When I wrote my post Genetics and Memetics, the thrust of the post was in the declining number of male descendants in our family to highlight that perhaps something genetic was influencing the trend. Some of my readers have however asked whether the declining trend is seen in the birth of girls in the family and so, I went back and did my sums and am pleased to note that in our family girls are flourishing and doing very well indeed, thank you.
My father had three sisters of whom one is still around and kicking a lot of our butts. She is the youngest in her generation and she and my father are the only surviving members in that generation. Though from the males of that generation only two girls were born, from the girls’ side a total of nine daughters and five sons were born. So, from that generation, a total of eleven daughters were born.
From my generation, from the male cousins, eight daughters were born and from the female cousins,seven girls were born.
From my son’s generation, so far we have already seen five that I know of but I doubt that there are more. Pardon me for that observation, as I have lost touch with a lot of them due to my being up in the Western side of the country, whereas most of the younger generation as well as their parents are down South,
The point however is that female children abound!
This is contrary to the trend in the Northern parts of our country where a major problem of female infanticide prevails resulting in skewed male female ratios which are challenging some social norms and equations. In fact, many men from the Northern parts of our country are now forced to seek brides from the South despite linguistic and cultural differences. While this may indeed eventually work out in integrating the country better, for the moment, other social problems are very obvious, and the progress in educating the affected populace is going very slow.
We do not have the problem that Afghan and Pakistani girl children have but our problems are more serious. Some of the social problems, like dowry that need to be addressed by better education and perhaps even propaganda to overcome this situation needs to be undertaken on a war footing. The efforts so far made have just been scratching the surface. This is a perennial problem with the group of states here called the Cow Belt or the BIMARU states, which are in a time warp of the 18th century culture and values. Unfortunately, this is also the most populated and send the maximum number of Members to our Parliament and the quality of our Parliamentary democracy is there for all to see.
In urban India, even in the Cow Belt, things are improving but not all that fast as one would like. There is another peculiar problem of a higher widow population compared to widowers and in the cow belt, that is another problem altogether needing a separate analysis. Another post in the making!
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