Preeti Choudhry
@PreetiChoudhry • 68,324 subscribers
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My take : Rarely do I personalise stories. But sometimes one must. Because I come from privilege. And let me use a cliché here - agency. I am fortunate to have both. I come from Haryana. I am married to someone who hails from western Uttar Pradesh. To say that either state ranks poorly on gender justice indices would be the polite version of the truth. My husband and I are also fortunate to still have familial roots in our ancestral villages. And every time I visit whether my village or his -the blessing is almost always the same: “Dudho nahao, puto phalo.” .. back in in the cities ... it translates loosely to: may you be the mother of a hundred sons - . In the village it's always said Literally In the city rarely said aloud but very precisely understood: may you become the mother of sons, because in this country even one son can dramatically elevate a families social standing. A son becomes status. Security. Social capital. He is the lifelong investment expected to yield lifelong returns. The one relationship through which hierarchy can be asserted - just by the virtue of gender - a son - And so the logic begins early. If there are only two glasses of milk, the son gets one not the daughter, sometimes not even the mother. If there is money for only one child’s education, it goes to the son, even if the daughter is brighter, more ambitious, more capable. Investment, after all, is expected to bring returns. And from that logic flows an entire ecosystem: dowry, control, dependence, harassment, silence. What we often describe as “tradition” is, in reality, an economic and social structure built around the premium value assigned to sons. Even when the son is getting married - the privilege of that association is understood to be so acute that the girls family should naturally bear all expenses of the wedding . The tragedy is not only that women are oppressed by it. The tragedy is also that many women are compelled to uphold it, because in deeply unequal systems survival itself becomes transactional. so we can continue to pontificate on #Twisha's death, but we all know the one brutal truth that killed her - we did - we killed twisha : the obsessive premium we attach to a male child. The lifelong social privilege of a “son” has created collateral damage for every woman alive in India . This desire cuts across class, caste, and religion alike. Twisha is dead. But her story survives in the collective, generational silence of women who endured but survived. women who, in some form, exist in each of our homes... and we all know them - very often we are them !
Preeti Choudhry62,875 次观看 • 2 个月前
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