Let's Ring the Bell! Against Child Marriage!

India has always been mysteriously guided by mythologies and scriptures that were written thousands of years ago. Our very unwillingness to bring ourselves at par with the current times has been the main reason why we are still a third world country when the countries like China and Japan who started at the same time as ours are already being considered as the next superpowers. We are so proud of our golden history that we fail to see it’s irrelevance in the modern times. But I also feel that either we are too superficial in our understanding of these ancient scriptures or a certain group of people manipulate our understanding in order to maintain their superiority and power. For they are often heard saying, “Our ancestors can never be wrong. For it was only in their time we had reached the peak of the development.” They make poor, superstitious people wrongly believe in the truth of the scriptures without ever explaining the reason that triggered the action our ancestors had taken. For example, the issue of child marriage: At a point in time when India was under constant attack and the attackers sought young virgin girls to satisfy their carnal needs or to sell them as slaves to wealthy merchants it was probably the easiest way to protect the weaker gender by marrying them off early. The girls were probably denied education because an educated partner, who is at par with his intellectual level, was likely to tempt a man of a healthy relationship and be distracted while fighting the war. But it was then. Whatever their reasoning might have been doesn’t hold good in today’s society. Yet it is all that we cling to. To me it all boils down to game of powers, of dominance. The chauvinist men’s absolute need to dominate. By marrying a child, whose mental development is not yet proper, who has not yet found her own voice, the man gains an absolute dominance over her. And this boasts his fake masculinity, something that heals the many failures he endures in his life. The very fact that there’s someone weaker at home, who is living in even worse than him soothes him. So while the men in rest of the world work harder in order to forget the frustrations of failure, in order to prove their superiority; our men turn inside, on their young wives. While the men in rest of the world measure their achievements in terms of their work, our men measure their achievements by the number of bluish marks on their wives skin and the number of sons they produce. And in order to achieve more they need younger brides, who are feeble and scared enough. In fact according to UNICEF, almost 69% of total marriages in Bihar involve girls below 18! Shocking indeed. Also it hurts more when people who are forward enough to be able to use the Internet, advocates child marriage openly, in his website: “…And the docs huh! They think they are the ones who create & save human lives. They claim a woman is not physically or mentally fit to get married young. Nonsense. In that case my grandmother could have never had 13 children and lived till the age of 70 with one husband (She was married at the age of 14).” And in another place: "The people who fought against child marriages were never subjected to the sexual desperation a man or a woman undergoes during his/her teens or puberty. So what was the end result? People started indulging more in masturbation, homosexuality, preteen & unsafe sex! What if you had provided an environment conducive for sex, when the nature wanted people to do? I think things would have been better. (Banning child marriages have led to other socio-economic problems, which I will discuss in some other blog….)" And he is a spiritual guru. People go to him to get advises on better living! In spite of staying in Chennai for few years, I have recently discovered about the Puberty Function for girls. When I questioned the sanity of the function, I was told that it was a very pure function and it was a way of the girls family to let people know that their girls were ready for marriage now. Though I wanted to ask if reproduction was the only reason to get married I never did. Instead I asked, if there was a similar function for boys. The person in front of me looked scandalized. Clearly being able to father a child isn’t a suitable criteria for a boy to get married. Then why should being able to mother a child be the only suitable criteria to get married for a girl child? *** I have thought many times, what can I do? Could I really do anything about helping our women, our little girls? Or will it be ever enough, no matter how much I do? But sitting here now, so many thousands of miles away from my country, when I am able to take a bird’s eye view of our system, I see that, most of the times the problem starts with a third person, usually the village head or the eldest family member deciding on behalf of the parents. Most of the time parents marry off their daughters just because someone influential told so, or sometimes from the fear of people talking, even if they themselves were not ready. Our democracy is nothing but a pseudonym. We still follow monarchy. If we could somehow take out these monarchs out of the equation, out of our system, probably there’s still chance for our society to survive. Because isn’t it the very nature of any species to protect their offspring against harms? Why should we, the most superior species of all animals, be any different? If I could eliminate at least one such monarch I would consider this a great achievement. But till the time I actually have the opportunity, I fulfill my role by spreading the word as far as I can, by writing about it, by debating with people. I start in my own circle, trying to make people I know see things in a different light. Try to make them feel differently about themselves, about who they listen to. Because I still believe, a small step taken today can cross the mountain tomorrow. So let us all pledge that we will take our small steps today. Let’s ring the bell.
 Love,

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