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Laxmi Agarwal is so much more than just what we know her as - a gritty acid attack survivor. Here we meet her as a mom, speaking about her dreams for her daughter.
Laxmi Agarwal is so much more than just what we know her as – a gritty acid attack survivor. Here we meet her as a mom, speaking about her dreams for her daughter.
I’m very fortunate to have met the real Chapaak Girl last week. Laxmi Agarwal, the acid attack survivor.
Acid attacks. Yes I’m sure that you would have have read or heard some gory stories about it. Often on social media platforms and at times in national dailies. But let’s keep that aside for the for sometime, and talk about something more beautiful in their lives.
There is much more to a survivor; she can be a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother too. Yes Laxmi is a mother to a very beautiful daughter… She calls her “She”, a very unique name but with a lot of meaning in it. Why She? Because it is about the grit and determination of a lady who refused to get suppressed by her tormentors. She, because she is a ray of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel. She, because she is everything to her.
In our country we say Naari is Shakti, and She is a synonym of the naari version of shakti. Yes, She is her shakti, which gives her courage to fight against all the odds that life throws at her.
When asked her, about her dreams for her daughter, she in a very nonchalant way said that she doesn’t have any dreams for her. Figuring out the question on my face, she said that “it would be unfair to burden my child with my dreams. My job is to teach them how to fly, and then let them decide how high they want to fly, or nestle in a cozy nest.
How true are her words, parents put so much of stress on their child these days that at times they break. You have to just teach your child to fly and let them decide if they want to soar like an eagle or be like a dove, both are equally beautiful, equally majestic and definitely better than broken eggs.
Being a Mother myself, I can very well comprehend her thoughts. In today’s day and age, we have reduced to being rats who are always running after some reward. Do you remember the last time you took your child to a park and played with them? Achieving targets was a goal, but now it has become a way of life. Rather, we treat our kids as a means to achieve goals , goals which perhaps we have dreamt about but could not fulfill. This hectic life has upset the social fabric of society.
Don’t treat your kids like your dream catchers; rather, sit with them, spend time with them, figure out what they want to do in life. Once they set their aim, all that as a parents we have to do is to support them unconditionally. Yes there will be troubles and there will be solutions, and these are the signs that life is there. I’m a Mom; I don’t know everything, but I’m learning, and I have learnt that let’s not have ‘broken eggs’.
Images source: Author’s Facebook account
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I huffed, puffed and panted up the hill, taking many rest breaks along the way. My calf muscles pained, my heart protested, and my breathing became heavy at one stage.
“Let’s turn back,” my husband remarked. We stood at the foot of Shravanbelagola – one of the most revered Jain pilgrimage centres. “We will not climb the hill,” he continued.
My husband and I were vacationing in Karnataka. It was the month of May, and even at the early hour of 8 am in the morning, the sun scorched our backs. After visiting Bangalore and Mysore, we had made a planned stop at this holy site in the Southern part of the state en route to Hosur. Even while planning our vacation, my husband was very excited at the prospect of visiting this place and the 18 m high statue of Lord Gometeshwara, considered one of the world’s tallest free-standing monolithic statues.
What we hadn’t bargained for was there would be 1001 granite steps that needed to be climbed to have a close-up view of this colossal magic three thousand feet above sea level on a hilltop. It would be an understatement to term it as an arduous climb.
Why is the Social Media trend of young mothers of boys captioning their parenting video “Dear future Daughter-in-Law, you are welcome” deeply problematic and disturbing to me as a young mother of a girl?
I have recently come across a trend on social media started by young mothers of boys who share videos where they teach their sons to be sensitive and understanding and also make them actively participate in household chores.
However, the problematic part of this trend is that such reels or videos are almost always captioned, “To my future daughter-in-law, you are welcome.” I know your intentions are positive, but I would like to point out how you are failing the very purpose you wanted to accomplish by captioning the videos like this.
I know you are hurt—perhaps by a domestic household that lacks empathy, by a partner who either is emotionally unavailable, is a man-child adding to your burden of parenting instead of sharing it, or who is simply backed by overprotective and abusive in-laws who do not understand the tiring journey of a working woman left without any rest as doing the household chores timely is her responsibility only.
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