HONOUR KILLING-when culture kills

HONOUR KILLING-when culture kills
I normally eschew my writing temptations till something perturbs me deep inside. The news that is consistently striking the newspaper headlines from last few months are the news of honour killings. The generality of the victims were the young girls and women. Some of the brutal killings left me with goose pimples and I asked myself “Are we really living in 21st century?” Apart from the modern India where we are ushering into gender partnership there runs a parallel India on the other side where gender equality is still a distant dream and people kill their kin for the sake of (false) social cohesion. The most appalling part is the impudent and unrepentant behavior of the imbecile culprits. I was left aghast to read that majority of the culprits were the youths wearing jeans and t-shirt and not with the traditional “dhoti-kurta” attire. Brother killing his sister, Mother killing her daughter and Grandparents killing their grandchildren, damning the shared childhood memories to become the upholders of tradition. Families want girls to study to land good husbands, but clamp down hard on love marriages, which are rising anyway. These incidents are an anathema on our society and obfuscating our path of development. These incidents prove that some part of our so called society is still not ready to give equal status to girls and when they choose their own partner in defiance of norms, the overriding sentiments try to stop her at all cost. What can make you more lugubrious is the fact that the educated class is also a part of this unjustifiable heinous crime apart from the uneducated bucolic people which shows their double octane backwardness. They don’t understand the slight difference between living the life with a rich and a rich life.
One interesting question that comes to my mind is that what these people think of the “swayamvars” mentioned in the Hindu mythology which according to me was a system for choosing the groom by a girl on her own norms.
In the end, there is no honour, only shame in killing.