… how can India claim her making, when she was a dreamer—dare we say it—despite India, not because of it? What did India give Jyoti Singh? Not a society that respected her. Not an education for which her family didn’t have to sacrifice every little thing. Not even a safe bus to take home.

The rapists—Mukesh Singh who recounts his crime and talks to the camera without showing the slightest regret (nor a full understanding of the inconceivable gravity of his actions) and his criminal companions—aren’t they, perhaps, India’s real sons? “What kind of human beings are these?” asks former chief of justice Leila Seth in the film. They are, let’s repeat it, India’s sons. The product of poor education, of centuries of patriarchy, and of violence, poverty and impunity.

No, Jyoti Singh is not India’s daughter – Quartz

The “bizarre boom of plastic surgery in small-town India.”

A girl (woman?) brought in for plastic surgery by her mother-in-law:

Comments Dr Kalda (plastic surgeon), “The saas (mother-in-law) examined the girl’s naked body before marriage and brought her to me so she could be perfect for her son.”

A father makes his daughter have plastic surgery to remove a birthmark on her cheek because a prospective groom’s mother found it objectionable:

As she’s wheeled into the operation theatre she winks at her sister and says “Oh didi, dulhe ko bhi check kar lo jaa ke, us ke upar bhi daag hai toh saath surgery karwa le! (Go get the groom checked too, if he has a scar as well we can get surgery together!)” An unamused Roopam explains, “She is young. She doesn’t understand — it doesn’t matter if a man is scarred or ugly, he will still get a wife. But a woman must do all she can to make herself the ideal wife.

The ugly side of progress