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66 pages

English

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Because I Am a Girl is a collection of seven stories of seven girls from different parts of India who fought with their situation and tried to empower themselves. With an Introduction by Govind Nihalani and written by personalities from all walks of life-writers, actors, artists, and TV stars-the stories try to capture their struggles, their dreams, and how they keep hope alive in their lives. Anjum Hasan visits a village in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, where young girls are forced to become sex workers. Pooja Bedi goes to Lucknow and meets a woman who gets an ultrasound done but then decides against killing her unborn baby girl. Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan travels to Hyderabad where she meets a young girl who comes to the city, learns data entry and finds herself a job. Shahana Goswami meets a young school drop-out who has done a beautician's course, and plans to set up her own parlour. Namrita Bachchan tells the story of a young girl who sells vegetables in the male-dominated Delhi's Govindpuri sabzi mandi during the wee hours of the morning and then learns to read and write during the day. Nafisa Ali Sodhi writes about a young girl in Delhi, who works as a rag picker but is a bright young student. Aditi Rao Hydari encounters a woman whose husband died of tuberculosis and who is training to be a nurse now while being an apprentice in a hospital.

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Humanities

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	17 mai 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184002331
Langue	English

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RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2012
Copyright Plan India 2012
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B, A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184002331
Contents
Introduction by Govind Nihalani
Walking the Line
Anjum Hasan
Walk of Life
Shahana Goswami
Any Other Sort of Teenager
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
Born to Die
Pooja Bedi
The Thousand-piece Jigsaw
Aditi Rao Hydari
A Mandi Life
Namrita Bachchan
Dignity
Nafisa Ali Sodhi
Introduction
Perhaps there is no greater sense of triumph than the one achieved by a disadvantaged individual through an intense struggle for her dignity and livelihood against a hostile social and economic background.
The realization dawned on me as I got progressively involved, six years ago, with the work being done by Plan India with disadvantaged children and their communities on various aspects of their lives.
Plan India has programmes that focus on issues related to the girl child. And Because I Am a Girl is one of its major initiatives. In the process of implementing Because I Am a Girl across several states of the country, the Plan India teams came across many inspiring stories of courageous young girls who challenged their circumstances and through sheer determination and unrelenting effort, rose above them. This book presents a selection of seven such stimulating stories.
Each story in this collection is not simply a journalistic report of a sequence of events in a particular girl s life; it is an attempt to gain an insight into their long and sustained struggles to negotiate the difficult conditions in order to be able to achieve a robust sense of self, inner pride, and restore a modicum of dignity.
These are the stories of young girls who make a conscious decision to take the risk and initiate the effort to change the claustrophobic situation of their current lives, to break free of the shackles of tradition and taboos that restrain their natural growth, to push open the doors of their dark rooms, to emerge in the sunlight to claim the freedom and opportunity which is rightfully theirs. The outcome in each case is positive and even uplifting but always tempered with humility, hope, and resilience. One important milestone in almost all the stories though is a stage in the journey when the struggling protagonist comes in contact with an initiative of Plan India and the positive turn her struggle takes therea er. These are the stories of empowerment through right knowledge and guidance provided by Plan India through its various outreach programmes.
Seven young women from different walks of life were invited for a one-on-one meeting with the girls and write about the experience of their interaction in their very own words. In the subtly unfolding Walking the Line , Anjum Hasan, through her protagonist Mina, discovers a community near Bharatpur, Rajasthan, where parents customarily send their young daughters to join the line to support the family. As Mina s husband Mahendar says, I know boys around here who live off their sisters earnings and wear gold chains this thick Cielo, Mercedes, you name it, they have it. Mina is one such daughter who decides to leave the line when she meets Mahendar. But before that she has lived years through the line . Now, free from the compulsion to sell her body, but having to work hard with her husband to earn a living, she is asked Are you finally happy, Mina? Of course, says Mina quickly before her emotions can slip through. Anyone who leaves the line can only be happy.
Shahana Goswami ( Walk of Life ) picks up a conversation with a young girl (not so young as she soon discovers) in a Mumbai local train. Intrigued and fascinated to know more about the person, Shahana accompanies the girl to her small home in a slum where they are the only Hindu family in the neighbourhood. It is a fascinating encounter during which a young girl s tough life opens up like a book and the writer is able to browse through some random pages. It is only when the writer gets up to leave and turns back to her saying, Arrey, I forgot to ask you Sunita, she corrected and laughed out loud. And it is while telling her story that the girl discovers pride in who she is, her sense of self as she declares her name, her pride layered over by her laughter.
Another meeting, another story. Meenakshi Madhavan Reddy ( Any Other Sort of Teenager ) meets a tall, shy girl named Radha in a lunch home in Hyderabad, making us enter the world of migrant workers in a big city. Daughter of landless parents, now earning their livelihood as migrant labourers in Hyderabad, Radha manages to get a proper office job, with a computer and a cell phone to herself. And that s precisely what invites the jibes from jobless boys hanging around at street corners in her neighborhood. Oho, Miss Office, think you re so big! Of whatever she earns, one half is saved for her brother s college tuition fee while the other half is set aside for her dowry. Her mother is obsessed with marrying her off to Ram Mama, her uncle, but Radha s ambition is to become a nurse. Will she ever? One hopes one day she will. In the meanwhile, having negotiated tough times, she has grown confident enough to say no to the marriage. Henceforth she decides to take her own decisions about her life.
Pooja Bedi ( Born to Die ), disturbed and enraged by the news of female infanticide in Devra, a village in Rajasthan with an alarming female population of only 13, all below the age of ten years, contacts Plan India. She is taken to Uttar Pradesh to meet Pushpa, a woman who had been subjected to brutal humiliation by her husband for bearing a third girl child. On this journey with Pooja, we discover a family that defies all our perceptions of a traditional and conservative middle class North Indian patriarchal family. Ramrati, a 61-year-old, uneducated mother-in-law of Pushpa, presides over a family that is surprisingly progressive, liberal and sensitive towards the girls. It is perhaps her understanding and support that has shielded Pushpa against her husband s escalating brutality. But the story does not end there. How can Pushpa be sure that she will not be forced to bear a child again by her son-obsessed husband? Empowered by the support of her mother-in-law and the younger women of the family, a quiet Pushpa is determined not to bear another child in the overreaching quest for a son. If he so desperately wants a boy, we can adopt one and give an orphan a good life.
The name of the protagonist of Aditi Rao s The Thousand-piece Jigsaw is Naazma, which literally means the one who looks after . Naazma is a little angel. Even when little, she is seen content and smiling and looking after some creature or the other, picking up puppies, feeding them, finding homes for kittens, scattering seeds for birds, and rocking wailing babies to sleep. But even angels like Naazma have to face a harsh life. The daughter of a migrant worker from Hyderabad working in a factory in Mumbai, Naazma s too is a tough journey but her strength is her compassion and indefatigable spirit. One day she will surely become the nurse that she dreams of becoming..
In Namrita Bachchan s evocatively narrated A Mandi Life , this is how we first see its protagonist, Puja, who lay squashed between her two sweating sisters under their mother s sagging bed in the improvised shack they called home. She was trying to breathe . Living in such claustrophobic conditions, Puja is determined to learn English and fulfill her dream of becoming a soldier. By the time we read the last line of her brave passage through life in the vegetable market, Mandi, we realize that not only will this little girl learn English but she also has it in her to become a soldier as well.
Gul Afshaan is from Assam. After the raging Brahamputra washes away her home and everything else with it, leaving her family homeless and destitute, Gul Afshaan and her parents relocate to Delhi, thanks to the kindness of her uncle who lives in the city. When Nafisa Ali Sodhi ( Dignity ) meets Gul Afshaan, the 13-year-old girl is living a hard life; she studies in a school and also works as a rag-picker before and after school hours. These days I go to the station only at four o clock in the morning and am back by 6:30 am as I have to go to school. Papa earns two thousand rupees a month. He picks garbage in a push cart going from one colony to another. And I manage to make a hundred rupees on a good day. It s a tough life for such a young girl, but even when given a chance, Gul Afshaan would choose not to return to her village in Assam, I would like to stay here now. I know this place.
The stories of these seven girls are lives in progress. But the one element that is common to the dreams of all these girls is the absence of selfishness. Their foremost concern is to bring comfort and dignity to the lives of their parents, particularly the mother, and their siblings, their own well-being always coming second. In the face of the most challenging of circumstances, these young girls shield themselves and their families with compassion and care and, of course, boundless hope.
Govind Nihalani November 7, 2011