Features
Rising election fever; feminine concerns and help
Cassandra elucidates. What need we, the citizens, and the government, particularly, concentrate on now at present times? Turning the economy around? Attempting to pay off debts? Easing the burden of the disadvantaged people, who account for around 30% to 40% of the population? We Ordinaries have tightened our belts. Those in government and particularly Parliamentarians are concentrating on getting duty-free luxury car permits and insurance till they and their extensive families die off.
To Cass a very relevant factor that makes us a land like no other is the concentration of all on elections. The questions asked from the end of last year were and are whether elections will be held; which election will be held first, and who is contesting the presidential election. Thus, the news relayed by TV channels is 80% election-related and 20% on the miseries in this country.
In sharp contrast, take Britain. On May 22, PM Rishi Sunak announced general elections in Britain will be conducted on July 4. How much time between official announcement and event? 44 days; one month and 14 days; 6 weeks. As short as that. And in this negatively unique country almost a year before an imagined election, OK, hoped for election talk was loud, persistent and unclear about the event. Even today, almost six months later, we are not sure which election will be held and when exactly.
The Parliament of Britain is considered the mother of all parliaments. The British manage without a written constitution but follow rules, regulations, customs as practised down the years. We meddle with our Constitution often and now have 22 Amendments.
All these conjectures got Cass humming a tune from the musical of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. “Why cannot a woman be more like a man?” Cass echoes GBS: Why cannot Sri Lanka be more like Britain or any other civilised nation, notwithstanding the former’s boast of a 2500-year-old cultural heritage, et al? This is another proof that SL is like no other country – in its perversity and foolishness. By the time elections are definitely announced and dates fixed, we Ordinaries will be delirious.
Women’s needs
Two articles in the previous week’s The Island papers dealt with the need for formal teaching of personal hygiene to teenage girls and making their needs during their monthly periods easily and cheaply available. Taboos are fast disappearing and people are not stupidly hush hush about menstruation.
A certain organisation thoughtfully distributed packs of essentials like sanitary pads, soap, etc., to girls in remote villages, to ease this burden which curtails their normal lives severely each month and prevents school attendance too.
This compels Cassandra to narrate the brave help given by an Indian small-time businessman to women: first his wife, then to others in his village area which caught on subcontinent-wise.
Arunachalam Muruganantham, son of poor handloom weavers, realized his wife used old rags since she could not afford sanitary pads. He researched in 1998 and found that only ten to twenty percent of all Indian females could afford proper menstrual hygienic products.
He decided to produce low cost pads and experimented with his wife as a guinea pig. Unsuccessful. He had to use and discard different materials to cover the cotton. He invented a simple machine to turn out the pads and managed to get university girls to give him feedback.
By now he had earned some derisive nicknames too. When guinea pigs decreased, he experimented with him wearing a bag of animal blood. However, finally he succeeded in turning out sanitary pads cheap and helped others to make machines or sold his which cost US$ 950 against an imported machine costing $500,000.
He started a sort of revolution in his country by selling 1,300 machines to 27 states and recently started exporting to developing countries, and thus much of rural India had their girls going through the days of the month with no severe interruptions and trepidation. He was named by Time Magazine in 2014 as one of 100 of the world’s most influential persons.
Cass’ input here is about another not much talked of, actually hidden suffering of girls and women in Sri Lanka. That is harassment, usually sexual, in public places and public transport. Cass need not elaborate on this. She herself has suffered in Kandy crowds during the early days of the Esala Perahera; in buses, in cinemas.
Then she adopted the ruse of carrying a pin and a stern face and a shout, never mind the consequences. She well remembers the rage she got into on one of her early morning walks, when she saw a three-wheeler driver parked near a small girls’ school exhibiting himself.
The contrast between the man’s vileness and the little girls’ innocence sent her screaming at the man. Fortunately for her, he fled in his vehicle. These types are usually funk sticks as we used to name them. But one never knows.
If a girl is being harassed by a man with his hands or body, she will usually not be supported by others in the bus, least of all the driver and conductor. This last named will tell her to get down and travel by car.
Experiences in countries like the Philippines, where Cass roamed the cheapest of markets with stunningly beautiful Rohini from New Delhi had not one jab, push, grasp nor fumble. A market in Delhi was horrendous. Maybe where men do not harass women is where they are not frustrated; prostitution freely available and often legalised.
To a young girl, protectively nurtured in a safe milieu, such harassment can be traumatic. I witnessed this recently. A driver who comes to help Cass got a call from his teenage daughter. She told him how she was ‘tortured’ by an older man on a bus. The father got enraged. “I will kill that man with my hare hands”, he shouted, asking her to photograph him. Too late and fortunate, since in his anger he would have traced the miscreant and committed murder.
Cass does not intend story telling. She asks you, her readers, what should be done to reduce if not curb and wipe out this crime. The police to patrol public transport; vigilantes to be recruited? It is the DUTY of the government, especially the relevant ministries, to make it safe for girls and women to get about their work.