FIshermen launching their boat on Lighthouse Beach - Kovalam, Kerela, India via Flickr’s lyon_photographyIt’s a man’s world in India, according to Australia’s The Age reporter Graham Reilly who reflects on the two years he lived in India’s Kerala countryside.

In intimate, narrative travelogue style, we become literary fireflies, flitting across the orangeaid details of his driver’s pending arranged marriage and other observations about life in Kerala.  Such a time-honored custom remains grounds for celebration, not Western-style judgements.

Our adrenalin rises as fears mount. In spite of the gorgeous landscape, this will not be a good story for women.

” … there is another India, an incredibly troubling India, an India that doesn’t appear in the tourist ads, an India that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is never likely to see on official visits to the capital to meet his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh. It was certainly an India that left me confounded, shocked and struggling to understand the country’s many complexities and inconvenient truths.” The Age

The list of discriminations in the Kerala region of India are well known here at A of C:

- The killing of girl babies and the resulting gender imbalance which will undoubtedly result in more sex trafficking and stealing of women for sex and forced marriage. We fear this trend will escalate.

- Dowery deaths when families can’t come up with sufficient dowery, resulting in bride burning. The Lancelet estimated that bride burning deaths ran 100,000 per year in 2001. It’s feared that dowry deaths are increasing.

Graham Reilly ends his provocative and troubling observations with an observation that knaws at me as well.