National Girl Child Day on January 24 celebrates gender equality and creates awareness around female foeticide, abandoning female newborns and other atrocities against them. Harshali Zine talks about the occasion and shares whether things have changed for better and if today many families welcome girls with much grandeur like they would if a boy is born unlike what it was earlier. She also points out a few more issues that are plaguing our society in today’s time.
“It will sound funny but we are in times when people are in desperate need of straight children. We are in the midst of a gender identity crisis. Females don’t identify with their female bodies and males don’t identify with their male bodies. The real question is why is it happening, especially now. There are so many sexes now. In the future how many sexes will exist? What made humanity reach this point. What has made this kind of chromosomal and hormonal imbalance in human bodies, why this confusion in physical characteristics? The million-dollar question is amidst this confusion, how will reproduction be smooth?” says the actor.
The second point that Harshali highlights is that people these days are desperately wanting to have their biological children through natural means.
“But IVFs and surrogacies are gaining popularity because reproduction through natural means is a crisis now. So the question is how did humanity get to this point that nothing that happens is through natural means? Everything is so hybrid and engineered including reproduction,” she shares.
The actor also adds that in an age where having healthy children by natural means is a blessing, any gender is more than welcome and valued be it, girl child or boy child. “Humanity is not in a position to value only one gender in the era where robots have started to reproduce, this dire need to have unengineered healthy human children because in future it’s going to be machines versus humans,” she says.
Harshali feels awful thinking that such discrimination in genders have been happening for ages.
“Yes today the mindset of people living in cities have changed, and any gender is welcome and raised happily without any discrimination. But due to the discrimination between the genders I see there is a lot of hatred and competition between the two genders. The female gender that has been oppressed and suppressed for ages are constantly trying to prove they are better than their male counterparts. So this cycle of oppressing and suppressing genders is still going on. And someone has to stop this because both these genders are uniquely different from each other and no one gender would exist without the other,” she adds.
The actor opines that the society should start respecting the power and skill that each of the two genders bring in rather than comparing the genders and making them compete with each other, which is just insane because they have different qualities and abilities.
“Before civilization developed, only matriarchy existed. The word May-tree-ar-kee derives from the Latin word mater, meaning mother and archein means to rule. Things were perfect in that era even when females led the society, as the qualities of both the genders were respected. Females took care of domestic work, rituals, ceremonies as they were more balanced in mind and heart and males did outdoor work as they had more physical strength, until civilization started developing, patriarchy came into existence. Physical strength was considered superior and men started intimidating females with their physical strength. But male and female energies are powerful forces with female being the negative energy force and male being the positive energy force. Together they create a life force, competition between two forces has to stop,” she adds.