We will survive 

My dear comrades-in-sisterhood,

I don’t know about you girls, but I find a blanket of moody melancholy descending upon my fighting spirit. Hopefully, it is just a phase, like the many moods that constitute the psychological make-up of this fascinating creature called WOMAN. A creature, that social scientists say, for whom the world goes round. A vital and most important link in the human race to determine the course of the future. So much so, that our country’s most powerful man decides it was time to dedicate a whole 12 months in our honour! Ironically, it seems to me that this honour is out of tune, exerting a very heavy price that some of our sisters are paying with their very lives.

I understand, dear comrades-in-sisterhood, that alleviating the suffering of another woman is your prime priority. So I would like to think that you are as much pained, as me, with the recent brutal killing of one such woman (besides the others that goes on so recklessly), who was hacked to death by someone she had bonded with, in the name of love. Strangely, love, which is said to be utterly selfless and giving, today does not see beyond selfishness and jealousy. Love, in whose name the world was created, and hate, which followed close on its heels forcing the universe to race towards its own doom. Love, in so many twisted reincarnations.

You and I know that life, for a major population of our kind living in areas still untouched by the comforts of human technology, is a grim reality. A reality laced with struggle. Yet, they keep the network of home and hearth striving with their commitment and a sense of purpose. Indeed, they believe it their raison d’ etre for living. For which they were born. And for which they will die: unsung heroines in a land that takes much away from them. Including their DIGNITY. Say what you might, this is the true picture of our country.

Closer home and Goa, for all its hyped - but often fake - sense of metropolitan values and cosmopolitan lifestyle, stinks of (some) men whose minds have not progressed beyond stone age values, while their bodies scream 21st century designer labels. These are men who are not ashamed to live their dreams using their women. Yet, they find their manhood challenged when their women set out to realise their own identities. Unable then to cope with their own failings of self-worth (instead of thriving to balance the changing needs of a relationship coupled with responsibility), they twist their inability to accept in a torrent of violence. I’m sure your mounting statistics is proof enough to substantiate my observations.

And that is why, we have to work that much harder in building a genuine support system to empathise with these women. Women, who are strong enough to dig into their own moral resources, with some help from you, to ensure their own survival and of those who they love. For, I think, it is only through economic independence that a woman can claim her share of rightful dignity. And independence. Everything else then falls in place, with time.

Dedicated though you all are towards ideals of your individual commitments, I wish that you reach out to the less fortunate ones whose lives are torn apart by the ugly claws of poverty and ignorance. It is these women that we have to strive to empower, so that they lead sufficiently decent lives. All that they want is the faith, with a means to ensure that they are capable of earning their three square meals a day. It is these women who then will serve as a link in the chain of enabling other women to choose their own destinies. A destiny that will give them the respect, they so rightfully deserve.

I have much faith in what you believe. I only wish you do not end up in the hen-parties, which many of your ‘sisters’ have fallen prey to. For if you do, much will be lost, and the very reason for your existence will be redundant. Let’s work, putting differences aside, that the ‘mentally unsound’ who get away with their heinous bloodshed, get a whacking of their lifetime

Ethel Da Costa
April 4, 2001

Back to Ethel da Costa sez