This link via SupMM made me laugh. Apparently more men are happier about unplanned pregnancies, than women are. Well that’s a little obvious I’d say. They won’t be growing to mammoth proportions, puking their guts out, getting stretchmarks, walking around like a leaky dairy farm for a year or more and then sagging to their newly-gained-fat knees.
It took me back to a discussion on unplanned pregnancies we were having earlier. I’m glad women’s lib gave us more control over our choices and bodies but I do feel a little twinge for men having no choice over when they would like to have kids anymore. A fair enough price to pay for not having to go through pregnancy and breastfeeding and loss of figure, one might say! Still….
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This piece of news made me wonder where we’re headed. A student of Annamalai University, Chennai dies in hospital – he was rushed there after an accident. Fellow students claimg that he was neglected because he was a north Indian (this isn’t in the link, I saw it on the news today). They riot/protest violently. The cops come and control the rioting. Fleeing students fall into a canal and drown. Bihar CM gives their family a compensation.
How many things do you see wrong here?
First – why riot outside a hospital saying that you’ve been neglected because of the state you come from? Why do we do this all the time? Every few weeks I hear of hospital staff being beaten up by relatives of a patient they couldn’t save. No wonder the half way decent doctors move abroad. At which point do we trust a doctor’s judgment that they could do no more? I could be wrong in this case, but it happens all the darn time.
Second – what is the chancellor supposed to do about it? He isn’t a medical professional and he can only believe it if the doctors tell him the boy couldn’t be saved. As a parent today, I’m a little less hard-hearted, but even I cant see the point in going to the Univ administration.
Third – the students who were running away from the police, accidentally fell into a canal and died. I don’t know what to say to this. Why exactly does the Bihar CM have to jump in with compensation?! Why politicise it? Doesn’t it encourage the students to think on communally divided lines? Then the MNS and Shiv Sena may as well throw all the north Indians out of Bombay because you know, CMs of other states are acting all partisan and making compensations for students who lost their lives while causing trouble for another state and college.
It’s such a vicious cycle, the politics is filthy, it is sad to see young guys getting dragged into this. My condolences for the lives lost but violent protests are not the answer. And compensations should be made if you’re dying for a cause, a natural calamity or due to state negligence. This hardly qualifies as state negligence. I’d say its your own negligence if you first riot and then fall into a canal while trying to make an escape. Hell.. I give up.
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Actually before I give up I must register my protest over this one. The ATC who allowed his kid to direct air traffic in the US. What right did he have to endanger so many lives? I’m okay with ‘take your kid to work day’ if you’re not doing something that involves other people’s lives and so long as your kids just watch. It’s particularly ironic that such highly trained professionals who are well aware of the seriousness of the job at hand fall in to the parent trap of thinking that its okay for their kid to fool around for a little while. How do they teach them to respect an education, the enormity of what they’re doing and other lives.
I don’t know if any of my older readers remember but there was one idiot doctor couple who allowed their 15-year-old son to come into the OT and operate on a pregnant woman and deliver her son via Csec. The post is buried somewhere in my old blog. I think people like this should be tortured in the old-fashioned way – half hanged, slit from neck to crotch, guts pulled out and burned in front of them, and then taken to the block. Am I sounding blood thirsty? Sorry – just the after effects of reading Phillipa Gregory’s The Boleyn Inheritance.
The Mad Momma 
sigh…i really don’t think too many men fret over why they can’t plan a pregnancy. at least i haven’t come across one so far! good for the wife – for the reasons you have so vividly described. 🙂
Agree with you over the student riots. why indeed did politics get into this!??
Ah yes I do remember the notorious doc couple!
And the punishment idea sounds capital! 🙂
Serious kudos to womens lib and I am a big believer in our body our choice, but I still find myself feeling a little bad for guys who sometimes have little or no say over when they want to have kids. Even when I was little and watched Masoom (not very little, when I was say fourteen) I felt bad for Nasiruddin Shah’s character who had noooo clue he even had a child and one fine day he was responsible for said child.
I am appalled there are some parents who think its cool to let their children put the lives of others in such grave danger! I remember my mum telling me about the 15 yr old kid performing surgery! What was his mum thinking???
tell me one human who is free of all prejudices and communal feeling.that is just not possible.and when an amplified version of that human comes in contact with a normal human who has minimal of these ,results are such pieces of news..free
Hi MM,
The story about the idiot Dr couple reminds me of one more…a 7 – 8 year old kid being allowed to drive a car; I think it was an Indica – and if that wasn’t macho enough, made to break some sort of speed record on the highway or something. His parents were proud and some ‘sabse tez’ TV channel was conceited enough to keep running it for a couple of days….and to think that I got spanked for throwing water balloons on unsuspecting pedestrians during Holi in Mumbai…all those years ago. Sigh!
well it worked na? you’ve grown up to be a great guy i am sure. while those kids – well, the less said, the better
LOL! thanks for the vote of confidence!my wife’s opinion is quite the contrary, though.
Yes, sad cases, these. and this malaise is also very much alive amongst a lot of young parents, who want their children to be the first, the earliest, the fastest, the tallest……whatever! just like the ‘isms’ in religion, parents (most of them, me included) are victims of this ‘est’ trap…the sooner we realise it, the better
🙂 She’s a wife. we expect no less from any self respecting wife but steady criticism and taking the husband down the proverbial peg or two 😀
at this point my husband usually makes a bad pun about how he needs a peg or two to deal with me 😀
heh heh…story of our lives.
Hmm
What? No updates on the Nithyananda scandal? It’s BIG in the south !
hah! and have the trolls come in and make it a religious thing? not on your life. i’m tired of telling idiots that i am not a papal agent
Knew you’d say this. Come on MM lets live dangerously!
oh i wouldnt mind it if it were exciting and dangerous. now its predictable and tedious to deal with the same argument.
first i object to something truly objectionable. some idiot will come and say – oh you object because you’re from a different religion. – never mind that 8000 others are objecting too.
wtf – did anyone think of checking my religion before they hit me in the eye with a stone filled balloon?! So why does it become a religious issue if i object?
It’s getting ridiculous and more than scary that anything and everything one says and does can be used as justification for a violent mob. Look at what’s happening with the Swami Nityanand scandal…so what if he’s really doing ‘immoral’ things…how does it justify violence…half those people just want to be in the media spotlight and let out their rage against those better off than them.
I remember that doctor couple’s kid…it was terrible. It’s all again done for that moment in the sun…is it worth risking others’ lives for it?
OMG!!! My mail inspired a post!!!!
*Fluttering eyelashes and fans hands and swooning*
Men deserve no choices – they’r not the ones who are laid up in bed thanks to their “imaginary” cramps when they are 15 & miss the basketball match or find that they cannot suddenly wear their V-neck tees or start getting rashes when they have to switch from a sports bra to a regular bra or get embarrassed when they stain the chair or get bloated up. Men blame women for PMS. The men ought to figure out all this first – the only thing they complain about is shaving. Which also they don’t do regularly.
I just did this post on this kid who threw water balloons on my colleague and me as we were leaving for a meeting while his father’s defence was “Bura na mano holi hai”. Parents like him and that doctor couple and all those who let their 15-16 year old kids drive to school in a City without knowing the road rules or having any thought of safety & consideration for themselves or for others all deserve the proverbial punishment of being hung by their toe-nails.
yep – was going to link up to that one in another 2-3 days.
With respect to the Airplane fiasco, there was worse that once happenned
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593
HOLY SHIT!! just when I think I have the worst, one of you shows me something worse.
Hung , drawn and quartered , eh ? I like that .
yep – so much more gory when you break it down and describe na? 😀
MM! I actually question the validity of the survey and their target. But it tickled me, something in the male hormones triggers a “I did it!” moment when they find out they impregnated a woman without even trying to (I know, one can argue the consequence of sex is babies…)
On the endangering lives part – I couldn’t agree more. The next will be a pilot allowing his kid to fly the bloody plane itself! I hope the punishment is strict and will resonate with others in similarly critical professions for a long time to come.
oh but someone did – in 1994. Khalil left a comment to that effect.
OMG…that description was horrific…so many lives lost in the matter of minutes 😦
You liked ‘The Boleyn Inheritance’? how is it? I understand your blood-thirsty feeling. A Philippa Gregory book about the Boleyns can stir in such emotions :O
I am enjoying the way it teaches you history. it wasnt a subject I took to in school….
Forgot to comment on the original post, so here goes..
I am 26 and single.I am not a mother yet. But I hope to be one, someday. I went to an all girls college, and a lot of my seniors and batch mates are mothers now. The most striking thing I notice about ALL of them, is how becoming a mother has changed them all. I used to think the whole ‘motherhood being a glorious thing’ was being ridiculously overplayed in our movies and serials, but realize it can’t be. Not when every mother I know claims it’s the one life altering event of her life. Everyone – even the stereotypes that you would think don’t care for it. The ‘Slut’ at college, the woman who will put aside her child bearing plans to climb up the corporate ladder and finally have her kid at 40, the tomboy in class, the ‘oh-my-god-i-will-never-have-kids-they-are-too-tiny-ugly-worm-like-and-i-wouldn’t-know-what-to-do’ types. (I have nothing for or against these kinds or even about such labels, just listing down the usual suspects for not having kids).
If this were true, I don’t want to ever be in a place where looking at my child, I secretly cry for the one I killed, only because I didn’t want the child then.
A child is much more than a biological reaction to a sperm that travelled up your uterus, isn’t it? (pardon my biology, if it’s wrong here). How then can you kill it? And if you did, why expect me to be sensitive to the semantics, just so as not to upset you?
I agree there are always the exceptions – the rape victims/ the ones who are forced to abort their unwanted girl children. I don’t know what it would feel like to be one and I will not pass any judgment on them or what they are going through. But we aren’t really talking about the exceptions, are we? We are talking about the couples out there who are clear about their motives for having sex and if you have been careless, who is to blame? And you want me to empathize with you over it? If you are smart enough to know what you want, why not be a little more careful and avoid accidents?
Long comment, but what a funny generation we must be, if my sensitivity to semantics is more important and gets more air time than the naked truth that an abortion, due to an easily avoidable mistake, is really killing a child.
have you seen this one?
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/now-extra-small-condoms-for-12yrolds/111039-17.html?from=tn
if you have to make a special condom size because you’ve not err.. grown to your full size, you’ve got to take the hint and not have sex until you are!
A father letting a child manage air traffic controls is just inconcievable! What was he thinking?
I saw the ‘Other Boleyn Girl’ sometime last year..wrote a post about it.
http://allaboutsukhdev.blogspot.com/2008/11/movie-time.html
the movie didnt do well but it really piqued my interest, to learn more about that era.
must get this book.
This whole incident reminded me of that Anil Kapoor starer movie “Nayak” … where a student not allowed in a bus was completely politiced …. I thought it was an exaggeration … how I wish I was right.
I am really sick of this mob mentality that we carry. The politicians should discourage it and make it compeletely illegal. Instead, they end up handing out compensations (from our hard earned money that went to them as taxes). Gah!
Loved your blog and this post in particular.. took me back to my hilly days in Darjeeling….Esp. the part where I demanded my own pony to be driven from home to the mall n back and yes a personal jocky too who knew nursery songs!!! to think back now.. Lolz!!!
thnaks for refreshing memories…. 🙂