Burnt Brides Pay the Bitter Price of Dowry

Questions

1. Nirmala Chaudary was a girl who got married to a man named Hari Ram. Hari was chosen by her parents. Nirmala's family paid a generous dowry (a sum that the family of the bride pays to the groom) for their standards and the marriage was sealed. Only 4 months after, Nirmala's new husband came to her father, Subdash and asked for more money and a share in the Chaudary's flat. Understandably, Subdash refused to pay and 2 weeks later Nirmala was fatally injured in a kerosene fire in her in the house of the Ram family. Mr. Ram claimed that it had been suicide and since there were no evidence or witnesses of the crime there wasn't done anything about it.
   
2. Bride-burnings are getting more and more common because more and more people starts realizing that it is an easy way of making a lot of money from dowrys without getting punished for it. Over 1500 women have burnt to death in their homes since 1985, and that is just in New Delhi. Of course india has a huge population and compared to that the number may seem small but as a very likely way of murdering someone it is a lot.
   
3. The size of the dowry is determined mostly by the quality of the husband she will get. For example an education or good looks could raise the dowry quite a lot.
   
4. The Dowry Prohibition act does not have any effect because such a huge amount of people see it as a standard at almost every wedding. It is like forbidding danish people from giving each other gifts on Christmas Eve. Also, in the prohibition act, the word dowry is not defined. It is basically a gift and you can't forbid people of willingly giving other people positive gifts. It wouldn't make sense.
   
5. Marriage in India is not just declaring your love to one another. For the women's part it is determine who they will spend the rest of their lives with. Because once a woman gets married, she will live with her grooms family and perhaps never see her own family again. If the women isn't content with her new life there isn't much to do about it. Because divorce is very frowned upon and if done leaves a stain on the family possibly denying any sisters' chances of getting married. Therefore sometimes suicide is the only resort for an abused bride.
   
6. Both the women and the men in the advertisements wants to highlight their physical features such as height, and their educations or any other provable accomplishment.
   
7. In the western countries there are generally less traditions that are bound by religion and the focus is more on the individual freedom, which isn't a good thing all the time, because families have a tendency to become a bit distant of each other. Of course there are also extremist religious groups in western society but these exist all over the world. It has also been a general concern that women should have equal rights as men since the middle of the 20th century. In muslim countries some people think that women are being discriminated because they have to cover themselves, but if you were to ask a normal muslim female they would say that they do it completely willingly because that is what they believe in.