Monday, January 25, 2010

Umm, shouldn't the government be apologizing to Indian women?


People are upset over the government's ineptitude in featuring a Pakistan Air Force officer among Indian heroes in an ad. So, the government has apologized for bad implementation.

Aishwarya highlights the real scandal in the ad's concept and subtext -- for which it should apologize to every Indian woman:

Notice that all the important people in this particular advertisement are men.I realise that the government have issued lots of public-service ads in the past highlighting the idea that women are actually worthwhile, contributing members of society and that we might want to keep them around... but this? The girl child is important because she may some day give birth to boy children who are what really matters. Never forget that that is what we're here for. [Bold emphasis added]

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Update: Here's Dreamer at Gawd's Own Country [via BlogBharti]:

The message seems to be that we should keep our baby girls alive so that they can grow up and, no, not achieve something on their own, but can give birth to sons who would make the country proud! So lets keep the girls around as a bunch of living incubators. That real tragedy of female foeticide apparently is that if there were no women where are all our strapping sons going to come from? Now if that isn't an endorsement of the age old "putravati bhava", I don't know what it is. That, people, ... is the real goof up. [Bold emphasis in the original.]

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