REFLECTANCE

THE OPINIATED AND JUDGEMENTAL SOCIETY

On 25th may 1999, at 6 am in the morning, room no 16 of the hospital was filled with shrieks and cry of a little baby. This baby supposedly is me, Rhea. I am the eldest child of my parents.

With whatever little information I remember being told by my relatives, I was born very dark and people actually questioned if I was their real child or was adopted. And from what I hear, people were worried for my parents, since I was born dark. Infact when I was just some days old people questioned whether I would grow up to become a beautiful person or not. And to most of the people who had already predicted my future I was supposedy to become very ugly.

At those times people were very critical in terms of colour, caste, creed, race. In terms of colour I was already demeand but in terms of caste they had no choice since I was born in an upper caste Hindu family.

I remember a time when I was around 4 years old and I had attended a Pooja ceremony ( Hindu rituals) at my friends place, I saw an old women there sitting in the corner with flowers in her hand listening to the mantras chanted by the Brahmin. She was sitting very far from the actual crowd. I found it very unusual so I casually asked a women, who I don't precisely remember now as to why was she sitting alone in the corner. To this she replied that she was of lower caste. At the age of 4 I had no idea what upper caste and Lower caste meant. Infact I had no idea as in what caste is. But now when I think of it, it drives me nuts.

What is caste? Aren't we born on the same land, with the same air, water, having similar organs and surviving on food or do people of higher and lower caste have contrasting habits or characters? Some might have been born on the earth while some on Mars. Is that so?

Continuing my story, I lived with my parents in a small village and villages are supposed to be having a very intimate internal contact among every household giving people more opportunity to gossip about a person.

My village was no less and that was a time when males outnumbered females.

My memory is vague of that time but I do remember seeing mostly the male child going to school while the females stayed back doing domestic chores. I had a neighbour who had 2 daughters and a son. The youngest in the family was their son Aryan. I used to call him Aryan dada (brother) and he had a nickname for me, rabbit. I was very fond of him ,infact I still am. It's surprising but we are still in touch. His parents enrolled him in a very fancy English medium school while his two elder sisters had no chance of getting education, not even in a public school. When I was little I thought they didn't go to school because they were lazy and had no interest in studying but as I grew up I realized, I was so wrong. They for a fact had dreams and aspirations just like their brother had, but their wings had been cut down by their parents.

People from small uneducated families find out educating their girl child as a wastage of money. They are of the opinion that girls are not their investment while sons are. A girl will get married and will go to her husband's house to live so why waste money on her. While a boy will remain back in the house and will look after his parents. By educating a boy, it will enhance the economic ability of any household while educating a girl is means to an end since she cannot work outside the premises of her household. So all of these makes it compatible and completely okay to not educate a girl.

This is the society we live in.