By Saima Jamal
It was a showery and obvious damp morning; I got out to fetch some groceries. The mild shower quite musically accompanied my average footsteps and I enjoyed it well. While heading towards the grocery store, my eyes caught of a slender and smart girl who was walking in the opposite direction but to my knowledge, quite lifelessly, as if she had no direction to follow.
While getting back to home after fetching my groceries, I spotted her again; just walking lifelessly amidst the mild showers but drenched completely. I approached her in a very transparent way. A gracefully thin face with thicker eyeballs where it was Augean to differentiate in-between the tear drops rolling down and the gushing raindrops.
“Assalamualaikum Sister, are you alright?”
She stood still and kept gazing at me only. The more kind I grew, the more she started to open-up, equivalent to the candid lotus eruption from the deep muds.
She then posed a very deep question “We girls are born but why on earth there is an imbalanced treatment?”
After a proper enquiry, she belonged to a middle-class household where household stuff was more prioritized than ambition, comparatively. The way she dealt with my question, statements and references, all that screamed loudly that she would have for sure added a more colorful feather to the valley’s cap, provided that balanced treatment and privilege.
Rather than getting judgmental in a jiffy, I took her question as a project and started from myself being a daughter. Here, I’m with a series of positive and negative outcomes as well. Although, Times have changed grossly and so are the Kashmiri parents with the changing scenario. Daughters are no more regarded a liability as of the darker times.
They are thoroughly allowed to get educated, to get into arts, sports, science, and medicine and so on. But my in-depth analysis acted like a household hammer on a hard walnut, whereby frequent hits broke the shell and I peeped into the kernel. The shell is like most of the Kashmiri parents educate their daughters but up to the extent they can keep a watch of, they mostly do not let them what one calls “Explore”.
I hereby stand with a question for all my readers, “If a daughter is purely ambitious and she wants to get inspired via exploration/ travelling, what do you think would be the percentage of parent couples who can smoothly understand and allow?”
If a son wants to explore, all he has to do is a proper package and daughters are allowed to be ambitious but up to a certain limit, only. Let father/brother any of the blessed ones accompany let the daughter’s ambition get aired.
Let parental care be honored and let daughters be placed safely but not utterly stopped and killed inwardly. In a scenario, where sons are allowed and only daughters are to go through a series of questions, distrust and permissions even for petty occasions, all this gives birth to the feeling of “Inadequacy and Insignificance “where a daughter consciously concludes that something is wrong being a girl.
And perhaps the very household statement to almost every girl “wae’riw chuy gaczun”…”you have to head to your in-laws’ home “makes her hypersensitive to criticism before she is even married. This way a natural difference occurs not only on gender basis but also on aptitude and intellect basis where conservative mindsets air the average sons and suppress the more aptitude exhibiting daughters. It gradually becomes a cause for a higher anxiety risk. A stoppage of a girl child from participating in certain activities just because of her gender automatically sends a message to her soul that “She’s fragile”.
Eventually, such parenting style turns out to be “indifferent parenting “where the parents are “neither demanding nor responsive”. This indifferent attitude leads to serious mental health repercussions, where options like counseling and psychotherapy have to work at the end. There certainly is a change in the shell, let us work now for a pest-free kernel, too.
Comments are closed.