It wasn’t the fear of spending the day with strangers, nor had waking up early in the morning ever irked me. No, it was not the unwillingness to learn, to answer questions and the fear of the imaginary “dungeon full of snakes” my teacher threatened to send me if I wouldn’t do my homework. It was corporal punishment that terrified me the most, especially since I’d experienced it myself.

Arson and poison attacks on schools across Afghanistan, mostly against those teaching girls, have forced students to defend themselves, an extra-curricular activity imposed by the government which blames the Taliban for the violence.  Some 550 schools in 11 provinces have been closed because the state could not provide enough security.

If you live in a tribal area in Pakistan, you are a woman, you are not educated or financially independent and the men in your family are the sovereign decision makers, then your chances of being victimized by an eccentric decision taken by a group of elderly men from your tribe, who you might not even know, are huge.

The moment a girl child is born in India, it’s not only the child who cries, but the whole family. The family feels disaster has arrived on their doorstep. The blame cannot be put only on poor and illiterate people, even the so called ‘educated’ suffer from this syndrome.

Afghanistan has been suffering from internal conflict and violence for the last three decades. This, combined with extreme poverty in many cases, has caused people to lose their mental stability. Several cases of violence illustrate how women routinely become victims of violence in patriarchal Afghan society.

It was a freezing cold December morning in India. I was wrapped up in my thick blanket.  The alarm buzzed, coupled with my mother panicking about her early morning list of “to-dos”.

I have always been a “Daddy’s girl”. And I am proud to be one too. But being a privileged one doesn’t make me insensitive.  Coming from a country like India where the birth of a girl child is still considered a curse, it makes me wonder if we have really come a long way as a country.

 Living in my world as an educated, urban, independent woman I became a bit selfish. I didn’t realise that the old order of societal norms still prevailed around me. In the process of my own transition from being a much loved daughter, sister, friend to a much loved wife I had certainly become less aware of what was going on in Indian society. And the birth of a girl child is one case in point.But two incidents in a row changed it all and woke me up with a start. It was the 15 March 2012; I was browsing the Indian news channels and e-newspapers. One name that made headlines was Baby Falak, a two year old girl who died of cardiac arrest. It was her third cardiac arrest in three months. She was admitted in a hospital in Delhi on 18 January 2012 with a fractured skull and human bite marks on her body.