozen in the 90s. For example there was a huge census in india in 2011 where among a number of things they also measured girl-boy ratio. TN was the best/progressive among this and some states were predictably poor. but not even the worst state went below 930 girls for every 1000 boys. the 3:1 ratio seems to be a really fringe exception.
Secondly, supreme court of india recently legitimized gay relationships to a big extent.
On US topics - I think you have your own opinion on what right/wong. no harm in that. But on abortion and gay marriages I have never had a solid opinion on what is right or wrong. Im ok with any outcome on these issues but what I plead for is at least a good argument in favor or against. So far I've not seen a single good argument that is philosophically/legally well rounded and will withstand - for lack of a better phrase - a socratic way of inquiry.
most arguments are like what you have presented here - take a fringe case and present it as a mainstream. i.e. present an exception as an example to get to a pre-determined end goal. for example - What % of abortions come from rapes?
had typed a long comment yesterday. dont know why it did not post on site..
Kajan, pointing out a root cause is not the same as giving an excuse. when you ignore the root cause, then it is an excuse.
example.. if you have no guns, you wont have gun violence. You will still have violence. but not gun violence. But having "No guns" is NOT an option because that is part of a "way of life for which the forefathers fought".. given that NO guns is not an option in a country with a 300 million population and 350 million guns where there are enough to arm every man woman child and unborn child for decades to come, everything else is an excuse. Because we have only workarounds given the source cannot be touched.
Hawkeye, my image of India is definitely not frozen in the 90's. There are still communities where the man:woman ratio is heavily biased in select age groups. Taking an average across all ages across all communities is the data you are talking about. as for my point that we have conditioned generations to think males are better than females in some way and it will take a lot of years to reverse that conditioning. . . here is something from my own life. As of three years ago (2011), I was still told by well meaning relatives that it is not too late to fix my Kolli problem. (Kolli - funeral torch used to light funeral pyre.. something of a last rite performed usually by the eldest son for parents). I am sure my dead body will burn and burn well if one of my daughters or both of them jointly light my funeral pyre and I hope they do. No, I am pretty grounded on a lot of issues where the older generation of Indian women don't stand by younger generation Indian women to fight for them.
finally, the fringe thing. I do agree that media usually bloats up fringe issues and does not talk about the norm but mostly the exception. To that end, yes. If my newsfeed from Google on certain issue is biased (apparently your google newsfeed might be different than mine even if we select the same headings based on what we usually read as news).. then it is possible that my information is biased. If the world is a more tolerant place, I will definitely rejoice with you.
:)
saw this in a humor site today..
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-09-24/india/28249543_1_dalit-woman-dalit-family-dog
why share this?
well, we have kids being raised in an international community setting in California and they have not seen a gun up close or have had to deal with discrimination of any kind and so far they have been taught they are next to none. so why bother with issues like gun control, discrimination etc. when all I have to do is say "as long as you live here you are okay?" . Because the world is becoming smaller every day and they are our future. so teaching them non-violence is a worthy option, live and let live and empowerment without entitlement is worth it in my opinion.
the news article above may be fringe.. maybe this happens in villages across the country. don't know. we keep seeing things like this in the news everyday be it India or the US. Maybe all this is a 0.00001 % issue and there is nothing anyone can do about it.. then again, it shouldn't happen and that is where the fact that it is a small percentage and therefore it should be ignored is an "excuse".
I am surprised I didnt get notification for your reply. I had subscribed for notifications. Sundar you should check why this is acting up.
Overall - I was commenting on the 'extreme example' dominating the headlines today. if its abortion then people present 'abortion in case of rape or incest' as an example as if that is the mainstream case. if its girl vs boy in india people present bihari and punjabi communities as a mainstream case. the census was not for old people as well. it is a birth rate statistic. for every 1000 male babies born the worst state in in india has 930 or so women babies. dont get me wrong that in a larger scheme of things is a deplorable statistic (when you see it as 500 million men the raw number is pretty bad). but like many cases the truth is somewhere in the middle. Its not my google feed vs yours. Its the anecdotal bias vs the boredome of empirical information. An anecdote is news. broad dull patterns arent news. if you read a few anecdotes the replace the reallity of broad patterns with the ones that we create ourselves.
i have been told by relatives about the 'kolli vechufying' aspect as well. i myself am concerned about that. i have gone and inquired about the correct procedure for people falling in my category. I wont let my daughters light my funeral pyre purely because the sastras that prescribe that there should be a funeral pyre in the first place also prescribe that a woman cannot do it. After all the education - i wont commit a basic fallacy which is a fallacy of source. but i dont believe this necessarily makes girls inferior to men. Not being able to light a funeral pyre does not make them any less of my children, does not make them inferior , does not make them less loved. It is not different than them not being able to play for the men's test cricket team. its just another 'kuraindha batcham aaru vidhyasam' thing like women have breasts and men don't. I accept women and men are unequal. this is the reality of the universe. The mistake i wont make is to consider inequality as superiority or inferiority. if you read my latest blog inequality is just an attribute of the world and not anything to be ashamed of.