Virgin for sale, welcome to India in 2008

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...-mostviewedbox

The dark side of my beloved motherland.

.... had to be Rajasthan.

So sad to see these practices are still not stopped....

How true, sad side of my motherland too..

Well no, could have been anywhere in the cow belt.
I'm from Bihar, these things are not unheard of there.

Most anything goes in Bihar - except tourists.

Rajasthan, it seems, scores highly & often with these 'child bride' stories (et al) though .....

I read an article about this community in Tehelka a while back, but can't find the link.

It seems that the women are either prostitutes or do all the domestic work. The prostitutes are the sole earners of the community. The men do nothing.

The men, it reported, were not keen on change.

Yes, "Sad side of our Motherland"!

Disturbing Pictures and sad reading.

Being from a place and actually leaving there are two different things. I am not aware of such community any where in Bihar or neighbouring states. Rush, may be many summers have passed since you left; its time to pay a short visit to your native state and know it better. Of course, if you know any of such community from this part of our motherland, please, enlighten people like me!

I am sure you were not talking about Prostitution per se as this cancer of our society exist everywhere.

Due to lack of economic opportunities, the "victims" are choosing to do this out of their own free will. Simply stopping this acticity will only create more hardship for them.

It is meaningless to point to this or that state in India. Fact is that a lot of these states have very little economic opportunity for people with their qualifications.

The free will may be overstated. So far as the featured community is concerned, it seems that they are following tradition, as well as earning their family income.

Family and tradition and peer pressure are powerful steerers of free will.

Being from a place and actually leaving there are two different things. I am not aware of such community any where in Bihar or neighbouring states. Rush, may be many summers have passed since you left; its time to pay a short visit to your native state and know it better.

I assume you mean living there. Well, I think I'm more in touch with the goings on in Bihar then most Indians in India. I visit every 18months - two years. Have spent months there at a time in the past, not the the major cities but towns and back in my village. Ins summary, despite not having lived in India for 20 years I do think I know the state of play, particularly in my native state.

Yes, I do agree with you.
Poverty is the real issue here. But what pains me is the fact that a poor state like Bihar which is already suffering from a plethora of ills, garner all the jibes and winks because of ill-informed opinions!

a poor state like Bihar which is already suffering from a plethora of ills, garner all the jibes and winks because of ill-informed opinions!
Please point out the ill informed opinion

All of that exists in the western world. Recently there was a family of polygamists arrested here in the US. IMHO, moral values should be left to the individual. However, society has some responsibility to educte/inform the public at large about safety and health.

Here in Australia - in northern NSW Indigenous girls as young as 13 work as prostitutes for truck drivers - on the roadside. They do this not out of cultural tradition, but to earn money for petrol sniffing, alcohol etc... What is more shameful - a developed country where the indigenous children and people have been disenfranchised for so long that it has come to this? Or a developing country where people follow tradition into a profession that is morally repugnant, but at least gives them independence and some financial security. Sounds like the women in this community are the only ones doing anything, and they are doing what they know.. what alternative employment is there for them?

Taking the devil's advocate - the Indian girls have the support & presumably protection of their community, they are not outcasts from their community, they appear to be putting the money towards future comfort, and to be realistic - the other choice of marrying and slaving over a hot stove, a job digging the roads and raising a brood of children while your husband chews betel-nut and sits around seems no more appealing!

Yes, I know they are young, and of course if I could I'd go there personally and rescue all of them, send them to school and protect them I'd do it in a flash!

I only hope that someone, rather than judging what they do from a purely moralistic perspective, is trying to make sure they use condoms & have health checks - and that the community uses the income partly to educate the children and adults & invest in other small businesses so that this traditional form of income will eventually be replaced by another.

I recently read a really great book called Courtesans, which looked at the lives of 5 I think celebrated courtesans (mistresses - or if you like high class prostitutes of the nobility and royalty) - in England and France in the 18th and 19th centuries. These women joined their profession at a very young age in a time when a married woman could own no property and were entirely dependent on the whims of her husband, marriages were rarely made out of love but mostly for convenience or property, that is if she could find a husband, if not, she became a governess or companion if she was lucky, or lived with her parents until they died and their estate went to the nearest male relative!.

They were glamorous, highly educated & well read and worldly and wielded great power & political influence as well as accumulating vast amounts of money and estates...

Just making an observation... if you take western Christian morality out of the equation - it is easier to see why some people make certain choices (or have them made for them).

Very sad indeed. although I guess it can be compared with the countless teenage moms in the Western countries....