Yesterday, I gave my driver the afternoon off so that he and his wife could go to the doctor to find out the gender of their baby.
Today, he tells me he won’t be able to come to work today or tomorrow because his wife just had an abortion. !ncredible !ndia
How much in USD does a driver cost in India?
Depends. About 50-200 bucks a month. I pay my guy $200.
lol no way
Baller status - I’m getting my cfa to become a driver and here you are with your own personal indian driver. Fcking baller.
Why can he not come to work? It’s not like he had the abortion.
Seems like you guys are getting caught up about the fact that I have a driver. That’s not the important part of the story.
My driver had his wife get an abortion because the ultrasound was a girl.
I posted something, but I don’t see it here: I was asking if they believe you are reincarnated as the same sex, or do you change from time to time?
Ive heard about these kinds of things happening but I’ve never actually had someone tell me it just happened. Wow.
^ Yeah me too. It’s one of those things that we know happens in India VERY frequently, but nobody admits to doing it. 7 out of 10 newborns are male in India. So you quant geniuses can figre out how many sex selected abortions must be happening. My driver already has a girl. I asked him if he cares about it being a boy or a girl He said, “Oh, I don’t care.”
Well, I guess he did. He bribed the doctor to tell him which one it was. It’s llegal for the doctors to tell you for this very reason. He had to pay the doctor almost 150 dollars to find out.
This guy has driven for me for 4 years. He’s a really nice guy. A great employee. So not at all like the kind of person you would expect. He’s also a dedicated family man. So dedicated, he’d kill his unborn child just because it’s a girl.
Of course we are fascinated by the driver for 200/month! Man, maybe you are right about the expat thing.
That is a shame about the baby. I just can’t understand that culture it seems, despite one of my best friends being first generation Indian American. It makes me feel better he has trouble too
^ That’s not the end of the perks, RawRaw.
It is more likely that he does care, but it is possible that it’s the wife that wants a son and chose to abort the daughter. My understanding is that if she doesn’t have a son, the daughters will go to someone else’s family and be slaves to their mothers-in-law when the mother-in-law gets old. Without a son, your driver’s wife will have no one to take care of her (or at least be her slave). The fact that one girl was acceptable in the family does suggest that they are not entirelly opposed to having girls: it’s just that if they’re going to have two kids, they want one of them to be a boy.
It’s still an unplatable reason to abort a kid, but it’s not quite as backwards as someone who will abort a girl on the first try.
Here in the states, actually, there is some sex selection abortion going on in upper class communities, and interestingly enough, it’s boys that get aborted more. Again, it’s usually a second child, where the parents want a boy and a girl and already have a boy. The New York Times magazine section did a big article on this some years back. I think it was titled “Going for the girl,” or something like that.
Yep, remember, when your daughter gets married, she’s “given away” to her groom’s family, whereas the son essentially stays with you. While I don’t mean to justify it, these are essentially investment decisions in a climate unfriendly of investment in girls.
Maybe “James” didn’t have enough money to bribe the doctor the first time and took his chances. Hope the b!tch gets another girl the next time.
Yeah a driver for $200 would be awesome. Deduct the extra days off.
oh I will. Yeah, I’m pretty sure he made the decision with his wife. My driver is not a poor guy either. In addition to working for me he runs a few side businesses.
The rationale is pretty simple. It’s not that they want save their daughter from a life of slavery. They just don’t want another daughter. They just want a son and do not value having a girl.
At my last job, I worked with a couple of mormon guys who apparently did nothing but work and make babies. One of them had 2 daughters and the other had 2 sons. Since they each said they wanted like 4 kids they joked that if they each kept up their trends of all girls and all boys they might swap the final one so they would each have both a boy and girl. They said they were joking but I have a funny feeling they might consider it. Or maybe just swap wives. Who knows.
If I ever have kids, I think I’d want 1 of each or 2 sons and a daughter. But that requires getting married, so we’ll see how that goes.
I have a driver too - he just happens to work for 50 different people at at time.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to discount the underlying situation, but honestly it didn’t even phase me. I personally think, at least when speaking for the greater of society (wow this statement could cause chaos), having an abortion is much better than popping out kids left and right. Though this doesn’t directly relate to aborting a female over a male, it does indirectly because these families would just try until they had a male (my grandparents had 5 women before having their first son)
Then again, i’ve always subscribed to the malthusian theory…
Yeah, I mean anything to slow down India’s birthrate is fine by me. But yeah, what a sausage fest this place is gonna be in a decade or so.
My point wasn’t that the wife wanted to spare a daughter the humiliation of being a slave to a mother-in-law. Clearly that wasn’t a motivation for the first child. My point was the wife might want to *be* a mother-in-law with a slave daughter-in-law. She can’t do that without a son.
The implication of not enough women to go around for the number of men is of course something that will be “interesting” as it evolves. China already has some 30+ million men more than women, so a population slightly smaller than Spain’s will basically go through life without a mate (that’s simplistic, since many people will have more than one mate in life, but you get the picture). On the one hand, it may may give women more bargaining power simply because of their rarity, but it could also lead to men being more violent towards women in an attempt to hang on to what they think they have. It may also just mean that a large number of men without women will start to become more violent, with less to lose and no partner trying to calm them down at all.
It’s not an enviable situation. And of course, the country has nukes too, so that will be fun!
I’d go Long Gang Rape in such an environment.