A Enquiry into the societal conspiracy behind the sad end of a 17 year old kerala(Southern most indian state) girl who died after giving birth a baby girl.
The Freedom Child
A MIRROR WE CAN’T MISS
SHE IS UNLIKE ANY CHILD. UNLIKE ANYBODY BORN IN KERALA FOR THE LAST SEVERAL DECADES, SHE POSES QUESTIONS, WHICH CAN SHAKE THE EMPTY AND MOTH-EATEN FOUNDATIONS OF THE MALAYALI MORAL PSYCHE. SHE IS THE PIERCING MIRROR HELD TO OUR CRUMBLING HYPOCRISY.
She was born on Aug 15th, 2004. Exactly on the same day, 57 years ago, the proud Prime Minister of India unfurled the national flag and delivered his historic “tryst with destiny speech.” (1947 aug 15 India won its political Independence after being a colony of british for 200 years)
She was born at the Kottayam Medical College Hospital (MCH). It is for sure that in the hospital records, against her name, the place for her father’s remained unfilled. But her mother’s name has filled the newspaper columns across Kerala for the last 3-4 months. Now the mother is no more and her ill-fated face stilled in time after undergoing unspeakable agonies, travelled to our drawing rooms, courtesy the insensitive TV journalists with anaesthetized sensibilities. This unfortunate child born to this unlucky mother on the Independence Day, is the hapless daughter of Shari S. Nair who died after going through the trauma of sexual abuse, and the possible poisoning later to facilitate the easy burial of evidences.
The ordeal of the 17-year old girl’s life, starting from being the winner of a small time beauty competition at Kottayam, to the tragic end at the MCH hospital is a frightful pointer to the atrocious times we live in. That it happened the way it happened is not surprising while analysing the recent sex scandals. In all these cases, it is a mix of beauty contests, fashion shows, serial acting, modelling, mobile phones and love affairs, that proved to be fatal. Invariably, the story line is, young and over ambitious girls around the age of 15-17 getting lured into some kind of relationships with men who cheat the girls and lead them to a glamour ring where a kind of semi-prostitution and allied activities thrive to cater to the demands and needs of the high and mighty - in recent Kerala parlance, ‘VIPs’.
Many times an elder woman also makes an appearance in the racket, and the girls who get trapped, either willingly or unwillingly, lose their sense of discretion and decision making power till they find themselves pregnant and thrown away. Parents cooperate and even connive at times without knowing the full gravity of the situation, thinking that their girl is on the path to stardom. Initially, both the girls and their parents get blinded, by the flow of easy money and the promise of immediate celluloid triumphs. Being poor and defenceless, their lines of resistance get weakened till disaster visits them, as happened in the Kiliroor case.
The society in Kerala has undergone breathtaking changes in the last 20 years or so. The invasion of satellite TV and the acceptance of Hindi films with sleazy stories and lurid song sequences have fuelled the trademark liberalism of this generation. Reduced space of social resistance movements and the withering of the intellectual idealism accentuated this trend.
Media cleverly passed the buck in the critical hour of reckoning and even acted as cheerleaders. Irresponsible women’s magazines in the state infected by a bug borrowed directly from the salacious Sunday magazines and city editions of some well-known English newspapers, went to town detailing stories which had obvious hints, tips and fast facts to become instant celebrities. Celebrating and glorifying the success of film stars by the so-called family magazines had a profound impact in securing the social sanction for many ill adventures.
Thus the cultural and intellectual consent for treating the body as an object of adulation and a medium of commerce are well endorsed by these insidious endeavours promoted and acquiesced by media. The not so vigilant society played into the hands of big time media merchants interested solely in the flow to their coffers. So the price Malayali paid and the pain he experienced seeing the lifeless face of the mercilessly battered Kiliroor girl were long over due. The ticket for it was really taken while reading and rejoicing the success stories of models, film stars and their utterly rubbish gossips.
The group suicide of a Namboodiri family at Kaviyoor in Kottayam in connection with the Kiliroor case is quite revealing. Namboodiri’s daughter, a 15-year-old upcoming classical dancer was duped after luring her and her family about the prospects in TV serial acting by a self-styled talent scout, Latha Nair, who is the prime accused in the Kiliroor case. How can her priest cum astrologer father be blamed if he thought that sending his daughter to some preliminary tests with another woman was necessary for an acting career.
How can we find fault with him if he thought that his talented daughter has a chance when many girls with upper caste surname tails are making names in the film and serial industry. He belongs to the Malayali middle class community who is entranced by the pervasive success tales of past Kalathilakams and their subsequent married lives, which were fed as the favourite diet to the readers of pop Malayalam magazines. What is left unstated in these features is the kind of trials and tough days, these so-called successful stars encountered in their route to stardom. Unpleasant stories of compromises remain unsaid and unknown, while the effort of bestowing a non-existing goodness and decency to these fields continue unabated. Cost of that information deficit is terrible and devastating as it leads the uninitiated and the unsuspecting to cleverly disguised traps. This becomes a collective tragedy of the society when the supposedly alert media acts as a shameless collaborator in this project of deceit.
What one must know is that a well-designed package is readied to draft the woman into the roles, which the market wants to fit and fix for them. From beauty contests to modelling, the victim is glorified as the victor. And the smiling girl or boy is just a new recruit to the logic of the market where he or she thinks that they are scoring points. The reality is that points are scored at their expense. That is the mesmerising art and science of showbiz. To one success tale printed, there would be hundreds of failed stories of painful tears, awful abuse and lost innocence. Nobody says about it and nobody reads about it. At least the Kiliroor case must open our eyes and harden our resolves. We owe that much to the little girl born on the day we celebrated our initiation into freedom. Born on the Independence Day of an illustrious Nation, she will remain as a lasting indictment to our ethical ineptitude. This is a curse our morally hollow society surely deserves.
helo
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