True love?

I am not a raconteur.

Let me just record here a real-life incident that I recently came to know of and that caused non-trivial perturbations to my thoughts. It strongly brought back to me some of the non-academic questions about which for the past decade and more I have been pondering off and on and even today I actively continue to search for their answers either through personal or indirect experiences. Questions which I believe are very crucial to my life and whose answers can have far reaching consequences.

So how did I get to know of this incident that I am trying to narrate? I have just now completed my BSc.(Hons.) course in Physics at Chennai Mathematical Institute and Howrah is what can technically be called as my home-town (I am not sure whether I have anything in common with Howrah or whether Howrah has anyway influenced me!) I was travelling in a train from Chennai to Howrah after my last semester was over. On of my co-passengers was a doctor and this is an experience of that doctor which he narrated to us.

One day a well-to-do and married male patient came to this doctor with some kind of a tumorous growth happening at various points in one half of his face. Preliminary investigation revealed it to be a cancerous growth and that it had spread to critical areas like the eye and nose and the palate. The doctor realized that it is a complicated case and after consultation with his colleagues concluded that the only possible "cure" for this is to do a massive surgery on that side of the face and remove all the infected regions. There was no way out but to remove the eye and one-half of the nose and almost everything on that side of the face. Then a plastic surgery would have to be done to cover up all the voids and deep scars that would be created. To remove whatever malignant cells that might remain a round of chemotherapy had to be done.

This grave situation was informed to the couple and seeing no way out they conceded to the operation. The couple realized that they would need to liquidate some of their assets to finance the whole operation. While the husband was admitted to the hospital, the wife started bringing to him regularly papers and documents relating to their various properties like land owned etc. These were officially owned by the husband and hence his signature was required to sell them or mortgage them.

Eventually the operation was done. For the doctors there was a great sense of achievement that this immensely risk prone operation could be completed and the person was alive and healthy. But on more practical grounds now the person's face was a scary thing to look at. It was half a face and the other half was a flat sheet of skin. The wife almost fainted when she saw him after the operation.

Now the guy was on constant medication and the wife had to regularly buy and bring to him the medicines. The doctors noticed that the wife was uncomfortable spending time in the hospital and was not getting habituated to the typical smell that pervades a hospital.
Gradually the frequency of visits of the wife started to decline and finally she stopped coming.

Now the doctors were faced with the question as to how to keep procuring the medicines for the patient. So the doctors decided to keep giving to him whatever could be salvaged out of the stock of free samples that any hospital has. Thus the doctors managed to complete the cycle of medication and the guy was eventually released.

He walked out of the hospital alone and with half a face but without the tumorous growth.

After a few months this guy returned back to the hospital with a face and body that could hardly be called human. The doctor said that even seasoned doctors got considerably shocked to see him. His entire face had swollen up and the standard structures on the face like eye, nose and lips were indiscernible. It was a weirdly shaped lump of flesh to say the least. The doctor said that his face with the numerous tumours bulging out of everywhere looked like a large cauliflower. He even had weirdly shaped protrusions coming out of every point in the body which have the lymph glands like the arm-pits, groins etc. For most doctors he was the scariest effect of disease they had ever seen in their life. For others he was looking just like a character out of some horror movie.

The guy had the following tale to tell: When he was discharged from the hospital he returned back to his home to find that it was completely empty. He had no property to live on. His wife had run away with some guy taking with her all the property. She could do this since he had already signed the papers. Now he could hardly sustain himself on his own and loss of his wife plunged him into deep sorrow. Out of frustration he took to alcohol and spent whatever money he had on it. As soon as he started drinking alcohol the tumorous growths across his body started and the disease backfired that the earlier treatment had suppressed to a considerable extent. The disease now came back in greater measure and devastated his physical appearance and abilities.

Now his wife had run-away with all his property and he was reduced to a mendicant on the street with a ghastly physical appearance that made him recede from his social circles as well which could have been his help during such difficult times.

The guy surmises and almost correctly so that his wife decided to run away as soon as she realized the amount of physical distortion the operation had caused to his face. Almost surely she couldn't accept the situation of having to spend the rest of her life with a man who had half a face.


Now this man having lost everything but his life had come back to the hospital with only one request to make to the doctors "Please kill me". So this man chose euthanasia ("mercy killing") as the way out of being in a state of complete physical mutilation including the face being distorted beyond recognition, financial ruin and simultaneous loss of his family.


I am not inviting any debate about whether this choice is right or wrong. I am convinced that in that given situation I would have made the same choice and I will consider that person to be some being beyond human who would not chose death in such circumstances.

The issue what this episode brings home is the issue of mutual physical acceptability in a relationship of romantic love. How much is physical beauty a factor in falling in love? Is there any meaning or truth in "romantic love" unless it is passionate?

This is something that I have debated within me since I was in class 5 or 6 and even today at the age of 21 it is a question that I am yet to settle for sure. I don't feel confident of the amount of truth that is there when a people talk of love as some form of an emotion that rises beyond all mortal factors and is supposed to be a bind of thoughts and hearts etc etc.

A critical synchronization of thoughts and emotions is necessary for anything to even qualify to be called love but is it even remotely practically feasible unless there is a mutual physical acceptance? At this point in my life I don't think I can.

I think if a question is posed to me as "Will you love your wife as before even if she loses a leg as a consequence of some accident and becomes dependent on the wheel-chair?" then my answer is an emphatic "yes". But if a question is asked as "Will your love your wife as before even if she gets physically distorted like that man?" then I am finding it very difficult to come up with a positive answer.

I would consider it to be my greatest achievement if ever in my life I can give an emphatic "yes" as an answer to the later question.

I somehow don't see how romantic love between 2 people can be sustained without mutual physical acceptance. That will require an amount of strength to rise beyond all mortal factors, that I am not sure whether any person is capable of having.

Is such a situation supposed to be the best test for true love or is such a test impossible for anyone to pass?
I don't know the answer to these questions and hence the reason why I am writing these articles.

These thoughts bring home a more central point. Can you think of one relationship in this world that can stand this situation? When 2 people stick together even when one is physically mutilated beyond recognition ? Yes..I think there is only one form of relationship that can sustain this...that between a mother and her child.

I somehow feel that motherhood is one bond which is beyond the reach of any other form of relationship and probably the only form which has a chance of sustaining such shocks like the one discussed above.

As I grow up this is something that I feel in stronger and stronger forms: "Mother" is probably the symbol of the strongest form of bond, most unshatterable support and the safest shelter.



The central question one needs to find an answer to is this:

Is it possible for two people engaged in romantic love to be passionately in love and yet love each other like a mother loves her child or are these emotions mutually exclusive?

Yet another connection snapped....

As the title suggest this writing is a chronicling of another major loss of a relationship that I seem to have been subject to over the past few weeks.Perhaps writing about it makes it slightly easier to rationalize the situation and hence face it.

Anyway the ability to write what one feels is the greatest armour one can have when faced with abject loneliness. Fortunately my incessant and ever deepening lonliness has equipped me with atleast this ability and of course a deepening interest in science which also helps combat lonliness.

It was pretty debatable to me for quite some time to me as to whether the terrible strain I was feeling over the past few weeks were solely due to the extreme time crunch that I was facing during the GRE preparations. On retrospection I feel that the GRE was only a minor contributor to the immense psychological strain I was facing. GRE preparations were only affecting the technical thoughts but generally pain inflicted to the non-technical aspect of the mind is more hurtful.

Now I realize that the pain was mostly due to the tremendous sense of frustration and agony and pain that I was feeling in my subconscious mind due to the apparent loss of a relationship or atleast a potentially non-trivial human connection. Losing a relationship is not a new experience to me but this time round it was I think it happened in the most subtlest of ways. It happened fast and without any exchange of words and without even me feeling it explicitly.

But unsurprisingly life has hardened me beyond whatever I had thought as possible. A connection for which I deeply felt seems to have evaporated from my life without much of clamour or even a shed of tear. I can confess without any inhibitions that the last time I lost a deep relationship I had cried incessantly for about 3 days before it fully sunk in that I have lost a person. Even now if I look back at that incident the fact that I cried profusely for a long time doesn't at all seem childish to me , because it only testifies and assures to me the genuine depth of feeling I had for that person.

But this time round things seem to be have gone by without a single drop of tear. It just silently sheared me from within with no external manifestation. I am truly transforming into a rock or a machine.

The agony showed up its existence only after the immediate pressure of GRE waned off. And then I realized how it had actually ripped apart my inner self into shreds over the last few weeks but unknowingly I was attributing the feeling to GRE.

I had known that this person is coming home for the Durga Pujas and hence I had been longing to get to communicate after a long time. The Pujas came , this person came home and I realized to my utter shock that the one who had come back was complete antithesis of the person whom I had known 5 months ago! A person who completely derecognizes the 21 year old connection between us.

But still one cant rule out the possibility that I am totally misinterpreting everything since I have had no communication with this person for the last 5 months. All I am deducing is from this person's orkut profile and other such behavioural indications on the cyber world. I could have held on to this fain hope that I am wrong but then life has taught me not to nurture such hopes.

This connection was very special to me for many reasons. I think it is the longest connection I have ever had in my life. It is for about 21 years , that is since I was born.Its true that there was total lack of communications for about 7-8 years in between and then I was suddenly contacted by this person one fine morning about 1.5 years ago. This long a communication gap and then the other side reconnecting to me in a rejuvenated way after so many years through a sheer chance of fate had made this connection very special.

But the fact remains that this connection was special because over the past 7-8 months this had come to be the only non-trivial non-academic relationship that I had or could have hoped to sustain. If someone cant understand me over a period of 21 years no matter how irregular the communications have been ,then I believe that I just cant be understood by anyone or there is some intrinsic factor inside me that shatters all possibilities of non-trivial non-academic relationships.

What is interesting is that what I see of this person today from the orkut profile is anti polar to the person I faced 5 months ago. It seems that the other side of this connection has undergone a total psychological change over the last 5 months , a change at an unprecedented scale to have reversed some of the fundamental defining characteristics itself. As a consequence of the communication failure I have no clue as to what propelled such a drastic change of character at the other end but it seems likely that the breakage of this 21 year old connection is a fall out of this change.

But anyway it is clear that the other side is completely untouched by this breakage and the breakage is pretty much surgically done. All I get at the other end is a silent psychic trauma that I must combat within as I externally fight the challenges of the academic life , for the time being my Physics GRE.

A trauma which generates silent wails and dry tears and dreadful nightmares and a continuous sense of vacuum inflating inside. A tremendous sense of frustration of having lost a deep bond .The agony fills the subconscious every time I take my mind off academics.

The sinking feeling that if my analysis is correct then I have lost the last remaining connection that I had to the non-academic spheres or life. If this connection has been snapped { which is almost certain } then I have no more anchors to hold myself onto any emotional bonds beyond which are automatically defined via blood relations.

I have set sail on a tumultous ocean on a small dingy which has no sails and which has a weak oar. The last anchor I had to the world has also now been snapped. All I now see is the vast weltering ocean on all my sides and I have only a small boat to keep me afloat in the face of these plundering waves.

The small boy in the Wordsworth's poem who had set sail on a small boat had returned ashore when he saw the large mountain.

I will not turn back ashore.
For one thing since all my bondings are now gone , I don't know where is the shore.

I will reach the other side on this dilapidated small boat of mine or I will sink midway.
I am not turning back.

Yet another Durga Puja.....

One more Durga Puja passing down my life just like the 20 previous ones which passed away leaving no mark or memory. One more lonely , solitary brooding festival. Although I am not a religious person or follow any religion in particular , but still that doesn't stop me from enjoying the artistic beauty of the pandals and the lighting and the sculptures. I have always believed that art forms are meant for and are best appreciated in company with a group of people who will share your point of view rather than in solitude. I sometimes really wonder as to what in this world is meant for enjoying in isolation. I really don't think any. The beautiful equations of Gauge Theory or the Einstein's Equations are also best understood and appreciated when discussed instead of ruminated in isolation.

These festivals over these 20 years have grown to become objects of tremendous hatred and frustration and irritation. They only remind me of all the joys in life that the rest of the world enjoys and I have been missing out on for all my life. Given that over the recent years my personal life has gone from bad to worse and I have realized some of my fundamental inabilities , I don't think there is any chance that these festivals like the Durga Puja will mean the amount of joy and celebration it means to the rest of the world.

All I know is that , I hate these festivals to the bottom of my core since they act glaring reminders of all things in my life that I have tried to get but have brutally failed.A reminder of all my failures and deepest of frustrations.

But then its a perennial conflict within me which I have never been able to resolve. Should science in particular be pursued in isolation and only interacted when one gets stuck or is it best followed in company. I have generally tried adopted following a middle path in this respect. When I am learning a new concept then I keep discussing with the more experienced on a regular basis and then I confine myself to total isolation when I am trying to individualize the subject. The process when I am trying to analyse some subtle aspect and might get an insight. But after I have got an insight of mine then I again go back to the discussion mode to test my analysis on others.

It is the conflict of the individualism with the macrocosm that becomes the fountain head of creativity.Its in the attempts to emerge from isolation to the public that the inchoate ideas get ossified into new insights.

But then somewhere down the lane in my life I lost my social life and personal life. I was left alone in my pursuits , interests and passions. Perhaps all this went a long way into motivating me into research and poetry and fine arts. Things that start coming naturally when one spends evenings alone by the window year after year. Abject loneliness has come to settle as the fundamental fabric of my life.

I used to watch my friends go out in the evenings to play , but somehow no one ever felt like calling me. I wonder what was wrong or so different about me when I was very young that my peer group had already deserted me! {Now things are more or less understandable....but then? } But then I did try to venture out on my own and try to mingle with the others and start playing cricket or football with them. But somehow I always felt like an alien and I couldn't continue playing in a particular group for long. I had to soon come back home into my own world where I was the reason of all that happened and I was the thing on which everything showed its effects.

This lack of play group in childhood aggravated a big "problem" in my life as I grew up. Contrary to what I had expected I got more and more alienated and sequestered into my own world. It pushed my interests in science further since somehow I felt "undisturbed" but then I was unknowingly feeding a snake in my life that has blandished its fangs over the last 2.5 years. I was slowly developing a clear demarcation between "Academic" and "Non-Academic" aspects of life.

As I grew up and especially when I came to college I realized that no one had in his/her life such a strong demarcation between what is "Academic" and "Non-Academic" as I had. But this demarcation never showed its brutal face till I seriously fell in love. Till I fell in love , this demarcation was always acting in my favour except that social alienation was something that I have anyway gotten used to since my early childhood.

Only when I seriously fell in love that I realized a whole lot of ugly things about myself and also about the tremendous introvert that I had already grown to me. My mother { who is a doctor } believes that if I were to be taken to a psychologist then I would surely pass the tests to be labelled psychologically ill and an introvert.

Its only when I fell in love that I realized how much in great conflict was the concept of love with my natural introverted-ness. To add to this I already had the "problem" of tremendous conflict between my "individual" and the "world outside" and the strong demarcation that I have developed since my childhood about what is "Academic" and what is "Non-Academic".

It goes without saying that the relationship failed and it crashed brutally.

I am not sure what would happen if I ever I fall in love with a lady like me but then since till now my attempts to build relationships have always been with people who are not very much like me , all have failed. I have somehow been trying to convince myself that building relationships is somehow a very special talent that I haven't been born with.....some how I have to find ways at every step of my life to somehow circumvent the pressing problem of loneliness and isolation. Its a tremendous psychological stress at times and it takes a lot of effort to be able to recover out of these bouts of depression caused by loneliness.

Of course these are psychological states and problems that neither can be shared nor can be told to anyone nor will anyone understand if I tell this to someone.I have given up hopes to meet a person who will be able to penetrate into my life and provide a permanent resolution of the abject loneliness.

Given that somehow I seem to repel everyone with whom I try to have the slightest amount of non-academic interactions , I am sure that the probability of finding such a person is infinitesimal.


In retrospect I see a total blur..I really don't know why or when this problem of introverted-ness and the severe conflict with individualism started and exactly when and why I started doing a strong demarcation between the academic and the non-academic.....I really don't understand as to what led to the what...Was it my gradual interest into research and science that pulled me out of the world and isolated me and begot me this terrible loneliness or is it the other way round ? Has my continuous search for academic success led me to be subjected to total isolation ? Perhaps it has to do with my low intelligence level . Given the meagre levels my intelligence , perhaps the only way one can optimize the path to professional success is by getting into a state of total isolation.

Perhaps now that all possible damage has been done its best that I no more try to understand the roots of the current situation.

And its a long time I have stopped relying on my blood relations and family for any kind of psychological support or support during emotional stresses.I don't feel that they either understand the depth of the situation nor do they seem to understand that as one grows up it becomes very tough to keep academic work segregated from emotional disbalances and loneliness in personal life.

The current situation is very simple...As the academic and professional pressures are mounting up exponentially , the bouts of depression induced from abject loneliness is become more and more frequent and more and more painful. Quite a few times over the last week I have felt like going to over to someone and vent out all my troubles and cry aloud. The tremendous need to find a shoulder on which I can rest my head for sometime and perhaps find a new inspiration or encouragement to get on with the huge amount of work at hand. But of course it takes only a split second before that the simple and cruel realization dawns on me ::



There is no such "someone" and I am totally alone.



The only source of energy and encouragement and inspiration is me and myself. I have to find all the energy I need from within my ownself unlike other people who have company to hang around with and relax or may be a stable romantic relationship to fall back upon when things get dark. I have only one world to rely on for everything....the inner world where I am the Creator , the Destroyer and the Preserver...where I am the Ghost , the Father and the Son.

In these times of total isolation when the realization dawn that the world has totally deserted me and in times of non-technical trouble I start feeling the total absence of a shoulder and someone.....in such times perhaps I understand the meaning of the Sanskrit phrase

"Ahan Brahmasmi" { I am Bramha }

History tells that the sage who first proclaimed this was stoned to death for blasphemy.Hundreds of years later , I a mere mortal being when subjected to hopeless frustration and utter loneliness and total isolation , feel the truth of what that sage said.

Motives

Understanding the motive for any action is always very difficult. Physics and Mathematics perhaps try to completely avoid such questions since here we are mostly happy at the stage of answering the "How?" and everytime we go near to answering "Why?" we console ourselfves by trying to give a general structure which will give the current question as a special case and hence we have morphed the question of "Why?" into searching for a larger structure.

But then unfortunately life is not simple. Here to survive we have to understand 2 different kinds of motives and there is no way we can avoid either of the questions for long ::

Q1. What is my motive for doing what I am doing ?
Q2. What is the other person's motive in doing what he/she is doing ?

Somehow I am a little fortunate since I can understand my motives for doing things very clearly. May be at times the motives are things which the rest of the worl will not agree to being a "good" motive. But then mostly my motives can be classified into the following types ::

a) Search for beauty either in the mortal sense or in the sense of an aesthetic theory.
b) Search for professional succcess and recognition.
c) Search for love or a deep relationship with someone.

Ofcourse its a different question as to how able I am in succeeding in these motives. I feel that inspite of my most sincere and hardest efforts even at the cost of my professional motives I have some fundamental inability or some kind of a blockade in succeding in my last motive. May be the answer lies in my genetic sequence or in my fate.

Similarly though I am more able in pursuing the first 2 motives but still my achievemnts have been far far below the critical value which would give me satisfaction. But then somehow most people believe that I am never going to attain that critical value. If they are true then ofcourse I have been written off by my life and I have been dumped by my fate.

I am consciously trying to avoid this terribly demotivating influence of these people.


Anyway at any rate what is most complex is the fact that I also need to understand the motives of other people's actions and the following issues confront me here ::

a) Most people are a bit too undecided about things and they themselves arent sure of their own motives and hence interacting with them gets really tough.

b) If the other person's motives are simply to harm me then the motive is easiest to detect.

c) If the other person is sincerely trying to help me then what becomes crucial to understand is the mental frame in which this other person is trying to help me which can be of the following types ::
1. That person feels that I am inferior to him/her and hence is lending me a favour.
2. That person is in some sort of a compulsion to help me.
3. That person is seekig some favour from me and hence is helping me.
4. That person is helping me as an equal with a collaborative attitude.

Unfortunately as we as human beings are evolving and becoming more sophisticated we have acquired greater and greater skills in hiding or disguising our motives. Especially people are becoming more and more capable in disguising the difference between the motives of the kind 1. , 2. and 3.

I feel that a critical analysis of human evolution and development will tell us that the stage of evolution human species are essentially characterized by one and only one factor ::
"our ability to disguise our emotions and motives"

People are scared to accept their faults and weaknesses and shirk from the possibility of being pointed out about them. Mostly people are scared to face the fact they need help and even more scared to face the fact that they might be under some compulsion. People seem to want to believe that they are living in a free world and that they are all doing what they want to do and enjoy. They seem to take the fact that they have lots of bindings and restrictions on them as an insult.

But as a result of all this one thing is surely becoming complex and that is interactions. One nevre knows whether one is seeing the real person or a guise. I feel scared to interprete and I am never sure whether the other person means what he/she is saying and whether I should belive or not. I feel that this world and the experiences of living in it have deeply impregnated in me a dictum of doubt :: "Doubt everything that you see around you"

It takes so much effort nowadays to even believe that the other person is happy when I see the other person smiling at me. Today there are so many different malicious reasons for a person to smile!

A world where even a smile cant be belived and I must exist in it.

A stand-alone machine

At times it becomes essential that one learns to live like a solitary machine which takes as input all the knowledge that has been produced by the human race and processes them and gives as output a new contribution to that reservoir.

A machine which works day and night and which works disjoint from everything else as if it is the only thing that exists in the universe and the only other thing that exists is that reservoir of concepts.

A machine which needs nothing more than the basic fuel to sustain itself and which understands nothing else but the purpose for which it exist..to produce more concepts. A single , solitary aim of the machine. A complete dedication to the purpose of its creation , a level of dedication which no human being can ever hope to attain since human beings need emotions to survive along with the fuel.Its capabilities are limited by only the program written onto its chip and nothing else.

A machine which by definition doesnt feel or respond to any undulation in this universe except fluctuations in the concept reservoir to which it is connected.

The machine is in a state of solitude and disconnection that it is close to that state of dedication where it becomes oblivious of even its own existence and is aware of only the reservoir and the purpose.

The machine doesn't respond to anything expect fluctuations in the concept reservoir.

This machine is the goal of existence. This machine-state is the purpose of life.

But I am yet to give an output.


The reservoir...The machine...The purpose.

60th year of Independence in a land of more than 1000 female foeticides a day.

We are of course in a self congratulatory mood on the the 60th year of Independence of India.

Yes India the land which has revealed to the world most fundamental principles of nature like Bose statistics of integral spin particles and black holes. Yes India where more than 1300 female foetuses are killed a day. A land where 6000 women are killed each year over dowry issue. A land where 5000-7000 girls in the age group of 10-40 are subjected into the world of prostitution.

10 million female foetues being killed in India over the last 2 decades far exceeds the total number of people killed in both the world wars. A figure which has far surpassed the estimates of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen about the "missing women" of India.

Foetuses being dumped in polythene bags in the vats or new Born girl babies being wrapped in wet cloth so that they catch pneumonia and then after a lot of hue and cry they can be declared dead by causing a delay. Girl newborns being killed by selective ultrasonography.Or simply the poorest of the poor sections of the society starving the new born girl bay to death.

Many times the hand that kills the baby is the mother's.But as an expert in this field had commented "The hand is hers and not the will"

This is India which revels in its achievements of having a half daughter of hers to be selected to be sent to the space on a foreign vehicle. Of course we have enough achievements to be proud of but then everything is perhaps too ephemeral to cause a difference at the grass roots and the deep seated ideas of sexual discrimination. Our most realistic achievements have been in the process of increasing the efficiency and number of wealth generating machines also known as industrialization.But all this has perhaps resulted in greater disproportion in wealth concentration. One can always say that the the bottom of the economic scale has shifted up by quite a lot compared to where we were 60 years ago but then unfortunately this scale has an amazing elasticity constant. The upper ends have moved up by exponential amounts than what the lower ends have moved up.

But then a little bit of thought perhaps shows that India is not suffering from any large scale economic crisis and it perhaps never will. The issue that confronts India is the issue of discrimination. Discrimination on all sorts of grounds starting from race , caste , creed , religion etc. But most importantly on the basis of sex.

A good question to ask on this 60th year of independence is "What is the fraction of people of India who are contributing to the nation's progress?"

I had earlier written a few articles on the issue of the plight of typical housewives. In the same strain let me ask the following question "Is the housewife's ability to contribute to the nation's progress being fully used by letting her do the household chores?"

A nation progresses can be effected only when everyone's potential is utilized maximally. By subjugating a huge section of the society to an almost non-contributing state , a nation is bound to doom. If a huge section of the population is to believe that its only the men who are capable of being the earning member of the family then one must ask a simple question "Why did nature choose to create the two sexes and not just one?"

I am sure that the reason goes just beyond the need to procreate for the continuation of the species other than the fact that nature chooses to shift from asexual to sexual reproduction as the species becomes more complex and developed. The reasons for this must lie somewhere deep down.

But one thing is surely convincing , that nature did not create the opposite sex just as tools of procreation! Even after 59 celebration of Independence a huge section of the Indian population doesn't realize that both the sexes have equal and complementary roles to play in the progress.

Now we must also realize the other end of the problem. How deep and complex is the trouble into which the parents of a girl child are dumped into if the family happens to be down the socio-economic scale ? Hasn't the problem got recursive ? We need a huge work force of women to stand up hands in hands with their male counterparts and the large sections of them who are born down the economic scale must die because they are a burden to their families ?

What is the way out of this vicious circle ?

Can the persons who will save the nation out of this vicious circle be those rare and appreciable cases of women in the upper strata that we see to be walking into the professional as well as the fundamental science departments of the best institutes in India ? Or are those rare ladies from the so called "backward classes" of the society the light of hope out of this trouble ?

Or does it need a tremendous coordination of efforts from both ends of the social spectrum ?

The situations is really terrifying as to what lies in the future of a father of a girl child is born in a family lower down the economic scale. If we start assuming that he has no chauvinistic views even then he wont have the nerve to break across the social customs and rules and his so called "obligations". He wont be able to resist the society around him which will convince him that the girl child is a sinking stone around the neck of the family and that she is nothing but a financial burden. He wont be able to resist the social pressure which will convince him that the girl will never be able to be a self-earning person and he will be forced to believe that the girl needs to be married off so as to "unload" himself of this economic burden.

All the above things are sure to sound mundane to anyone who has done even the slightest reading in this issue or has cared to make first-hand observations about such families. Its true that the nation is tired of listening to these problems and finds such things as soporific as the issue of public-private partnership issues in entrepreneurship.

But then one cant ignore that even after 60 years of independence our problems haven't changed! It has either changed forms or has just been uniformly scaled up. Most of our developments have perhaps resulted in the concentration of wealth to get more disproportionate or has lead to administration and effective powers to be getting more and more shifted to the already affluent class of the society.

But then the question that I find most fearsome is that in pre-independence era we could have slighted off all such issues by saying that its the British's fault or that the person at the receiving end is afraid of the oppressive foreign power , but then now whom are we to blame ?


In today's scenario one must ask as to "Who" form that section of the society of whom that poor parents of a girl child are afraid of , that he cant give voice to their innermost wishes to see their daughter prosper as a progressive individual ? Who form the section of the society of whom the parents are afraid ? What are the factors that the parents choose to give more importance than the most natural instincts of a parent to see their child prosper ?

Are they afraid of that section of the society which still blindly believes scriptures written by Manu which supposedly contain statements like 'Let a girl-child be born somewhere else and let a boy be born here"

Are they the section of the society who have risen to become local creators of destiny by virtue of their birth in a "higher class" ? Is it the fear to be ostracized by the society and to be secluded and to lose their means of income due to isolation what forces the family to not let their natural wishes bloom ?

What prevents the parents of the girl-child from standing up and revolting against the forces that pressurize them to do away with the child and to assert their rights ? What prevents them from turning around and slapping the person and killing him/her who ill advises them about the girl child?

If we as a nation are to resolve to provide financial support to each such family then will the possibility of economic rehabilitation instill the basic minimum courage in such families to rise against the social forces that press them towards doing injustice towards their girl child ?

The other more subtle factor is that of education. The government officials and the policies seem to have been believing that education will eradicate all social troubles. I really find it tough to accept this logic. Its the finest of educated minds that have created the most sophisticated of techniques to do the evilest of medical crimes. I have seen a relative of mine , who was a teacher to have been crying incessantly when her son's wife gave birth to a girl child. I am not at all convinced that education will make a difference.

I believe the problem shows up in different colours at the two ends of the economic spectrum. At the lower end the issue is economic and at the upper end it is stinking chauvinism. We still seem to carry somewhere deep within our subconscious the millennium old idea of society and of what it must be. Its time we searched within ourselves and cleared the last vestiges of such ideas that may be lurking within.

But within our peer group I think we again need a different perspective. When are we going to stop thinking like in typical romantic literature where the guy feels elated being defeated by her in a duel !!? Its time we looked upon them not as "needy" sections of the society but as a section of the society who if given the right platform to duel will perform to their best and a section of the society who have been given unnecessary amounts of concessions.

I think its more of an insult rather than a help when a person's motives are facilitated by lowering the bar for them. Train them to jump higher rather than pushing the bar selectively lower.


Its time we made attempts to understand the meaning of love and marriage to see the real meaning of such interactions. Aren't these emotions , that nature has gifted us with to feel the need to coordinate between the sexes to recognize the mutual complementarity of abilities. Isn't the essential purpose to enhance the feeling of comradeship between the two sexes ?

We need to look at such interactions as means of rejuvenating the society through the feeling of camaraderie instead of a way of one supporting the other. Perhaps nothing surges a nation forward at a faster speed than the intricate healthy bonds between the 2 sexes starting from a the simplest of emotions of passionate love between couples. Nothing pushes a nation backward at a faster rate than its society getting preferential between the sexes.


Let us dedicate this 60th year of independence to the cause of stopping the silent mass holocaust of girl child in India and to ensure that the future Independence Day's are celebrated by an India where the women and men from every section of the society ,stand hand in hand for the national cause.

Appendix

A reference for the people who arent convinced of the facts ::

1. http://www.unicef.org/sowc07/report/report.php

2. http://www.unicef.org/sowc07/docs/sowc07.pdf

Though many of the figures I have quoted refer to the data of year 2000. 2007 report ofcourse shows some positive trends in certain areas but all that is too insignificant when we have 1300 female foeticides a day.

Darkness and the fire.

I fondly member those romanticisms when I was in class 3 or 4 when I used to deliberately get up at times before the crack of dawn to paint the rising sun and to take a walk in the small colony of Sector-2 of Rourkela ( Orissa ) . The small city of intense intellectual activity which formed the roots of my hopes , imaginations and thinkings and aspirations in life. The roads of the city where I first fell in love. It used to be densely foggy during the winter and nothing beyond a few meters would be visible and my height made things more romantic since I couldnt see more than a few meters infront of me.

There was a certain sense of thrill in the act of walking through the fog not knowing what lay ahead and the unpredictability made things more interesting. I used to revel at the joy of being able to walk through the fog confidently despite the handicap of sight.

Many of my friends in that age used to play the popular game of hide and seek or the game in which a guy or a girl would have his/her eyes blindfolded and he/she would have to touch some pre-assigned person.

I never found those games interesting but I did find something similar interesting . At evening when at times both my parents would come home late , I used to shut off all the lights in the flat and would try to go about doing my usual work in total darkness. It gave me immense joy when I slowly realized that unlike many of my other friends etc I was pretty much proficient in my activities in the dark as under normal lighting conditions. I used to do this when I used to visit my late grandfater's house in West Bengal. Ofcourse such activities got more risky as well as thrilling since my late grandfather's house is 2 storeyed.

In those young ages it seemed to be a real challenge to me be able to go about navigating through that pretty large house up and down the stairs without any need of light. I had developed a pretty nice sense of direction and sense of objects in the darkness. But there were times when I failed and on one such occassion I cut my chin when I missed a step and there were near misses of fatal accidents. But then the joy was overwhelming enough to make me try again.

Ofcourse as I grew up I could do these navigational activities in the dark at a much faster speed. I can now a days run up and down the stairs in a house at pretty much the normal speed even in total darkness.

Expectedly , my mother always gets scared to see me do these things , more because I at times do them deliberately by shutting off the lights of the rooms. It gives me great pleasure to be able to navigate in a place without the aid of light.

Given 21 years of experience my mother has gotten used to my eccentricities and she has probably gotten used to being always afraid that my desperate behaviours can invite any kind of trouble in my life.

Other than these navigational games in the darkness another thing that really attacted me was fire. I had great joy in observing various things burn in fire. How the wax softens , melts and then becomes glassy and then smokes. How a leaf gives off a hissing sound at times before burning and how various types of plastics crumple and twist in myriad ways before burning.

But what really fascinated me was to time for how long I could hold my index finger in the tip of the candle flame. Initially it was very low , but as I grew up the time increased by quite a lot. As I grew up this activity of mine became symbolic of various different things at various different stages of my life. During the high school , I used to test my patience and endurance ability and my determination by timing for how long I could hold my finger in the flame. When in deep sorrow I used to do it to feel convinced that I still have the strength to rise and fight back.

It goes without saying that my mother feels scared and frightened to see me do this. I still do it whenever a candle is lit at home , be it for the pujas that my mother or grandmother does.

But then this game of mine with the candle flame initially started off with very different emotions and feelings. I have heard from my friends of both the sexes , especially from some of my female friends , that there is a threshold age after which they have felt the emotion of being "passionately in love". But somehow I think I have felt this emotion of passionate love at a far far younger age than everyone else. I had felt within me the sense of passionate romance and love for a lady of my age ever since I have definitive memories. I was responsive to the emotions of love , romance and passion even when I was very young. Since then I had imagined myself to be deeply , passionately and devotedly in love with a lady. It was then that I started feeling attracted to the candle flame. To test my love.

When I was in classes 2 to 4 , the ability to hold my finger in the candle flame seemed to symbolize to me my ability of how much pain and sufferring I can endure for the sake of my love. I used to feel a deep sense of joy , that my love could be strong enough to hold me through any perils and that I could have the tenacity to fight any pain for the sake of my lady.

I really dont know from when and exactly what or is it the totality of my life over the last 5-6 years that my faith and belief in all these emotions has been waning. Its decaying fast and perhaps very soon the person that I was during the age of 10 would start looking like someone else.

Now the unpredictability of the darkness scares me. I no more feel convident that I can navigate through it and I am scared to fall again. I feel frightened to be burnt by the fire whereas in younger days fire was a plaything for me. But still darkness looks a little more mangeable thing than fire.

I have lost some of my own essential things in life. I know not when . I know not how. I knwo not to whom. Is it the continual crash over the last 6 years , of all my beliefs which I tied to my ability of holding the finger in the candle flame ?