Uncultured cultivation

There are many funny ways to react to this news item which says girls were made to plough fields naked for rain, so that the rain gods will be embarrassed and will ultimately come down.

I can joke "Ok, so that means weather gods are all women?" Another more effective idea I can suggest here is to arrange few big screens in the drought hit areas and play some of the Bollywood 'numbers' instead where item-girls do un-garmented mowing and plowing, it can virtually embarrass anybody, let alone rain gods. Or on a second thought, what if the rain gods commit suicide unable to bear the embarrassment, so let’s not take such extreme measures.

However, those of us who joked on it might not have noticed that it's a perfect image of many things that are wrong in our country.

• We still lack education and awareness which makes people become more and more superstitious.


• Our women still are treated second-class citizens – why didn't the organizers think of making men do so?


• We still are incapable of providing basic facilities like irrigation to our farmers that they go to such extremes.


• Not just that much, it also shows how our law enforcement is not capable of stopping such atrocities done against women


• Our perpetually-concerned, hypocritical culture-guardians are so worried about filthy, fifth-rated TV shows but they have nothing to say about such things. May be these kind of things are not against ‘our values’