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Is a child bride just another nine year old girl? Or is she a woman interrupted, and reduced to a statistic? This poem makes you think.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/snugglepup/4658292501
The fresh breeze dances
lightly on the tips of the dangling dewdrop as
I run in the lawn of colourful imagination. The juicy sun
shines on my small feet.
My big, innocent eyes taste the world
With the all wonder of a nine year old girl.
Exploring, singing, living, breathing-
Free.
Like all children deserve to be.
A sudden darkness.
I stumble on the narrow-minded sexist stones; the most
poisonous of them all. My lush lawn of imagination
gets overthrown by the hard ground of reality, as,
A demonic spiral of a wedding garland tightens its hold on my trembling neck
choking my freedom.
Murdering my childhood.
Licking away all innocence.
Now, as I look up to see my twenty year old groom
I am just
A lifeless, empty shell.
Another 9 year old bride
Among 67 million others like me.
Pic credit: snugglepup (Used under a CC license)
Hi! I'm an often overly-excited, frequently fun-loving, and sometimes deeply-sunk-in-thoughts student of life. Earth and all the stuff in it -especially humans- has always awed me and I love read more...
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Dear Women’s Web Community Member,
You may have wondered at our being on the quieter side during the last couple of months. Thank you for your patience, and we wanted to come back to you with a detailed note on what’s been happening at our end of things.
When we first began Women’s Web, as a blog from one woman’s desk along with a few like-minded souls, little could we have imagined the heights that it would soar to. Over the years, Women’s Web has published over 20000 stories (almost all by women), empowered countless women with the ideas, community and resources to chase their dreams, employed hundreds of women in core and project-based roles, and in the process, emerged as the OG women’s community in India. It has also inspired many others to build communities of a similar nature, all enabling women (and other-underrepresented groups) in their own ways.
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