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Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
India's Women Burn Survivors: Double The Trauma As Their Children Reject Them
They are often called "kitchen accidents". An innocent phrase that wears the garb of the unfortunate occurrence.
It is also a useful phrase; one that is employed cleverly to shroud anything from intense domestic violence, to physical abuse for dowry, to suicidal tendencies, to deliberate attempts of murder.
This article is not being recommended because it is yet another sob story from the "third world" - though there is no denying how quickly it brings a lump to the reader's throat. Read about how Anandi’s daughter shrank from her in horror looking at her scars, or how Parimala’s daughter refused to be held by her once-loved mother and you begin to scratch the surface of the suffering that these women and countless others like them go through - with no access to any kind of post-traumatic stress relief.
The moot point here is, burn injuries to women in India are frequently never a case of terrible bad luck - they carry heavy histories of subjugation, violence and homicide. For instance, both Anandi and Parimala tried to burn themselves, having had enough of their in-laws' constant physical and mental abuse.
Their children, often eye-witnesses to these self-immolations, are thus sucked into this tragic vortex of pain, rejection and emotional tumult in a society that is failing to address the violence that prompts such incidents.
Consider these figures: University of Washington research found that Indian women, between 15 and 50 years of age, are more prone to fire-related deaths than women of any other country. In 2014 alone, 91,000 women died of burn-related injuries in India.
The article is all the more poignant because of its focus on the children’s distress. For them, it is not just their mother's scars that are intimidating - survivors wear pressure garments that obscure their face, further complicating the sense of disconnect and abandonment the child feels because of a mother who is away in the hospital, who looks different and who cannot be what she was before.
