Last week, Iowa Guru and I were invited out to dinner by a young Indian couple. He is an entrepreneur that I am working with, and along with his wife, they took us out to a fine dinner. From the dinner and conversation I came away with a sense of the possibilities of India. I believe the husband comes from a family with money, and with that boon he was able to get a law degree in India and an MBA from the U.K. She has a college degree in the arts, and she is now spending her time caring for their toddler son. Her intentions are to open a “kindergarten” (in our scheme we would call it a preschool). The husband had the marks of someone, despite being relatively young (I estimate mid-30s), who has started a business, done well, and traveled widely. She struck me with her very open and gentle demeanor. Her plans for her kindergarten get rolling after her sister’s upcoming wedding. She remarked that she couldn’t imagine leaving India, which in part is attributable to her obviously close connections to family, but also because India now offers young people such as themselves such a complete & wide-array of the material and cultural goods of life. This struck me as a keen reminder of the variety in India, where we can see abject poverty in some places, and material wealth and success in others. Whether the young and vibrant middle class in India can pull the nation as a whole to a higher standard of development remains to be seen, but I couldn’t help but admire the pluck, optimism, and vibrancy that this young couple represents.
Sometime after this, Inscrutable Panda forwarded an article about 50 million missing women. The article is interesting because it’s the account of a young Indian woman who was educated in a self-described liberal, feminist college in Boston, and who in the late 1980s was exposed to the writings of Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, a native of India and a frequent, perceptive commentator on Indian affairs. In the late 1980s, Sen pointed out that women were terribly underrepresented in Indian demographics, and this suggested something sinister. The author Rita Banerji, goes on to explain that she came to realize that Indian females, from conception through marriage and beyond, were suffering deaths in shocking numbers. The young author believes that these deaths of Indian females from conception through adulthood are India’s equivalent to the silent complicity that child abuse became in the US. (Especially in the scandal of the American Catholic Church.) People tried to deal with it by ignoring it. The article is shocking and eye-opening.
The reason I came to think of this article in relation to our dinner conversation is that the young wife, in describing her upbringing and her present circumstances, is someone whose appearance and demeanor strongly suggest that she is the product of a loving family. The openness and ease of her demeanor struck me that way. To then read shortly after how many Indian females are killed, not to mention mistreated, is another reminder of the huge contrasts that this nation often presents us. And even in my short time here, I can think of many instances where girls and women are doing well (so as not to paint to gloomy a portrait). At some point, I’ll have to go back to Indians that I get to know well enough to find out how went widely recognized or considered this problem is. My sense is that it remains a national secret that everyone is in on. One of the problems I keep reading in the papers about of late has been about a series about rapes. In these articles, as the New YorkTimes has pointed out, the victims are portrayed as the subject of shame rather than the victims of wanton violence.
How do all Indians come to be valued? It may take something more than just lifting people out of poverty; it will probably take a real change in attitude among members of every class. It will probably require India to reveal its shameful "secret".
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