Be it abortion of female foetus, slow killing of female child by negligence or cruelty, mostly by girls' parents themselves, dowry deaths, ritual murders, honour killings, or other brands of unreported killings and Sati (in which a widow is supposed to burn herself alive with her dead husband at his funeral pyre) - the Indian polity, whether rural or urban, has still a lot to learn about humane behaviour towads its female component.

The obscurant religious leaders - most of them illiterate in the Hindu scriptures - also add oil to fire by issuing unthoughtful statements on critical issues like Sati. Their mind-set still functions at dark ages' level. The Hindu scriptures are very definite about who is supposed to be the first guru of mankind. She is your mother. After having disposed off your mother, your first teacher, you are sure to become a beast and not a compassionate human being.

Unfortunately, there is no teacher : neither in the public nor in the private sector to teach this universal truth forcefully to Indians. Our national mentors, or the Government, evidently, did not pay much serious attention to it till recently. Of course, one comes across a lot of publicity that aborting female foetuses is a crime. And, I am sure, the concerned Government departments will have a lots of data to show that they are overactive.

In the pre-partition India, it was common in the great land of five rivers known as Punjab to bury the girl infant alive soon after the birth. Especially in a family which did not have a boy. A piece of cotton was put in her one hand, a big piece of jaggery (cane juice sugar) was inserted in her small mouth (to choke her ?) and she was buried with household ladies singing : "Spin the cotton/ And eat the jaggery,/ You go back,/ but send your brother." A gruesome murder was made to look like a lark.

Strange as it may appear but when one looks closely, the ladies themselves are the biggest culprits in annihilating their own sex.

Today, according to newspaper reports, in Haryana, a State carved out of Indian Punjab (as opposed to Pakistan's Punjab), there are far less females than the male population of the State. The social scientists fear that in time the Haryanvi male will have to go bride-hunting elsewhere. But given his track record, which parents will happily give their daughters in marriage ?

There are many female murder stories doing the round in India, but the following two stunned me most.

In the first instance, a comparatively less affluent boy chose a rich cousin to cast his spell on her. As the blood relationship was very close, the girl's orthodox parents were very apprehensive of the boy spending a lot of time with the girl. They asked his parents to keep the boy away. But they assured them that their boy was very sensible. But then the inevitable happened and the girl's family had no choice but to marry the two - willy-nilly.

The marriage ceremony was conducted in a very subdued fashion, unlike a normal Hindu wedding, and the boy was denied the big cheque he was expecting. His expectation of sharing the girl's bungalow and cars were shattered by her parents, who insisted that he should hire an accommodation of his own. To put it mildly, he was very resentful.

Then the quibbling started, very soon leading to ferocious verbal fights and then hand-to-hand combat between the couple. One dark morning he telephoned his in-laws that their daughter had committed suicide by hanging herself on the ceiling fan.

The second girl was treated as a burden by her parents, although she loved them heartily and there was no financial crunch, as she was a pensioner. They only had to command and she will go out of her way to serve them and make them happy. Sometime in her adolescence she was diagnosed neurotic and the parents chose shortcut treatment of electric shocks, which unhinged her more. A miserable life turned into an unbearable one. Yet she loved life and and its boons.

One afternoon the neighbours heard the parents cry that their daughter is dead.

That is the childhood and youth of females in India for you. Now let's cast a glance at how "happy" they are in their old age.

An old lady of 80 or so, who had sacrificed her youth, wealth and comfort to bring up her son was rewarded by him with negligence and ill-treatment. She took shelter with her widowed daughter. But fate dictated otherwise and she suffered a stroke leading to paralysis. She stayed on with her daughter, who could not afford her proper treatment, for almost a decade in this condition. Then some relatives decided enough is enough and wrote a stinking letter to the affluent son, who was shamed into taking backing his mother.

But before one year passed, in the hot month of June he brought and dumped his mother, after a couple of hundred miles travel from where he stayed, in front of the staircase leading to the first floor flat of his sister. He did not have the courtesy to inform his sister that he has brought their mother to her, nor did he bother to carry the patient upstairs. The sister learnt from the neighbours that her mother has come. The mother was half dead with travel exhaustion and dehydration.

As the article is coming to an end, most readers would miss any moral or purpose in this article. But I am only a journalist. I only report what is happening in the society faithfully. You are free to imagine whatever moral or purpose you want to have.

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