Under a thorny bougainvillea creeper, you can enjoy fragile bougainvillea flowers as they softly fall on you. In exactly the same way, Bollywood films mostly perpetuate and reinforce patriarchal mindsets when they use women as colourful flowers following society?s barbed bidding.

Bollywood discriminates against women: Up to the 20th century, Bollywood generally held up traditional values of demure, sari-clad women for the nation to emulate; the ones dressed in western clothes were shown as immoral or vamps. Catering to NRIs in the 21st century, women are in designer clothing flaunting affluence. Did Bollywood contribute any learning to society on modernity, culture, education, social values, innovation, art? You will always find fantasy and subtle violence, the macho hero eve-teasing women who run around trees, now thin pillars at discotheques, smiling and saying, ?Nahi, nahi!? This conveys that women want to be puppets. Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt frankly disclosed recently, ?There?s no denying that filmmakers have portrayed women as objects as mute animals being led by the chain by men,? adding that this has to be corrected.

Bollywood mirrors the way families prioritise boys. I?m not questioning the creative liberty of the director, just showcasing the mediocrity of creative ideation in films with the sole ambition of making box-office hits. Aside from encashing money, films with skewed gender balances teach nothing about respecting women as individuals. Funnily enough, without playing any role to advance society, old Bollywoodians become politicians. Does it prove politicians with popularity are scarce in India?

Racism with fairness creamS: Among the many discriminatory angles that promote bias against women is the R2,000-crore market for fairness creams. India being a vast, deep, heterogeneous country in terms of its geography, culture, language, economic disparities, it?s obvious there will be differences among people. Already, the caste system unfairly assigns us permanent stations in life from birth. The female foetus is under threat of being aborted if her gender is known. Now, modern technology has created another stigma?a racial beauty cream to make dark skinned faces fair. How come we degrade women by accepting a face bleaching product to determine beauty? Most matrimonial advertisements peddle the girl?s skin colour along with caste and education.

Biased gender balance in education: This brings me to a 2010 Indian Express report that exposed how frightened society gets if girls perform better in education as they did in Karnataka?s pre-university level. Institutions like MES College and National College set higher cut-off percentages for admitting girls ostensibly to ?equalise classroom numbers?. The science course had cut-off marks of 594 for boys and 599 for girls; while in commerce, cut-offs were 553 for boys and 580 for girls. St Joseph?s College of Commerce had said it gave admission preference to boys.

My grandmother?s partiality to me as a boy: If I look at my own upbringing, even under the conditions of poverty, I was the darling in my joint family. When my girl cousins were born much later, they were not as indulged as I was. Unlike me, they were taught household chores, and my grandmother didn?t especially hide mangoes for them when they returned from school. Even today in almost all homes in India, boys are given preference. It is the mothers who equally contribute to enabling this discrimination that they themselves have grown up with. The Indian census has proved that more families continue to favour boys than they did in yesteryears. The 0-6 years sex ratio of girls to 1,000 boys was 962 in 1981 which declined to 945 in 1991, 927 in 2001 and 914 in the 2011 census. There?s a sharper decline in Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat. Clearly, female infanticide is widespread.

The US is also patriarchal: In general, more boys than girls are born in the US by a ratio of 1.05:1. A University of Maine survey (1988) found adults aged 18-66 generally preferred a son as an only child. The Psychological Reports journal study confirmed the bias towards first-born male children. The latest research in genetics has proved 80% success in a technique called sperm sorting which identifies semen samples rich in X (female) and Y (male) chromosomes. The preferred sample is then artificially inseminated into the woman. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is another sex selection approach first reported in the UK (1990). Now being developed at Cornell University Medical Center, New York, it involves removing one of the eight cells from three-day-old pre-embryos, analysing DNA for sex before implanting the embryos in a woman?s uterus. Jamie Grifo, director at Cornell, said, ?This is a very intensive, expensive procedure for couples who have a high risk of passing inherited diseases? like hemophilia and Duchenne?s muscular dystrophy. He added, ?We will not do this for sex selection.? But as abortion is legal, patients are questioning why termination of life is allowed, but choice of gender is not.

Gender balance to start from villages: Insensitivity towards girls starts not only at home where boys are pampered. At government schools in most Indian villages, there are no toilets, so girls are forced to quit once they reach puberty. From there, the prejudice continues at every step. In our country, empowerment of women through equal opportunity in education, work and in social status needs to be urgently made possible.

Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top management. Reach him at http://www.shiningconsulting.com