The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday 3 December 2013

RIGHTS ISSUES AND WOMEN EMPOWERMENT IN INDIA - CHILD BRIDES

Underage Marriages

Underage marriages are prevalent in many states of India. In some parts where it was thought to be effectively put down, the social blot is witnessing resurgence.

India is known as the child marriage capital of the world. On mining statistical analyses and news reports for information and data, we come across harrowing details.

An October report said India refused to sign the UN Human Rights Council led resolution on child marriages. Countries like Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Chad, Guatemala, Honduras and Yemen were among the 107 countries supporting the resolution. The report quoted these supporting countries as having high rates of child marriage.


The child marriages involve both the boys and the girls but no deep sociological understanding is required to arrive at the conclusion that not boys but girls are at the receiving end of such ill-intended practices of a brutal, archaic, patriarchal society that treats its women (and thus girls) as secondary, inferior counterparts.

UNICEF statistics say 18 per cent of the Indian girls are married by the age of 15 and the share gets disturbingly higher with 47 per cent of the girls getting married by the age of 18. The October 2013 report published in the Times of India puts the number of child brides in India at 24 million out of the global count of 60 million.

That is 40 per cent of the lot – India is statistically and thus justifiably the child bride capital of the world!  

Marrying girls when they are not even able to understand themselves and then expecting from them to understand the needs of an entire family and act accordingly – it is inhuman, it is barbaric – but it is what is exactly happening.

There is a law to prevent child marriages, like there is one to stop dowry cases. Both are glaring example of nationalised social apathies. Both have been meek in checking the menace because the implementers are from among us only, the progenies of the brutal, archaic, patriarchal society, who refuse to budge. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/