INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY 8TH MARCH, 2010 – STILL THE FUTURE IS SHADOWED..

As the sun of Monday, March 08, 2010 rose to brighten the earth, history was written in Los Angeles at 82nd Academy Awards. Kathyren Bigelow, the lady behind the magic of the Hollywood super hit ‘The Hurt Locker’ which swept six Oscars at the Hollywood awards extravaganza, came onto the stage to receive the ‘Best Director’ award, a new leaf was added to not much long history of women empowerment which the world and especially the 3rd world countries have witnessed in the past few decades. The first ever woman to win the Academy Award for the Best Director portrayed the best possible example as a salute to the rising woman power. She won this award facing the toughest competition from her ex-husband James Cameron and the man behind the blockbuster ‘Titanic’ and this year ‘Avatar’.
India too made the presence felt of this internationally vital event and rather the much needed day for a male dominated society like India as Air India gave the command of all its major flights to the woman pilots proving against all the present odds we still have come a long way.
The question which really quests a mind to find a hardcore answer is that why, why when we talk of women empowerment in our country, our prime focus remains just on the shells lying on the seashore and not the deep hidden millions and millions of shells inside the depth of the sea which may have the brightest pearls inside them?
In the aura of few thousand successful women in India, why those 200 million women are forgotten who still are miles and miles away from the ‘e’ of word education. You might have seen your neighbor’s daughter or a friend as a CEO of MNC but have you ever boggled your mind over more than half woman occupants who work as low-paid agricultural laborers. If this is not enough let me give you another bolt from the blue that in our country 41 per cent of the girls drop out from the schools till they reach the age of 19.
Menaces like crime against women, malnutrition, tapering sex-ratio, and pre and post natal deaths and not to forget female infanticide and feticides are the hard core elements in a so-called fast developing society of ours. A society where still, a normal housewife does not consider it necessary to open a page of a newspaper and have a look at a current issue or two or more than half of them does not even have any access to them.
A country which dreams of becoming a mighty superpower in the coming decade, does it need a hard pinch to open its eyes? Yes it does, because its future is hinging on those 200 million women who still are so far from the mighty world of education. Rising to 63 percent of female literacy from a shameful 8 percent in 1948, what we can conclude is that it is yet so near, but yet so far to call itself not a masculine, not a feminine but a humanitarian country where males and females are not the parameters for leading a just, fruitful and satisfying life.
Although we have covered a long journey but nearly not enough…
HOPING FOR A BETTER WOMEN’S DAY THE NEXT YEAR….when we may have 33 percent of our MPs as women….