EDITORIAL : THE HINDU, INDIA

Missing daughters

The Census of 2011 revealed that the sex ratio in the 0-6 age group is worse now than in any decade since Independence. It is indisputable that this distressing trend is the result of more people having easier access to medical technologies that reveal the sex of the foetus, and opting for sex-selective abortions. New research published by The Lancet provides further insights into the phenomenon of ‘missing women': as family size in India declines over time, there is a bias against having a second female child when the first is a girl. Based on data drawn from the National Family Health Survey between 1990 and 2005 and the Census of 1991, 2001, and 2011, the paper estimates that for second-order births where the first is a female, the conditional sex ratio fell to an abysmal 836 girls per 1,000 boys in 2005. It is equally a matter of concern that most of India's population now lives in States where selective abortion of girls is common. What stands out in the findings is the positive correlation that education and affluence seem to have with a decline in the sex ratio; the decline was higher in the case of women with ten years or more of education than for mothers with no education. Such a trend calls for closer study of the factors that reinforce the son preference, especially in States and districts with a worsening ratio.

What is fundamentally underscored by the research is the failure of the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act even in its amended form, and the need for a multi-pronged strategy to remove the prejudice against the girl child. Any serious review of the law in the States with the worst child sex ratios should begin with the quarterly reports they are required to file on diagnostic centres, laboratories, and clinics, the action taken against unregistered bodies, search and seizure, and the outcomes of awareness campaigns. Not all States have been filing such reports regularly. The level of involvement of laggard States in implementing the PNDT Act can be gauged from the fact that in Haryana, a crucial notification on setting up Appropriate Authorities was not published in the gazette for 12 years from 1997, and it had to be reissued as an ordinance with retrospective effect. But then, while enforcement measures may have a salutary effect, the more challenging task is to make India a less male-dominated society. The place to start for that mission would be Parliament and the State Legislative Assemblies. Political parties must lead by enabling 33 per cent representation for women in legislatures and raise their visibility. Liberal scholarships for all levels of study and improved economic security may tilt the balance for the less affluent sections.

A troubadour of our times

In 1959, Robert Allen Zimmerman, an introverted teenager with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, renamed himself Bob Dylan after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Although he would reveal much later that Arthur Rimbaud and John Keats were major influences on his song writing, it was evident within a couple of years that this young man had melded poetry, protest, and song to create a unique style that rewrote the existing conventions of popular music. He was a modern day troubadour. At a time when pop was marked by cutesy love songs and catchy clear-cut rhythms, the deceptive irregular cadences of Dylan's folksy approach, the pinched and nasal tonality of his voice, and the elegiac lyrics that created anthemic songs of socio-political protest gave his music a stamp of astonishing power and originality. Now that he is 70, it seems apposite to recall how much he defined the music of the Sixties — that musically tumultuous decade, which fashioned the trajectory of popular music like no other since and which created music that lives with us even today. Most musicians and groups in that era — including The Beatles — were influenced by him in one way or another.

Over the years, there has been of course more than one Dylan. The acoustic folk of Blowin' In The Wind and A Hard Day's Rain a-Gonna Fall gave way in the mid-Sixties to a fusion of blues and rock, a period that produced two of his finest albums ( Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde) and saw him reach the heights of his creativity. In 1975, he reminded his fans that his genius was very much intact with his dark and brooding Blood On The Tracks, after which his music took on a new and soulful character in his so-called Christianity phase. By the early Nineties, it was widely believed that Dylan had exhausted his creative genius, but he surprised everyone with his 30th Grammy-winning Time Out Of Mind, which found a place in Rolling Stone magazine's list of 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. Of course, his place is music history owes principally to the audacious originality of his earlier work, that period in the first half of the Sixties in which he inspired an entire generation of musicians and charted a new direction for rock and rhythm and blues. Elvis Presley was the world's first true rock and roll star and The Beatles enjoyed the greatest fan following, but it was Dylan, contemporary bard and thinking person's musician, who persuaded us with his nasal twang and sparse instrumentation that pop could be a challenging, thought-provoking, and serious musical genre.