Can A Market Culture be Deadly?

I have never visited India, but the recent tragic death of baby Afreen, in Bangalore last week   makes me count my blessings and gives me cause to reflect.

I am a beloved daughter I grew up with the love of my parents surrounding me. My education was as good as my brothers. At sixteen I left school even though my Mother wanted me to go to college to improve on my qualifications. I began work straight away and as well as earning enough money to look after myself, I paid my parents a small token for my “keep”.  I had a career and succeeded to gain promotion and contributed to a good standard of living for my family.

I married my husband. We met and married as equals.  I would not be the woman I am without his love and support and he would not be the man he is without my love and support. This Synergy creates more than double the energy, as we work together with the agreed values. It means we don’t waste energy disagreeing on our direction..

I am lucky, I happened to be born into a family of wise and wonderful parents. Poverty comes in many guises, no one can be paid to value their daughter, not recognising and valuing the precious gift of a new life, be it a boy or a girl, is to be truly impoverished.

The driving factor of the Market culture where everything has a price or a cost, puts an enormously inflated price tag on a boy child. With it, overwhelming expectations of the boy to become a man who will support and protect his family and be able to carry that weight on his shoulders alone.

Fathers of India if you believe a son is a “saviour “ and more capable of being a provider for his aging parents, than a daughter. Think again.

Daughters of India, survive in spite of a deep and dark conspiracy to devalue them. They succeed even though the cards are stacked against them, imagine if that tenacity, ability and potential was truly nurtured and valued how great things would be, how easier life would be for men to share the load equally.

So can a market culture be deadly? yes it can, not only can it create  pressure to unjustly kill the girl child but it can kill the promise of a brighter more fruitful future.