I started helping my mother in our boutique 11 years ago when I was just a teenager. I had to deal with kaarigars and seamstresses who worked for us. From a young age I started mingling with these women who were home makers, belonged from a financially backward class with 3-4 children. They try their best to earn something besides their husband who perhaps work as a day labour or driver. I started to coach their children free of cost, help them with my old books, clothes, shoes anything that I felt they needed. However slowly I noticed a trend that the girls were almost always “sent away to live with grandmas at village” after a few years. It was then I realised that they were being married off and I never heard of them again. I have seen talented girls, clever girls taken away as their fathers thought doing “chulha” was more important than learning any sort of vocational training.
I tried my best to instill the interest of knowledge among those people and make their families understand that daughters are not liabilities or a thing to be ashamed of. Daughters will take care of her parents when they are old. However most of the times my plea fell on deaf ears and I regretted.
It is my humble plea to all of you reading this , please do not turn a deaf ear to those in need of help. We are privileged to have been born in families who support us, let us use that chance to improve our society a little. Please look around , there will always be a family maybe your cook’s, maid’s, watchman’s where a talented daughter is being married off. If the parents do not stand for their daughter then offcourse after marriage she will be trodden upon by the inlaws and then we get to hear stories about dowry and all that.
Empowerment of women begins at home. Once if we can make people realise that their daughters too can earn like a son, can get recognition like a son, they might stop thinking of them as a liability and help them get educated and earn a living.