Boy or Girl? — The Question Nobody Wants to Answer Honestly
Boy or Girl? — The Question Nobody Wants to Answer Honestly
स्त्री शक्ति है, स्त्री सृष्टि है। "Woman is power. Woman is creation." — But bsdk, creation ke saath pain bhi aata hai, and power ke saath loneliness bhi.
Overview
So, I put up an Instagram story one day. Simple question, no big deal I thought.
"Suppose a child is about to be born. That child comes to you and asks — what should I be, a boy or a girl? What's your advice?"
And the results? 65% said — be a boy. 35% said girl.
Now the reasons that came in were interesting, some were funny, and some were honestly... painful.
"Bhai ladke ko zyada freedom milti hai India mein, no contest."
"Ladki bano yaar, laws sab tumhare favor mein hain and you know exactly how to use them."
"It doesn't matter — your work decides your life."
Cool opinions. But none of them actually went deep. Nobody pulled up numbers. Nobody talked about real cases. Nobody talked about what it actually MEANS to live as a boy or a girl in this country.
So here I am. This blog is not a feminist blog. This is not a men's rights blog either. This is just — the truth, because someone had to say it.
We're going deep today. Laws, cases, history, numbers, real stories. And at the very end, we'll answer that child's question.
Let's get into it...
Chapter 1: "Why Is This Question So Damn Hard?"
यत्र नार्यस्तु पूज्यन्ते रमन्ते तत्र देवताः। "Where women are worshipped, the gods reside." — Manusmriti
You've seen this shloka on WhatsApp forwards. On school notice boards. On those motivational posters that teachers put up thinking it'll do something.
And then you step outside.
A girl can't take an auto alone at night without her heart rate going up. A guy gets falsely accused and spends 4 years running from court to court while his life falls apart. A mother kills her daughter before she's even born. A father tells his son "topper ban, nahi toh ghar ka naam dooba dega" — like the kid chose to be born into that pressure.
This question — boy or girl — is not philosophical. It's practical. It's about survival in a country that treats both genders like shit in different ways.
We're going to look at this honestly. Not from the boy's side. Not from the girl's side. Just from the truth's side.
And yes, it's going to get uncomfortable. Good. Uncomfortable means real.
Chapter 2: "The History Nobody Teaches You"
इतिहास वो नहीं जो किताबों में लिखा है। इतिहास वो है जो लोगों की आदतों में जिंदा है। "History is not what's written in books. History is what lives in people's habits."
Before we talk about laws and cases, we need to understand one thing — none of what we see today appeared out of nowhere. Every social custom, every law, every bias — it has a history. And if you don't know that history, you end up fighting the symptoms instead of the cause.
So let's go back.
The Ghoonghat Story — A Protection That Became A Prison
In ancient India, before the invasions — look at any goddess statue. Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga, Parvati. None of them have their faces covered. Bare-headed. Full presence. The historical and artistic evidence is clear.
Now fast forward to the 12th and 13th century. The Delhi Sultanate. Then the Mughals. Invasions happening. Wars happening. Women being taken.
Rajput families, to protect their women from invaders, started pulling the sari's pallu over the woman's face when she stepped out. Hide her from strangers. Don't let unknown men see her. It was a protective measure, like a wartime rule.
But wars ended. The Mughals settled. The British came. Independence happened. And bsdk, the ghoonghat never left. The threat it was designed for? Gone. The custom it created? Stayed.
That's how culture works. A one-time emergency response becomes a tradition, and the tradition becomes an identity, and the identity becomes non-negotiable. And nobody remembers the original reason.
So when someone today tells a girl to cover her face "out of respect for elders" — what they're really transmitting is a centuries-old wartime fear that nobody has bothered to examine. The invader is gone. The ghoonghat stayed.
The Dowry Story — How The British Turned Stridhan Into A Weapon
Original India had something called Stridhan. The bride's family gave gifts — jewellery, clothes, household items — directly to the bride. It was her money. Her property. She controlled it. It was financial security for her in case of abandonment or widowhood.
That was the original system.
Then came the British. In 1793, Lord Cornwallis introduced the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, enabling private land ownership. And in the same legal overhaul, British law completely prohibited women from owning property.
Think about that for a second. Women couldn't own land. Couldn't inherit. Whatever money came into the marriage belonged to the husband by law.
So now when the bride's family gave gifts — who got them? The husband. Who controlled them? The husband. And slowly, the in-laws realized they could demand MORE before they would agree to the marriage.
Stridhan — money for the woman — became dowry — money extorted from the woman's family to give to the man's family. Veena Talwar Oldenburg documented this entire transformation in her book "Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime."
The British left in 1947. The property law eventually changed. Women got inheritance rights in 1956, with more reforms in 2005. But the habit of demanding dowry? It never left. It adapted. Today, instead of gold and cows, it's cars, cash, and foreign trips.
2023 NCRB data — over 6,100 women died in dowry-related deaths in a single year. That's 17 women every day, dying because of a custom the British legal system accidentally invented.
The 498A Story — Why That Law Exists At All
In the 1970s and early 1980s, newspapers started running stories about young brides dying in kitchen fires. Stove explosions. Accidents, families said.
Women's rights organizations said — wait. These are murder. They're called dowry deaths. The in-laws burn the bride when more money isn't coming.
The Anti-Bride Burning Campaign of the 1980s exposed what was really happening in kitchens across India. It wasn't accidental fires. It was women being set on fire because their families couldn't pay more.
The government finally responded in 1983 by inserting Section 498A into the IPC — making cruelty by husband or his relatives a non-bailable, cognizable offence. No investigation needed before arrest.
Was it extreme? Yes. Was it necessary? At that time, yes. Women were dying and police were filing it as "accidental."
But here's the thing about extreme laws — they create extreme misuse on the other side. And that's exactly what happened over decades. A law written in blood for genuine victims started getting weaponized in divorce courts. And nobody fixed the law. So now we have both: real victims who need it, and falsely accused men who are destroyed by it.
The Supreme Court itself called it "legal terrorism" in certain cases. But the law still exists largely unchanged, because fixing it would require admitting that both realities are true simultaneously, and that's uncomfortable for everyone.
The Shah Bano Story — When One Old Woman Changed India
- Indore, Madhya Pradesh. Shah Bano Begum, 62 years old, mother of five, married for 43 years. Her husband Mohammed Ahmed Khan divorced her by triple talaq and stopped paying her maintenance.
She had no money. No property. She went to court asking for Rs. 500 per month. That's it. Not revenge. Not drama. Just — I need to survive.
It went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1985, the court ruled in her favor. Section 125 of the CrPC — maintenance rights — applies to all citizens regardless of religion.
The religious backlash was immediate. Muslim personal law boards said the court had no right to override Sharia. Protests happened across India. And Rajiv Gandhi's Congress government, worried about Muslim votes, overturned the Supreme Court judgment by passing the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 — which took away Muslim women's right to maintenance under secular law.
One 62-year-old woman asking for Rs. 500 a month exposed a fault line so deep it reshaped Indian politics.
Shah Bano herself? She eventually refused the maintenance because the religious community pressured her to "not go against Islam."
A woman who won a Supreme Court case was pressured into rejecting her own victory.
That's India.
Nirbhaya — The Case That Rewrote Laws Overnight
December 16, 2012. A 23-year-old physiotherapy intern. A bus in Delhi. Six men.
You know what happened. Everyone knows.
But do you know what changed in the law directly because of her?
The Justice JS Verma Committee was formed in six days. It received 80,000 suggestions from the public in one month. The Criminal Law Amendment Act 2013 — now called the Nirbhaya Act — widened the definition of rape, defined consent properly, created new offences of stalking and voyeurism, made acid attacks a specific criminal offence with minimum 10-year sentencing.
One case. Entire chapters of criminal law rewritten.
That's how powerful public anger is. And that's how broken the system had to be for that anger to be necessary.
The 2024 reforms under the new BNS continued this — stricter sentences, faster trials, digital evidence recording. But marital rape is still not a crime. The Verma Committee had recommended criminalizing it. That recommendation was quietly dropped.
So understand this before we go forward —
Every law that protects women today was written in response to something horrific that actually happened. The ghoonghat was born from invasion. The dowry demand was manufactured by colonial law. 498A was written in the ash of burned brides. Shah Bano showed what happens when law refuses to protect women. Nirbhaya showed what happens when a society stops pretending everything is fine.
Laws don't fall from the sky. They are written in pain.
And the laws that are now being misused? They were originally written in legitimate, documented pain. That's the tragedy — the same tools built for protection can become weapons in wrong hands.
Keep this in mind when we look at the cases.
Chapter 3: "Who Does The Law Actually Protect Right Now?"
कानून अंधा होता है। "Law is blind." — Everyone says this. But bro, if it's blind, why does it only fall on certain people?
India has two kinds of laws. Laws specifically made for women. And laws that are technically gender-neutral but work very differently in practice.
Laws That Specifically Favour Women:
1. Section 498A IPC / BNS Section 85-86 — The Cruelty Law Wife complains of cruelty, husband and his entire family can be arrested. Non-bailable. Immediate. No investigation needed before arrest.
2. Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 Only women can file a complaint under this Act. A man being abused at home has zero dedicated legal protection. No equivalent Act exists for men.
3. Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 Punishes giving and taking of dowry. But FIRs almost always land on the husband's family.
4. POSH Act, 2013 Workplace sexual harassment protection. Only for women.
5. Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 Financial and job protection during pregnancy. Gender-specific, understandable.
6. Section 354 BNS Outraging modesty of a woman. Men have no equivalent protection.
7. Rape Laws — BNS Section 63-70 Legally only a man can be the accused. Male rape victims have no dedicated legal framework. The new BNS even removed Section 377 IPC which at least partially protected male victims — and replaced it with nothing.
8. Arrest Rules — BNSS No woman can be arrested before sunrise or after sunset. No such protection for men.
9. Maintenance Laws Husband legally bound to pay wife's maintenance. The reverse is not legally mandated the same way.
Total women-specific laws and provisions: roughly 40 to 50+ across Acts, constitutional provisions under Article 15(3), and IPC/BNS sections. Solid number.
Where The Law Still Fails Women:
Marital rape is still not a crime. Exception 2 to Section 63 BNS explicitly says — if wife is above 18, husband forcing himself on her is not rape.
A woman who dies without a will, with no spouse or children — her property goes to her husband's heirs, not her own parents.
Rape of a separated wife carries 2-7 years sentence. Rape of any other woman? 7 years to life. Same crime. Lighter sentence based on relationship.
Where The Law Fails Men:
No dedicated Act protecting men from domestic violence by women.
No equivalent to POSH for men in the workplace.
Section 377 IPC, which at least covered male sexual assault victims, was removed in BNS with no replacement.
One false FIR — no investigation required before arrest. Your entire life collapses first, truth comes out later.
Score?
Women-specific protective laws: 40+ Men-specific protective laws: Zero dedicated Acts.
That's the legal reality. But laws on paper mean nothing without seeing what happened to real people.
Chapter 4: "The Cases That Should Make You Angry"
सत्य कड़वा होता है। "Truth is bitter." — And if it isn't making you uncomfortable, you're not looking at it right.
Both sides. No favorites here. And we're going beyond the headlines everyone already knows.
When Girls Got Humiliated — Stories India Barely Talked About
Case 1: Pragya Prasun, Varanasi (2006)
Twelve days after her wedding, Pragya was travelling by train to Delhi when a former suitor she had refused to marry threw acid on her face while she slept. 2 am. 47% burn injuries. He was caught the next day trying to attack her again. He got four and a half years.
Here's the part nobody talks about — years after the attack, Pragya went to open a bank account. The bank turned her away. Why? KYC requires blinking for biometric scanning. Acid attack survivors often cannot blink. There is no alternate provision anywhere in the system.
She built the Atijeevan Foundation and has helped 250+ survivors since. The man who destroyed her face got less time in jail than most people spend in a single job.
Case 2: Nikki Bhati, Greater Noida (August 2025)
Nobody outside UP covered this properly.
Nikki Bhati, 28 years old. Married in 2016. Nine years. In those nine years — a Scorpio given in dowry, then a Bullet motorbike, then Rs. 35 lakh in cash, and when her father bought a Mercedes, her husband wanted that too.
On August 21, 2025, her husband Vipin and his mother dragged her by the hair, poured an inflammable liquid on her, and set her on fire. In front of her young son. In front of her sister Kanchan who was married into the same family.
A video of Nikki engulfed in flames, stumbling down the stairs, went viral. She was rushed to Safdarjung Hospital. She didn't make it.
In 2025. Not 1975. 2025.
Case 3: The Haryana Girl (Kaithal, 2023)
No famous name. No viral hashtag.
A girl from Kaithal, Haryana fell in love with a boy from a different caste. Her own parents strangled her for it. Police arrested them. The case went into the system.
That's honor killing. Not some medieval thing. Kaithal, 2023. And it's not rare — Uttar Pradesh alone had 50 reported honor killings in recent data. Conviction rate? Below 20%. Most cases don't even get reported. They get listed as "accidents."
When Boys Got Humiliated — The Side Nobody Talks About
Case 4: Atul Subhash, Bengaluru (December 2024)
You've heard the name. Here's what happened.
Atul Subhash, 34 years old, AI professional. Found dead in his apartment. Suicide by hanging. 24-page suicide note. 81-minute video.
3 years of his life destroyed by legal battles. 6 cases filed against him — domestic violence, dowry harassment, more. 120 court hearings over 3 years, travelling Bengaluru to Jaunpur because the court wouldn't shift. His in-laws allegedly demanded Rs. 3 crore as settlement and Rs. 30 lakh just for him to see his own son.
He wrote about the judge allegedly asking for money. He wrote about the system being broken. He wrote about nobody listening to men.
And then he died.
After his death, a PIL was filed in the Supreme Court noting that "lakhs of men commit suicide every year because of multiple cases showered upon them by their wives."
Bsdk, yeh insaan bechaara nahi tha. Educated. Employed. Articulate. The system crushed him anyway.
Case 5: Vishnu Tiwari — 20 Years For A Crime He Never Committed
This one should be in school textbooks. It won't be.
Vishnu Tiwari, Uttar Pradesh, convicted of rape in 2001. The complaint? Filed because of a land dispute between families. He said from day one — this is fabricated, I never even spoke to her. Nobody listened.
He spent 20 years in jail.
He filed appeal after appeal from inside prison. For 16 years, his case sat as "defective" in the system because paperwork wasn't processed properly. He couldn't afford a lawyer outside. Nobody on the outside was fighting for him.
2021, Allahabad High Court acquitted him. Medical evidence showed no signs of assault. No corroboration. Nothing.
He walked out at 43. Told reporters — "How do I start life at 43?"
Nobody had an answer.
Case 6: The Dehradun Father — 5 Years For His Daughter's Boyfriend's Idea
A 42-year-old laundryman from Dehradun. His 15-year-old daughter was seeing a boy he didn't approve of. The boyfriend's solution? Get the father out of the picture.
He convinced the daughter to file a rape complaint against her own father. Case registered December 2019. Father arrested. Sent to jail.
Five years passed.
In 2024, during cross-examination, the daughter admitted she filed a false case because her father had disapproved of the relationship. Medical reports showed no evidence of rape.
He was acquitted. He came out at 47. Five years. Gone. The boyfriend who engineered this? Nothing happened to him.
Case 7: Jaswant, Gautam Budh Nagar — 11 Years, False Complaint He Didn't Even Write
A rape case was filed against Jaswant. He was convicted. Went to jail.
During trial, the complainant herself admitted in court that she didn't know what was written in her own complaint. Someone else had drafted it for her. Medical evidence showed no forced intercourse. No injuries. Nothing matching the allegations.
The court acquitted him in 2026 — after 11 years in jail. In a rare move, the court also initiated criminal proceedings against the woman for filing a false case.
Eleven years. For a complaint the complainant didn't even write herself.
Case 8: Ketan Agarwal, Lohagad Fort, Pune (June 2026)
Ketan Vishal Agarwal, real estate businessman. Went trekking at Lohagad Fort with his fiancée on June 18, 2026. Didn't come back.
Investigation found his own fiancée Siya Goyal had allegedly conspired with her boyfriend Chetan Chaudhary to push Ketan off the fort. Police say the plan was weeks in the making, an earlier attempt had been made on May 31, and the two had met at a cafe specifically to identify spots where he could be pushed.
He trekked with the person he was going to marry. That same person allegedly wanted him dead.
The Numbers:
NCRB data — male suicide rate: 14.2 per 1 lakh. Female suicide rate: 6.6 per 1 lakh.
Average over 8 years: 1,01,188 men die by suicide every year vs 43,314 women.
In 2021, married men's suicide rate was 24.3 per lakh. Married women's was 8.4. Married men are dying at three times the rate.
India accounts for 36.6% of all female suicides globally. Both numbers are disasters. Nobody wins this.
Chapter 5: "The Honest Scoreboard"
न स्त्री, न पुरुष — दोनों आधे हैं एक-दूसरे के बिना। "Neither woman, nor man — both are incomplete without the other." — Ardhanarishvara, the half-Shiva-half-Shakti concept
Honest list. No sugarcoating.
Being a Girl in India — The Real Picture:
Fear of stepping out at night is not an exaggeration — it's a daily calculation. 4,45,256 crimes against women were recorded in 2022 alone.
Life decisions — marriage, education, career — in many families, someone else makes them for you. You're "paraya dhan" before you've figured out who you are.
Dowry burden exists before you're born. Marital rape is still not a crime. Workplace harassment reporting is career suicide in many places. And India accounts for over a third of global female suicides.
Being a Boy in India — The Real Picture:
You're the "ghar ka chirag" from day one, which sounds great until you realize it means you carry everything and nobody asks if you're okay.
"Mard rote nahi." That sentence has quietly destroyed more men than any single law ever could.
There's no law protecting you if your wife is abusive. Your suicide rate is more than double women's. Family pressure increased by 107.5% as the cause of male suicides between 2014 and 2021.
One false FIR and your life collapses. When you're acquitted after 5, 11, or 20 years — nobody gives you those years back.
Chapter 6: "So What Does That Child Choose?"
जन्म लेना अपने हाथ में नहीं। पर जीना — वो तुम्हारे हाथ में है। "You don't choose your birth. But living — that's yours."
That child stands in front of you and asks — "Tell me, what should I be?"
If you're born a girl — 40+ laws protect you on paper. Society is slowly changing. Women today are more educated, more independent, more vocal than ever. But the physical fear is real. Night is dangerous. Harassment is real. People will spend your entire life trying to control you.
If you're born a boy — more social freedom, more movement, more decisions without explaining yourself. But your pain is invisible. No legal net if you fall inside your own home. Financial pressure entirely yours. And if someone weaponizes the legal system against you, the law was not built to protect you — and you may lose years, or decades, before anyone believes you.
Who has it harder?
65% voted boy. Looking at the data, you can understand why. Social freedom, physical safety, financial options — men still have more of all three in India.
But "more options" is not the same as "easy life."
Because a boy cries too — just nobody hears it. Because a girl can be happy too — just the system doesn't want her to stay that way.
Real answer to that child?
"Beta, you asked the right question. But you asked the wrong person. You don't need to choose who to be. You need to choose what world you want to build. Because the problem isn't being a boy or a girl — the problem is a country that makes both harder than they need to be. And if that world doesn't exist yet — you build it."
Bonus: What History Actually Tells Us
Every conversation about gender in India gets stuck in the present — current laws, current cases, current outrage.
But the present was shaped by the past.
The ghoonghat was a wartime emergency that became culture. The dowry demand was a legal side-effect of British colonial law banning women from owning property. Section 498A was written in the ash of women burned alive in kitchens. The Nirbhaya Act was written after a 23-year-old died on a hospital bed thirteen days after being attacked on a moving bus.
None of this came from nowhere. And none of this will go away by just writing new laws either.
The real change happens at the beginning — in how a boy is raised to believe he must never cry, and how a girl is raised to believe she must always adjust.
That's where the actual work is.
QUERY
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END
दोनों आधे-आधे हैं — यह सृष्टि का नियम है। "Both are halves — that's the law of creation." पर दर्द किसका ज़्यादा है — यह इंसान का बनाया हुआ नियम है। "But whose pain is greater — that's the law man made." And what man makes, man can change.
Something new is coming. Stay tuned.
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