The song was written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and featured in their album “Sometime in New York City” which was released in 1972. Ironical, isn’t it, that we are still using it as the headline of this piece, 16 years into the following millennium and almost four decades after the death of Lennon? Not really, if one were to consider the fate of the hapless he was talking about. More so, if that hapless happens to be an Indian.
If she is not aborted as a fetus or is bumped off as another unreported case of infanticide, the girl child is looked by millions of Indians as burden that has to be carried till she can be handed over to the groom, with dowry and stree-dhan added as deal sweetening incentives. And, yes, I write this consciously, in full knowledge of the multifarious schemes that have been launched by successive central and the state governments to address the “anomaly” and having been subjected to a barrage of promotional clips that show doting parents and smiling girls with their larger than life dreams. Schemes, damn scheming politicians and Statistics.
She is taught to “conform” without question to the antediluvian laws of the community and merge seamlessly into the background – just another brick in the wall of convoluted chauvinism. If she doesn’t and dares to dream the dreams that tele-films promoting the girl child shows, she is “punished”. Naturally, those who violate her in the name of meting out the so-called justice, go scot free, even as she is blamed for the titillation. Slut Walk anyone?
The Nation is shocked into numb disbelief. We light candles, demand castration to be included in the penal code and cry ourselves hoarse in primetime. We mock the rustic village elders and the two bit politicians who mumble “boys, will be boys”. And then the next story breaks and we move on, erasing the “incident” from our collective consciousness and leaving the little girl to carry her malignant cross qyamat se qyamat tak.
If she is lucky, she is bundled off in marriage, which, to many a young girl, means only a superficial change in status – she ceases to be a daughter and a sister and becomes a wife and a mother. The kitchens change, even as she takes on the additional burden of catering to the whims of her new family members and dedicate her body to the onerous task of giving birth to the much sought after male heir to the family. The daughters that pop out are literally “collateral damage”, but ah, that’s not the politically correct term – remember, we the people, swear by our Betis, our Lakshmis.
Such is the state of the Nation, that many a woman, consider taking up a job as a catharsis, a release from the toxicity, an escape from the cruel curse of fate. She leaves behind the “security” of home and hearth, crosses the Lakshman Rekha, to set foot into the big bad world of employment – to be embraced by an “equal opportunity employer”, who neither discriminates in terms of pay nor encourages the wolves that target her for favours primitive and carnal. And oh, she dares not raise a ruckus, for, if that does not ultimately lead to a termination, it will certainly lead to social ostracism. And this I say, not daring to venture into the dark abyss called trafficking. Or for that matter, the equally murky area at the back of our consciousness called domestic rape.
Apologists and sundry paean singers will rattle off success stories – of our women conquering the Everest, of being the second elected Prime Minister in the world, of boxing her way to Olympic victory stands, of being high and mighty. But for each such success story, how many lives were lost in silence or how many futures were aborted or how many women were condemned to a life of eternal darkness, they know not, for we care not either.
It is this woman, whom we, the hired pens of the captains of corporate India, want to “empower”. We want to apply the balm of trickle down at the very base of the economic pyramid and pay for the transformation with our CSR funds. And we use this cliché of empowerment in the same breath with which we bandy our other favourite terms that we flood our shiny little brochures of self-aggrandizement with – social responsibility, corporate citizenship, sustainability, carbon neutrality, resource rationalization, blah, blah, blah! Don’t believe all that I say, just check out the number of lady Directors in the Boards of our limited, listed companies, statutes and mandatory compulsions be damned!
Going back to Lennon, the phrase, he is quoted to have said, was inspired by the Irish Revolutionary James Connolly who had stated that “the woman worker is a slave of the slave.” Well not much has changed, but then again, I am hopeful. Lennon also sang, “Imagine”!