Girls versus Boys

When my cousin R walked in last evening, the first thing my maternal grandmother asked him was, "How's your baby boy?"

A pretty normal greeting, but get this- my cousin doesn't have a kid yet. His wife is just two months pregnant. And he doesn't know the sex of his child.

When I went travelling earlier this month, my grandmother gave me strict instructions- Get only blue clothes for R's unborn kid.

Every time someone in the family is pregnant, my grandmother talks about the unborn child being a boy. Almost like nothing else but a boy will do. And when a girl does come, she just shrugs. Like it is no big deal. And then she tells the new mother, "So what? Your next child will be a boy." Which means that unless you don't have a son, your life is not complete.

I don't know what irritates me more- the belief that talking of a boy and buying blue clothes will ensure a boy is born, or the overt preference for a boy. I think the latter is more hypocritical, because it is the samegrandmother who declares occassionally, "There's no difference between girls and boys."

If my grandmother really believes that there is no difference between girls and boys, why does she keeping talking about a boy?

Just last week, a dozen of us sat at the dining table, and the conversation veered to the "missing" baby girls in both urban and rural areas of North India. We agreed that it was a shame that girls were being killed mercilessly in Punjab and Haryana just because they were girls.

"Very sad," someone said.

We all nodded solmenly.

It was easy for us to say that, the stand we took seemed almost "natural".

But what was the point of discussing female foeticide? My grandmother's statements prove that she is inherently biased towards boys. So, here we are, in a modern, urban environment, criticising people who kill baby girls (born and unborn), and then we do nothing as our Head of Family displays her preference.

How can we expect the rural population to change their outlook, when we, the educated ones, are not able to shed our bias?

I tried to confront my grandmother yesterday on this issue.

"You think asking R about his baby boy and buying blue clothes will ensure that the child is a boy? What if it's a girl?"

"It will be a BOY," she said.

And that was that.