Dolphins Guide Scientists to Rescue Suicidal Girl

[BrotherIvan]

19. Yes, and yet they have more female representation in government than the US

I'm certainly not defending India in the slightest. I have visited more than a few times, and there are two things to note: a) it is a HUGE country and b) their backward cultural traditions have not died out even in the most modernized areas. There is still so much poverty and lack of communications, that you can have a modernizing city like Mumbai or Delhi, and then the most primitive culture out in the countryside. The caste system was supposed to be abolished ages ago, but it is alive and well to this day. There are mob murders in the countryside for any number of incidents. It is a rather lawless, strange place.

The treatment of women varies greatly by class. On the one hand, my 4 upper class aunts were all highly educated with three holding PhDs and one a world-renowned expert in her field. Then you can have a woman on the other spectrum, the Untouchable, who is only allowed to enter a house by a special door in order to clean the toilet and can not enter any other part of the house. As a girl, I created quite a lot of havoc by walking through that door.

For an American, it was very difficult to understand the culture at all. Servants were boys sometimes younger than I. Neither my sister, mother nor I would allow him to wait on us and created more havoc by buying him shoes and toys. The head servant literally cut the soles out of the shoes without prompting because he said that servants should learn to never expect new things. It made us all cry, and it cemented that somehow I would never completely understand the way they viewed the world.

Purdah (separation of men and women) was still recognized by some of the beautiful upper class women that we visited. This was in the 80s. They were dressed very smartly in designer western clothes, but had a separate section of the house for the women. So the old ways were still followed. My widowed grandmother felt openly guilty for not becoming a suttee, or throwing herself on her husband's funeral pyre. There is a very long and sad history of the subjugation of women in India. I do see positive changes though, with more and more women getting educations and autonomy. I only hope that these changes speed up as they seep out into the countryside so those horrible crimes can be stopped.