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These are the thoughts of a broken girl. An ordinary girl in a busy world trying to make sense of whatever life offers her. Just like you and me.
Waking up early is a good habit, so is bathing. For boys it was a sermon but for girls it’s a must. What sins do we carry, that our tiny bodies need to be scrubbed and cleaned the first thing in the morning and by evening we have to walk home fast to quickly learn cleaning the kitchen. Everything we must know fast – like how to ignore boys soon, how to finish our education early, marry fast, how to please our in-laws with our cooking and our husbands in bed.
No one ever gives girls a chance to take time and mold themselves. I often wonder what sins our bodies carry that we have to do everything quickly. Hidden in silence.
Grandmaa said, “Girls should bathe the first thing in the morning.” I wondered, what sins did our bodies carry that it needed to be scrubbed off even before we could sit to study.
Oh! How they tell us that love will be the answer to every question, the answer to our being. How a prince in his white horse will rescue us. That will be the prize of our chastity, our goodness. Of all we do, the prize is the man. And all we need to do is surrender. But no one told us that love does not demean or ask us to give up what we love. It never trades itself for silence. Love does not hurt you to numbness.
But in our culture the toxicity in romance is celebrated. The day he raised his hands on her it was called his intense love. This confuses young girls about love and pain. Most are encouraged to choose pain as a virtue and boys are encouraged to choose hurting as love.
Mothers should tell young girls that love is like food, don’t choose what hurts you. Also don’t choose the one that does not nourish you.
Mothers must teach their daughters that love is like food. Not every kind is healthy.
As young girls, we strove for comparison. Some girls were bad – they watched TV, spoke to boys, liked a film hero, and dressed fashionably. Some were good – they had well parted, tidy hair and did not talk to boys. We all strove to be the good ones – underplaying our wants, lying to ourselves and softening our voices. We also made sure that we slut shamed the other bad girls and spread rumors about them, because we wanted to be good girls.
We did not know, that one day we will be the other girls, trying to live our own lives and someone will brand our needs according to their wishes to be the good ones. We did not know as young girls that we were feeding a demon that one day will feast on us. And burn our own skin.
When we were little girls, my best friend and I laughed a lot when her mother reprimanded her sister. She was a bad girl. The boys teased her. And made quite a few blank calls. We felt happier when she was not allowed to wear her lipstick, which she always refused to share with us. Only that, as little girls we did not understand that we were creating the same web, that someday will suck us in, when someone would say, “Rape is your fault.”
This article is part of a series. You may read Part 1 here, Part 2 here,and Part 3 here.
Image Source – Unsplash
Proud Indian. Senior Writer at Women's Web. Columnist. Book Reviewer. Street Theatre - Aatish. Dreamer. Workaholic. read more...
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Children should be taught to aspire to be successful, but success doesn't have to mean an IIT admission only!
Imagine studying for 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 whole years for the JEE exam only to find out that there’s only a very, very slim chance of getting into an IIT. It is a fact widely acknowledged that the IIT-JEE is one of the toughest exams not just in India but in the whole world. Apart from IITs, the NITs and IIITs of India also accept the JEE scores for admission. There are said to be a total of 23 IITs, 31 NITs and 25 IIITs across the country.
Now, let’s first get a few facts about the IITs right. First, according to the NIRF rankings of 2023, only 17 IITs rank in the top 50 engineering colleges of India and only a few (around 5) IITs are in the list of the world’s top 100 engineering colleges. Second, the dropout rate of IIT-qualifying students stands at least at 20%, with reasons being cited ranging from academic pressure and unmanageable workload to caste discrimination and high levels of competition within the IIT.
So, it’s quite clear that the journey of making it through IIT is as challenging as the journey of getting into an IIT. Third and most important of all, the acceptance rate or the odds of getting into an IIT are below 3% which is a lot lower than the acceptance rate of highly and very highly ranked US universities. Four, getting into an IIT of one’s choice doesn’t mean one will also get into a branch of one’s preference at that IIT.
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