A Virtual Serendipity

Being born and brought up in a region where gross discrimination with the fairer gender has been the norm since decades, it is almost impossible for a thinking human to be a mute spectator. For us Indian females, our story begins right from the wombs of our mothers. Where many of the female fetuses are conveniently aborted, there are others who are granted the right to live. All through my growing years I have realized that there has been a paradigm shift in type of violence and discrimination that confront us. Now we have sound access to education and thus are empowered to take better decision for ourselves.

With rise in the population of educated and working women, the level of domestic violence has risen alarmingly. Since the perpetrator of such crimes is the husband in whom a woman places all her trust, the quantum of psychological trauma that she endures is huge. Some males do it in the name of religion, some to assert their masculinity and some at the behest of their mothers, sisters and kin. Whatever be the motives behind such heinous acts, they cannot be condoned. My sibling has been suffering silently from domestic violence in her marriage of five years. With the support from the rest of the family, she mustered courage to rein in the violent tendencies of her spouse through legal intervention. In my married life, I felt that I could not stand the violently abusive nature of my mother-in-law anymore, especially after I became pregnant. I knew that somewhere I had to draw a line. Mine has been a case of a mother-in-law torturing a pregnant daughter-in-law earlier for dowry and now for every trivial issue that might crop up in day-to-day life. Since I had worked hard in my academics from the start and had been conscious of my rights as a woman, it never occurred to me that I would ever encounter domestic violence in my own life. My mother-in-law has been trying her best to make my upcoming motherhood a challenging one by turning her son into a pawn in the game of family power dynamics.

It was in such moment of torment that I came across World Pulse community and discovered the Voices of Future program. I call this serendipity. My inner-being was seeking an outlet to let out what it has gone through in the last three months. Injustice anywhere is threat to justice everywhere. This is what has pushed me to explore the locus of this vicious circle of subjugation and exploitation that has pervaded every strata of the society. The painful part is that many of the female counterparts of my country are made to accept this as part of their destiny. All these agonies and trauma that I have gone through have firmed up my resolve to find viable solutions for eliminating the menace of domestic violence by tapping into the universal synergy of this wonderful forum.