dowry "evergreen"

I was reading national news in yahoo news page and i came across this news put up barely an hour ago. On December 7, a woman in Korba district of Chhattisgarh tried to burn her husband alive. She was arrested and what she said in her defense was that she was "fed up of her husband"!
I really could not push what she said to the back of my brain. To be so fed up of a person to try and burn him/her alive? And that too your husband? Another important fact in this case was that the wife had filed a case of dowry harassment against her husband but the matter was dissolved between them...the story continues.


Curious about dowry cases, i typed dowry in Google and clicked on news and a long list of dowry cases appeared; my eyes were drawn to dates and the number of pages. Disgustingly, there was a dowry case put on Google almost every single day and the list goes on and on, starting from a dowry case on the very day i searched where a village sarpanch in punjab was arrested in dowry case. And just think that hundreds of dowry incidents go unheard.
A country that claims itself to be a fast developing nation, is India moving to the developed and urban side for the better, or are the ghosts of our "so-called" uneducated/rural social evils lingering about and mutating into an urban beast with us and sinking deeper into us?


Being born and brought up in a small town in Jharkhand, i never understood the "why" behind the female foeticide n female infanticide cases my mother and her colleagues used to talk about; probably because my family setup was very different, or atleast i believed it to be so. But after getting a bigger picture of life, i understood that dowry system is one of the root causes of the biased gender ratio. And i also understood that dowry thrives in the urban, educated India too.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/20/20101207/1416/tnl-woman-held-for-trying-to-set-ablaze_1.html