As I was going out to my college last week in a public bus, I saw a woman or rather a girl, with quite an innocent face, traversing on the footpath. I am a very bad estimator of age of people but still if I am not entirely wrong she must have been a 15 or 16 years old and not more than that. And, I was really shocked to see that she had vermilion powder on her temple just like the way the Hindu married women wear it. I really couldn't believe my eyes and craned my neck to get a second look.
Here was I, a nineteen years old, going to college and planning to study till the age of twenty seven maybe and there was this girl who had been married off just at the age of sixteen making her stop her studies and putting a full stop to her dreams. Well, I accept, that maybe she might have had no big dreams and she was not even a good student but I couldn't understand why did her family marry her off. Child Labour, though banned, is still in wide practice in India. So they could have just put her to some work and she could have supported herself. It's not that that marrying a man would keep her off from earning money. Then why the marriage?
Child marriage is a concept which I have witnessed only in a television soap and in some films. I always believed that it was an ancient tradition practiced during the time of our grand parents and in the present day it is seen only in remote villages of Rajasthan and Bihar probably. But on seeing this girl I was stunned to see a victim of child marriage right in a metropolitan city, Kolkata. On discussing the issue with some intellectuals I got to know that the practice exists in full extent in the slum areas of all the metropolitan cities, leave alone the villages. And a bit of search in the Internet gave me the exact figures which really made be retaliate from the monitor and gape in awe. Here was a problem, a pest of the society, and we didn't even know it was so outspread.
