BREASTS UNVEILED
Wikipedia says "Breastfeeding is the feeding of an infant or young child with milk from a woman's breasts. Babies have a sucking reflex that enables them to suck and swallow milk. With few exceptions, human breast milk is the best source of nourishment for human infants." The "few exceptions" which the Wikipedia mentions are the child with classic Galactosemia and the mother with pulmonary tuberculosis or HIV. Now its time to add "environment" to the list.
Few days back, I was traveling from Erode to Bangalore in a second class seater of a day train. A couple with their infant (seems to be 6 months old) were accompanying me, sitting to my opposite. I understood from their talk that the girl (wearing a hyper-tight round neck T-shirt) and her husband were working together in a famous IT firm in Bangalore.
When the train halted at Dharmapuri, the baby started crying non-stop. Its parents were trying to console it clownishly. But it didn't as it was in hungry. They didn't have any feeding bottle (might be they had a stand that bottle feeding a six moth old baby is a bigger sin than leaving it crying in hungry). Ever the girl was able to feel its thirst but she didn't feed the child. Feeling embarrassed (her face depicts!) she makeup herself deaf and dumb towards the child's hunger.
It took nearly an hour for the normalcy to be regained when the baby slept by stopping its tears (in tiredness). Now the couples looked at each other and breathed freely. For them, the problem got resolved thereby. The reason of justification from the girl's view might be anything ranging from the fear on piercing eyes of few men around her to the backside-placed hook in her brassiere.
But for me, it invoked a series of questions in mind:
1.Being a mother feeding her child, why didn't she prefer a dress which comfort her in a travel?
2.Why can't we, the men synchronize our vision towards ethics?
3.Why didn't she prefer to go to toilet with the baby where she can create loneliness to feed?
4.What stopped her feeling embarrassed to unveil her motherliness?
5.How the women in developed nations tackle situations like this?
Oh! My Dear Mothers!
Please unveil the breasts to your babies.
Its their Elixir of life.
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