ROTTEN TO THE CORE

After reading an article "What price a man" quite sometime ago in one of an Indian Magazine which emphasize the grisliness of dowry, I felt it apt to reproduce verbatim excerpts from a short story by I.Jayakaran long ago which epitomizes the evil of dowry - the immoral practice that dishonours womanhood...

"Tiwari's task of finding a groom was by no means an easy one. He was aware that Kajal combined beauty and intelligence in herself, but then, Bihari fathers don't go by looks. It's dowry that they are after; the greater the amount the greater is the girl's acceptability in the family. Looks never mattered! The going rate happened to be Rs 6 lakh (RM60,000) for a raw B.Tech or MBBS and at least 25% more if he was a working person. But, Tiwari's assets as on date were a mere Rs 1 and half lakh (RM15,000). Even if he sold off all his wife's jewellery, the total amount he had would not exceed Rs 3 and half lakh (RM35,000).

He shrugged and thought to himself that he would have to settle for some babu (young man) working in a municipal office or possibly some middle school teacher. Many beauty queens in Bihar had to marry ordinary men because their fathers could not afford to pay the high dowry demanded for better placed grooms"

Well, the practice of dowry is offensive, grovelling and rotten to the core. It affronts our intelligence, morality and womanhood and those endeavouring to satiate their personal avarice making dowry a condition have descended to the level of the common street beggar. We can label them as "rapacious mendicants" and "money grubbers".

And those families concurring with the principle of the degrading and obnoxious system are in fact making their daughters into saleable assets. How abominable! After checking the antecedents of a man, is he still worth the dowry given? What if he turns out not to be a man of character, decency and substance of impotent failing to give his spouse her conjugal dues.

Or if he turns out to be a chronic alcoholic who batters her black and blue or treats her like an odalisque with a male chauvinistic attitude that sex is to be enjoyed by man and endured by woman?

There are a lot of arrogant SOBs and MCPs who think their penis is plated with gold and with a hefty varathatchanai (Tamil word for dowry) make a gem of a husband.

What if he turns out to be a two timing philanderer like Hugh Grant caught with the like of Estella "Divine Brown" Thompson? What if the gem of a husband turns out to be another John Wayne Bobbit? Does the aggrieved spouse have to slice of his penis to prove that the SOB was a worthless buy?

Let me not mince my words. No man is worth a dime of the dowry given no matter what blood or prestigious position he holds in society. Dowry should not be the decisive factor when marriage alliances are arranged and it should not be confined to the circumscribed limit of caste.

A marriageable girl's worth as a bride should not be determined solely by the amount of dowry she brings.

It is all right for girls born on a carpet of dollars or wallowing in the lap of luxury and whose parents concord with the principle of dowry to offer blank cheques to prospective bridegrooms (yet there's a question mark on his characters and worthiness!?) but what about families with not-so-young daughters who are clutching to the fag-end of gentility at a starvation salary or families who have no inherited land or property of any kind and financially down at the ladder? Should their daughters be kept aside as unwanted goods? Should such an idiotic system be permitted to continue?

The degeneration of it hampers the growth and progress of the Indian community and all the shock-horror stories emanating from India as a consequence of dowry should arouse every Indian out of complacency into reformer's fury to extirpate it.

Like suttee and caste, dowry system should be made virtually obsolete. Do not permit it to be the bane of the Hindu society.