We all know the huge lecture on how we Indians have different strategies against growing up one’s sons or daughters and how its screwing up the gender ratio in most literate of cities. This discrimination is built inside the religious rituals from the point of baby birth. Anyway.

A quite of a verbal fashion that we see in most northern states is to call one’s daughters or grand daughters as “beta”. For those unaware, its a hindi word which means a Son. The reason put forth is to express no gender discrimination by the elderly. Its supposed to be a sign that they give equal opportunities and preferences to both Sons and Daugters of the family. We are a growing country and we wish to show our literacy and open heartedness in everything we can. They all seemed to have that silly mistake.

Well, if you thought that both genders are equal before you then why the hell you had to title one as other? Calling her what she is isn’t enough eh? The Title “beta” when given to a daughter is simply taking her to the better place. So you see, being a son is that better place. There goes your gender differences from what you show rather than what you still bloody believe inside. Try this, call the sons as “beti” (The hindi word for a daughter).

I have been maintaining a lengthy genealogy of my family since 1850s. Like ~1400 people. My laptop opens up the MySQL+PHP localhost on every visit to new relatives and starts digging. Kinda my hobby. Often it happens that people don’t feel like sharing info about daughter’s or cousing daughters. That they say is cause, she is merely born here, she actually belongs to a different family after marriage. My DB is not only to my (grand * N) fathers tree but anybody who can link and dig up.

That 9 percent does not remotely show, that our rituals and social conditions are still way behind three hundred years even today. Maybe everything takes is own sweet time to mature. After all we stands for 1.2 billion people. Enjoy the ride!