KANKtareous

After weeks of resistance, Vivek, Aiman and I finally succumbed to 'KANK' yesterday. Like all good Indian families, we resort to Hindi films to save us when we are tired, bored, just fed up of our daily routine. Then like rajma-rice, we need a Hindi film - comfort food.

Last evening, exhausted with a fortnight's entertaining, computer vissicitudes, the dreariness of administrative details, Aiman's fatigue, the collapse of our domestic arrangements with Leela's absence, a few minutes of 'Khoon Pasina' on Sony TV was good fun. Sequences after sequences in green, I wondered if the costume director had bought rolls of cloth and cut everyone's suits in the same measure, Vinod Khanna and Amitabh Bacchan in leather jackets, with dashing faux fur collars. Fights, drama, tears. We wanted more.

So, the big screen across the road beckoned us. It will be a laugh, if nothing else, we thought. What can I say?

We gorged ourselves sick with popcorn, we squirmed in our seats with goggle-eyed amazement, we kept pinching each other in our effort to believe it was really happening on screen. Dialogues that would do justice to a C-grade film, sequences seemingly written, not to entertain, but to bore the audience beyond measure, actors who wandered around as dazed as us, not having an iota of a clue as to what they were all about, ugly, ugly close-ups, music and dance mediocre.

Today, I read, KJ may make KANK-2. NRIs loved KANK. It seems. Well!

who wants a girl?

A couple of days ago, more than 50 female foetuses were found outside a hospital in Punjab.

People have different reasons for doing away with unborn babies - a career, money, because they already have enough children, or whatever. Abortion is legal in India, so how can one question the motives of why a couple chooses to abort a baby?

Even if these parents who chose to do away with unwanted girls had been forced to have the baby girls, they would have made the girls' lives miserable. The girl child would grow up cursed everyday for being a burden, neglected, malnourished, poorly educated and married off to the first available male. After that, she would most likely be harrassed for dowry and burnt. Better that she was killed by her parents before birth rather than her life increasing suffering on this earth.

But perhaps, one of the girls would have turned out to be a rebel and changed the society she lived on it on its head, and improved the lot for all other girls like her? Who knows? I've often looked at families and said to myself, "I hope no girl is born in this family."

Girls should be born only into families that deserve them, that will appreciate the gift they have been given through a girl child.

No law can work to protect the girl child, or the female foetus as long as parents don't want girl children. Laws cannot be imposed from the outside, but have to come from within the requirements of our society, and our society doesn't need more women. So be it.