I had thought that I would find much to dissect, discuss and disagree with in the remaining part of the book. No such luck. The rest of the book is a meandering look at whatever seems to catch Mr. Sen's fancy. His love for Tagore and Ray are obvious and explicitly stated. Nest he goes into an analysis of what's wrong with India, with particular regard to its inequalities, whether related to gender, caste or class. I do agree with most of what he says there, but then he doesn't say anything path-breaking either. Nothing I didn't already know or suspect. How class inequalities impact every other cause of social, economic, and political inequity is something, however, I had not considered before. It makes sense, of course, as he points out when discussing communal riots across India in the last half century and more. He makes the very valid and I'm sure, underappreciated point that while most victims belonged to quite different communities, they belonged to the same class, the underprivileged and deprived. His talk on gender inequalities did not reveal anything new to me. I've always held that female empowerment has to go way beyond the freedom to get gainful employment outside the home. Education and exposure to the world to open up her mind to the possibilities there are out there are vital to make the woman an effective agent of change in the family and society. One thing I didn't know was that South-east Asian countries and China follow the same demographic trends as India with regards to preference for male progeny and the resulting skewing of the sex ratio and other indices of female health and well-being. I had assumed that with increased industrialization and a higher standard of living, those societies would have followed the Western trends towards a higher proportion of females at all age points. It seems that social ideas and practices that plague India are the same that affect these countries too. Makes you wonder then, why this male preference arises in Asian countries in the first place. As my wife pointed out, dowry as a modern institution prevails mostly in India and as far as we know, not in SE Asia. But I think, the malaise goes deeper than simple financial outlay. Asian countries are still preponderantly patriarchal. Male domination leads to the desire for male offspring. In the West, for a number of reasons (not least the dire shortage of males in the workforce post the two World Wars), females have gained a better foothold in the workplace and the society at large. Of course, the stress on education in the west over the last couple of centuries has helped to no small extent. When the opportunity arose in the 1910s, there were a lot of educated, willing women joining the workforce in various capacities. The trend got strengthened in the Second World War, and women's lib has never looked back since. I feel that in India and other Asian countries, this necessity never arose and most Indians still look upon the idea of women working as a matter of economic necessity rather than an essential part of their life experience and personality. As a result maybe, the ideas of women empowerment that arose with education and employment have not yet taken root here. Of course, Sen does not go into the depth of this question, and rightly so, because this would be a book in itself.
I still have some 50 odd pages to go, but I don't think I shall be really impressed by anything in the pages to come. I had kept my expectations deliberately low while buying this book because I have only too often endured the disappointment of dashed hopes, and I am thankful to say that I have not been misplaced in my assumption this time. By no means unreadable, but by the same measure, not a masterpiece either.
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