Category Archives: Not your average writing

Below is an interesting article about the pressures on women to get married.  It’s not as strong in typical North American culture as it is in South Asia or India, but it’s still quite reflective of common beliefs, even in Canada.

	29 » 2007
The false cure-all From girlhood on, young South Asian women are told that marriage is everything; it isn’t necessarily so   Gira Bhatt Special to the Sun Monday, October 29, 2007 I was a graduate student from India at the Simon Fraser University. Single, and in my late 20s, I went home after six years. It was a source of tremendous excitement. As I sat on the plane, the images of all my family members, numerous cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and neighbours began to surface. My images stopped at the vision of five little girls, about six years old who lived in my neighborhood. I was so fond of them! I was their big sister whom they waved at every time I walked by their play area and occasionally they followed me home when I returned. We talked, we shared stories, and we laughed. I wondered what they all would be like now. I knew I had lots of stories to tell them about my life abroad; what it was like to study in a big university, how students addressed their professors by their first names, how they ate their massive sandwiches during the classes right in front of their professors, how I had to study long hours which made my landlady worry that I might go insane, how women drove huge trucks, how the grocery stores had an entire aisle of animal food. Yes, I would tell them all about the joys of studying abroad. A wave of delight spread through my idealist mind. The plane landed in Mumbai and I reached home. Few days later, the “little girls,” now 12 years old knocked on our door. After inquiring how they were doing, what grades they were in, what their teachers were like etc, I started to talk about my life as a student abroad. The girls kept giggling, nudging each other. I could not understand what was going on. Then it happened. There was an interruption. One of the girls who I always thought had great leadership potential spoke up. “Aunty, are you a spinster?” Lots of giggles. More giggles. My mouth fell open. No words would escape though. My head started to buzz. Am I hearing this right? That was long time ago and I do not recall how the meeting had ended. All I remember is that I could not sleep well that night. These girls were barely 12 years old and their entire focus of life had zoomed onto one domain — being married. Now, marriage is not a bad thing. In fact, in general, people who are married live longer, are healthier and happier compared to single people. Also, at least 50 per cent of the marriages seem to move along smoothly, assuring a stable family life. However, what made the little-girls-in-India scenario salient in my mind is the recent events of young South Asian women in the Lower Mainland losing their lives as a result of their marriages going terribly wrong. Although such cases are a very small minority compared to the thousands of South Asian families who live a fairly normal and healthy life, the loss of even one woman’s life is one too many. I reflect upon the prime value placed on marriage in our society in general and our community in particular. It is a pervasive belief that marriage is a recipe for life-long happiness. It is a be-all, and cure-all for all the maladies of life. Although young daughters are raised with lots of love, a strong message is drilled into their minds throughout their growing years that marriage is the ultimate goal of life. Young girls repeatedly hear that if a young man has had a brush with the law, there is a remedy: Get him married to a “nice girl” and he will be all right. If a young man is involved in dangerous gang behaviour, there is a remedy; if a young man has problem keeping a steady employment, if a young man has been fooling around with “white girls,” there is a remedy: Get him married to a “nice girl” and he will be all right. The steady dose of Bollywood movies affirms this. As long as she is totally devoted to the man she marries, regardless of his “problems,” she will remain in that happy land of love ruled by her prince charming. However, if the prince charming’s problems do not go away, she has to just stay patient and worse, stay silent until the elusive destination of happily-ever-after arrives. If the prince charming does not become “all right” and in fact if he gets worse, i.e., abusive, there is the level two cure: “Have a child.” If having one child does not work, increase the dose; have another child, and another. Of course the problem does not necessarily go away. Scholars who examine the dynamics of abusive patterns in families have pointed out that among many factors involved in abusive relationships, an individual’s self-esteem is critical. How we value our worth as a person is crucial in providing us with a sense of adequacy, competence, confidence and the ability to cope with adverse situations in life. I see many young and bright South Asian women in my classes. I always remember one who was in the second year of her degree program. Very bright, very motivated, she excelled in all her courses. However, just two weeks before the term was to end, she disappeared. I sent repeated e-mails to inquire where she might be. A month later she wrote to me that her family had found her a really “good match” and she was married and now living in the U.K. Although not all South Asian women in my classes leave school halfway through, this is typical of many of them. Why are we not ensuring that our daughters learn to stand on their own feet before being married? Why are we pulling them out of schools and colleges? Why are we not allowing them to explore their talents and hobbies? Why are we not celebrating their school accomplishments without adding, “now, we only have to find you a good match”? Dr. Gira Bhatt is a psychology instructor at Kwantlen University College. © The Vancouver Sun 2007

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

=0)document.write(unescape(‘%3C’)+’\!-‘+’-‘)
//–> 

As per my post about my newspaper route that I had as a preteen, I couldn’t resist this Tyee story featuring excerpts from the book Wages by John Armstrong.

This story describes the pain and suffering of his preteen experience of enduring a newspaper route forced upon him by his mother. I can totally relate to awakening each morning after a night of fearful sleep in anticipation of what lay ahead at the crack of dawn: travelling through rain, wind, biting cold, sludging through muddy pathways, slipping on icy patches, wading through knee-high snowfalls and rushing home to get ready for school, all before 7 a.m..  I was not one of the lucky children who had parents chauffeur them in a cozy, heated car to and along their route. No, I had to do it all on foot with a noisy metal cart dragging behind me. The sparks ignited by the wheels as they scraped the cement provided no extra warmth or speed to get home faster. And being a 15-year-old girl in the 80s, I needed sufficient time to blow-dry my feathered hair and apply blue shadow up to my eyebrows. This was more important than quality newspaper delivery service, but it was enough stress to cause fortuitous panic attacks. I have recurring nightmares to this day that I awake late and miss deliveries.

Now Armstrong understands my pain. Unlike him though, I did manage to get fired. I guess the slave drivers at The London Free Press took their customer service more seriously, and also because the very last customer on my long, winding route was one of their managers waiting with his stopwatch timed for 7 a.m. sharp for the precious paper to be placed gently on his doormat while I bowed down to his arrogance. If it came one minute later, he was on the phone complaining to my supervisor. I had his paper delivered no later than 7:04 a.m.

Although Armstrong’s tale captures all of the gloom and anxiety involved in a carrier’s career including mid-route fear-induced bowel attacks (which thankfully did not happen to me), he didn’t mention the creepy homeless people and staggering drunks coming home from partying the night before that would try to steal your papers or make bumbling conversation with you. And there were people who would run out of their homes across the street from where your bundles lay and steal a paper before you got there, which of course, you’d get blamed for not delivering. I’d have to choose which unlucky customer would not receive his paper that day – it had to be a different one each time. There was no way I’d leave it for the stop-watching bitter employee who had to get his paper dry and pre-warmed, his favourite sections cornered, ready to read.

Ah, the joys of teenage jobs. How they play on your naivety and eagerness to make your own cash and have your own career. How they exploit the fact that your parents cut off your allowance because you’re old enough to become gainfully employed, but too young to get a job with the benefits of indoor dignity.  And I could empathize with Armstrong when he describes his parents’ work ethic:

“Not that I ever said so: my personal philosophy didn’t matter a damn. You got a job and you kept it, until you died or the company fired you…. In their experience, everything other than a bad job was too good to be true and so by definition didn’t exist, or was at the least criminal. The working life and the example of their own parents had warped them to the extent they couldn’t imagine anything other than a rotten deal; if a situation was truly lousy, then it must be solid, honourable employment.”

 The Catholic system still lives on: if you’re suffering, it’s all good. More points in heaven that way.

Randy Boswell, CanWest News Service

Canada geese are routinely targeted the world over (their namesake nation included) for abatement or culling by frustrated municipal officials and wildlife authorities, who try everything — barking dog teams, egg-addling birth-control blitzes, bitter-tasting “goose-be-gone” grass spray, even buckshot — to rid themselves of the nuisance.

All of which makes the extraordinary efforts in Britain to save the life of a single, conspicuously wounded Canada goose so remarkable.

The heart-rending saga has gone on for nearly four months, since the residents of Northampton first caught sight of a handsome gander swimming in a pond with a mate at its side — and a poacher’s arrow sunk straight through its chest.

To the general amazement of a would-be animal rescue unit — which, despite numerous attempts, has been unable to capture the bird and give it veterinary care — the goose has survived not only the initial piercing of its breast but also the infections that must surely have taken hold at times during the ordeal.

Yet it lives, a testament to the hardiness of the creature and the twist of fate that has all of Britain pulling for this one pitiable bird even as it casually curses the species in general.

“I have no idea how it has survived,” Roy Marriott, the bird’s chief pursuer, told CanWest News Service on Wednesday. “The arrow has obviously missed all the vital organs and somehow gone through muscle.”

This week, Marriott and other volunteers from the charitable group Animals in Need will try again to gently snare the injured goose, last seen a few days ago in a city pond with the arrow lodged just below its neck but now bent at an awkward angle, presumably causing even more trouble and soreness.

The crooked arrow is likely causing the bird “a bit of pain,” Marriott said, but he added that at the latest sighting the goose “was still swimming around with its mate and protecting her against the swans — he’s obviously still getting around all right and seems to be doing fine.”

Officials with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have advised Marriott’s group that if the goose is captured, the arrow should be trimmed rather than pulled out.

“It’s been in him now for so long,” he said. “So we’re not going to try to remove it because more infections could take place with it out.”

Marriott said: “I can’t understand the mentality of anybody firing [an arrow] at an animal like that.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2007