Page 87 - SocialHarmony
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11
What a Brother Desires from His Sister
(Sadhana, August 4, 1990)
Rakshabandhan…..Stalls with rows of rakhis symbolizing love
for a brother are seen everywhere. Soon the stalls will be
empty and the rakhis will adorn the wrists of brothers.
Every sister will become complete today, but how many
men will be complete brothers today?
A woman’s tensions and feelings of insecurity are
temporarily alleviated on Rakshabandhan, but how long will this
consolation last?
How strange is destiny – the same newspapers that carry
pages of brotherly love on Rakshabandhan are also full of gory
stories of death and destruction in the face of intolerance and
lack of brotherhood.
Not a single day goes by when there are no news of
unnatural deaths of women.
It is universally accepted that the worth of a nation’s value
system is seen in the level of respect accorded to its womenfolk.
If this is true, how would we be known to the world considering
the way we treat our women? We, who used to say, “Nari tu
Narayani” (Woman, you are God), who used to visualize God
himself as Ardh Narishwar and who used to proclaim that God
lives where women are respected, where are we today?
Where unborn foetuses are brutally destroyed and where
society takes pride in abortions are not the hideous stories of
an imaginary world – they are the realities faced by so-called
independent women in the modern twentieth century.
