Let us look at the state of woman in India. India is predominantly a patriarchal society where Indian woman plays merely a second fiddle to her husband, burying her dreams and ambitions irrevocably and surrendering herself to the tyranny of hackneyed and monotonous household work. She is endowed with the multitudinous responsibilities of household work including child rearing, by the obstinate and incorrigible prejudices and the dogmas of her family which is just an accomplice of the actual miscreant, the society. She cannot offload some of her duties to her egoistic husband who would feel the work below his well-preserved dignity. She is obsequious and servile to the whims and demands of her husband, who in most cases, is raised to the level of apotheosis. She is pusillanimous and timid to the impotent rage, fury and at times sexual abuse committed by him. Let us look at the statistics, according to Renuka Chaudhary, Minister of women and children, 70% of women in India are victims of domestic violence. She is confined to the unyielding four walls of her house-prison. As she is the carrier of prestige and honour of her philistine family, she is not allowed to work outdoors as she may fall prey to the lecherous and ogling eyes of testosterone-high stranger men. In many cases, she is considered to be a factory manufacturing babies without any relief of bottlenecks. She is the perennial unpaid servant of the family subjected to chagrin, torment and abuse of her masters who may also have bought her by making the payment in dowry. And when slaves clamour for justice, they are considered a mutiny and they are oppressed and suppressed by these undulating societal forces. So to think, that women in India may shop out their men for their concealed felonies by filing cases in our courts which are under constant hibernation, when they are still under the thraldom of men is to think too far-fetched.
Let us look at the West. Men and women enjoy equal rights. There is 99% literacy. It means there is awareness and they have the educational weapons to earn their own living and are not compelled to implore for money from their husbands to fulfill their needs . With education and monetary cushion comes a level of self-respect and when that self-respect is constantly damaged and thwarted, women may act in defiance against their husbands by filing a suit or vice-versa. With education, money; freedom inevitably follows. And many men and women may misuse this well-attained freedom by committing adultery, infidelity, betrayal, philandering, etc. in India too, men ( in some cases women too) are familiar with all those vices, but then the voices of women are muted and crushed under the dilapidated building of prestige and honour. Also they are surrounded with the perennial fear of being penniless, impoverished and being ostracized by the society exacerbated by the fact that they are congenitally destined to be stripped off any educational weapons which may aid them to earn their living independently.
So she endures and submits to the autocracy of these unjust facts till her hair turns grey and when finally she earns the relief of death. What if the women commits adultery, she is insolently kicked like a ball out of the stadium by his husband footballer.
Also, with development, comes the satanic greed which leads to insatiable desires. This ultimately leads to elevating work, career to the pinnacle of priorities, leaving family and a life of giving into oblivion. This is the reason why the imbalance of personal and professional life leads to divorces in the West. At times this imbalance leads to stress and an elusiveness of one's purpose and meaning cloaked by frustration that is released like a lava from a volcano onto the entire family.
Hence, all is not good in West, but still there is independence, an air of individuality. All though the condition of women is changing particularly in the metro cities of India. This revolution has still not creep into the crevices of those tiny villages where India truly resides. And whether the mind of the man has changed is still debatable.
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