Women never cease to amaze me

[Panag]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia


What so my birthday pics weren't enough? (From last year... they're on here somewhere but I forget which thread and can't be bothered searching.)

Hi ,

you still have pics on your comp , ...


open a new pics thread about you , ....

Have a great new week

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Meanwhile, in the world of men:

Indian village proud after double "honor killing"

By Simon Denyer

BALLA, India (Reuters) - Five armed men burst into the small room and courtyard at dawn, just as 21-year-old, 22-week pregnant, Sunita was drying her face on a towel.

They punched and kicked her stomach as she called out for her sleeping boyfriend "Jassa," 22-year-old Jasbir Singh, witnesses said. When he woke, both were dragged into waiting cars, driven away and strangled.

Their bodies, half-stripped, were laid out on the dirt outside Sunita's father's house for all to see, a sign that the family's "honor" had been restored by her cold-blooded murder.

A week later, the village of Balla, just a couple of hours drive from India's capital New Delhi, stands united behind the act, proud, defiant almost to a man.

Among the Jat caste of the conservative northern state of Haryana, it is taboo for a man and woman of the same village to marry. Although the couple were not related, they were seen in this deeply traditional society as brother and sister.

"From society's point of view, this is a very good thing," said 62-year-old farmer Balwan Arya, sitting smoking a hookah in the shade of a tree in a square with other elders from the village council or panchayat. "We have removed the blot."

Growing economic opportunities for young people and lower castes in Haryana have made "love marriages" more common, experts say, and the violent repression of them has risen in tandem as upper caste Jat men fight to hold on to power, status and property.

Sunita's father Om Prakash has confessed to murdering his pregnant daughter and her boyfriend, police told Reuters. An uncle and two cousins were among four others arrested.

But in Balla many people believe the father confessed merely to underline that he supported his daughter's killing, to satisfy honor and protect the real culprits among his family or village.

At their house, Sunita's mother did not emerge to talk. Instead, a young man on a motorbike tried to intimidate the Reuters team into leaving. It turned out he was another of Sunita's cousins, his father and brother held by police.

"We are not ashamed of it, absolutely not, we have the honor of doing the village proud," he said.

"We would not have had a face to show if we had not done this. It was the act of 'real men'."

THE POWER OF UPPER CASTE MEN

The relatively prosperous northern state of Haryana is one of India's most conservative when it comes to caste, marriage and the role of women. Deeply patriarchal, caste purity is paramount and marriages are arranged to sustain the status quo.

Men and women are still murdered across the villages of northern India for daring to marry outside their caste, but in Haryana the practice is widespread, and widely supported.

Here, women veil their faces with scarves in public. The illegal abortion of female fetuses is common, the ratio of women to men in Haryana just 861 to 1,000, the lowest in the country.

Anyone who transgresses social codes, by marrying across caste boundaries or within the same village, is liable to meet the same fate as Sunita and Jasbir.

Many such murders are never reported, hardly any result in prosecution, says Professor Javeed Alam, chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research.

"People from the same village are treated as siblings in Haryana," he said. "So this is treated as incest."

Without any law to prohibit this kind of marriage, "the only way you can punish it is by taking the law into your own hands. People believe people who commit incest should be killed."

Nor do politicians ever renounce the practice, Alam added, because if they did, "they would not win elections."

And the legalization of property rights for women in 1956 made love marriages within a village even more dangerous for this elite, as daughters living close to home could in theory claim a part of the family land, sociologist Prem Chowdhry says.

CHILDHOOD SWEETHEARTS

Sunita and Jasbir, sweethearts in the same class at school, had little chance. When he left school a couple of years before her to become an photographer's apprentice, he would often hang around at the school gates to collect her.

She was married off to another man, but left her husband to elope with Jasbir a year-and-a-half ago, and while the families tried to keep them apart, they realized it was a losing battle.

"They were madly in love even to the last day," said Jasbir's 16-year-old sister-in-law Lalita in the house where they lived in Machhroli village, around 35 km (20 miles) by road from Balla.

To make matters worse, Jasbir was from a lower sub-caste, and she was pregnant outside marriage. Sunita's parents in Balla found themselves virtually ostracized.

"Nobody would drink water in our house," Sunita's mother Roshni is reported to have said. "My daughter's action made us aliens in our own land. But we have managed to redeem our honor. She paid for her ill-gotten action."

But among Jasbir's family, split between Machhroli and Balla, grief is mixed with fear.

"Why are you talking to the media?" shouted a female family member at one point. "This will only bring more trouble."

At the small police post in Balla, a constable admitted the case was unlikely to ever reach prosecution, with the village putting enormous pressure on the police, and especially Jasbir's family, to quietly drop the case.

"We are being pressurized into reaching an agreement, a compromise, without even being given time to grieve," said Jasbir's 25-year-old sister Neelam. "We have been told that if we don't compromise, we will suffer the same fate."

In the narrow alleyway outside their tiny house, women wailed in grief. A few hundred yards away, the panchayat sat in quiet self-satisfaction.

"The people who have done this should get an award for it," said 48-year-old Satvir Singh. "This was a murder of morality."

http://uk.reuters.com/article/featuresNews/idUKDEL29449420080518?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true

Ok, it's wrong to generalize about men from this. I should have said "Indian men."

[aneeshm]

@ Rufus

What you've written does not have a component of the "bizarre" and completely inexplicable, which is what I was pointing out.

You fail it.

[aneeshm]

And who ever told you that the Jats constituted a traditional "elite" caste? Typical media decontextualisation.

They're newcomers to this. The only reason they count among the elite is because of their recently acquired economic clout, and not much else. It's because of insecurity that this stuff happens.

The real elite isn't bothered so much about inter-caste marriage as about maintaining their status. This is easily done by making sure that no "inter-economic" or "inter-status" marriages occur, where a child marries someone of lower economic or social status. Of course, the child is so socialised (being taught to look down upon everyone not of the educated elite as "the hordes", even by the education system itself) that he/she doesn't want to "marry down", anyway, so that's not a problem.

[Tuberski]

Not bizarre? How in hell can India be the second most populated country with this idiocy going on?

ACK!

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Sunita's father Om Prakash has confessed to murdering his pregnant daughter and her boyfriend, police told Reuters. An uncle and two cousins were among four others arrested.

But in Balla many people believe the father confessed merely to underline that he supported his daughter's killing, to satisfy honor and protect the real culprits among his family or village.

At their house, Sunita's mother did not emerge to talk. Instead, a young man on a motorbike tried to intimidate the Reuters team into leaving. It turned out he was another of Sunita's cousins, his father and brother held by police.

"We are not ashamed of it, absolutely not, we have the honor of doing the village proud," he said.

Originally posted by aneeshm
@ Rufus

What you've written does not have a component of the "bizarre" and completely inexplicable, which is what I was pointing out.

Unless you're suggesting that this is perfectly normal behavior in India. In which case: hey, you said it, not me.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly







Unless you're suggesting that this is perfectly normal behavior in India. In which case: hey, you said it, not me.

Something may be absolutely "abnormal" yet perfectly understandable and explicable. This is one of those things.

Considering mankind's evolutionary history and psychological makeup, it comes as no surprise to me that in a small village as backward and insular as that, instincts which we suppress or express differently become direct.

If you consider that throughout most of mankind's natural history (around 1,00,000 years), it is families - and within families, usually their highest-status male members, or patriarchs - which have had the first right of refusal over the reproductive assets of its female members, this behaviour becomes understandable and perfectly explicable. This is how humans are in their natural state. It is, in fact, what we would do, and what would happen to us if societal conditions were different.

Women offering romance to a person like that rapist - not so much.

[LordShiva]

[Kidlicious]

Women (who date authoritarians) never cease to amaze me.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by LordShiva

[BeBMan]

[Straybow]

Originally posted by aneeshm
Women offering romance to a person like that rapist - not so much.

So, women standing by husbands who kill their daughters because a bunch of shallow neighbors don't like who their daughter ran off with is not twisted??

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Straybow

So, women standing by husbands who kill their daughters because a bunch of shallow neighbors don't like who their daughter ran off with is not twisted???

We don't know what the women think in this case. AFAIK, only the men of the village were interviewed.

As for the shallow neighbours thing - it's not as simple as that. Sure, the neighbours were shallow. But in a tiny village, where every single thing in your life depends on what is your standing in the immediate community, being ostracised for your daughter's actions is tough, and is a huge deal. It doesn't justify murder, of course, but it's not what you make it out to be, either.

In fact, the whole thins is pretty tragic. Prejudiced neighbours, stupid daughter, stupid parents.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by aneeshm
Something may be absolutely "abnormal" yet perfectly understandable and explicable. This is one of those things.

No, it isn't.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by aneeshm
We don't know what the women think in this case. AFAIK, only the men of the village were interviewed.

"Nobody would drink water in our house," Sunita's mother Roshni is reported to have said. "My daughter's action made us aliens in our own land. But we have managed to redeem our honor. She paid for her ill-gotten action."