Mother India and Fire

I think Katherine Mayo's book was very biased in talking about the culture in India.  In ethics we're taught to respect everyone's culture and acknowledge how each culture's norms are relative to their society.  Not only does she not respect the issue of ethics when talking about India, but she also seems to just make a lot of assumptions up.  It's hard to believe that people were actually recommended to read the book prior to deploring to India on Peace Corps missions.  This not only goes to show where Mayo's head was at, but it showed how there's actually a market for her book.  In order for there to be controversy some people have to agree with her stance, otherwide everyone would just say it's garbage and disregard it.  The fact that people were using this as an actual guide to India is what's really disturbing and says a lot about society and the garbage that is actually supported.   In Mayo's book the people of India are made to look savage,but in Fire we see the total opposite. 

In Fire we see the disenfranchised women of India taking control of their sexuality which represents a push outside of the norms.  It reminds me of the modernist movement, and how many of the pioneering figures in modernism included sexuality in their idea of being liberated.  A prime example of a woman who did this was Frida Kahlo; certain parts of her biographical movie Frida actually reminded me of Fire.  The critique of a patriarchal culture is also a main theme in the modernist movement, the book Pedro Paramo is a good example of a book that is filled with critiques on patriarchal society.  In the novel the main landowner of the town rapes and impregnates several women, and females are depicted as being objects.  It is interesting to see how some countries began to get comfortable with the idea of individual's sexuality at the early part of the 1900's while some other countries have yet to acknowledge this facet of individualism.  It just goes back to the point of ethics and seeing every culture as relative to a certain perspective.  In ancient Greece around the time of Jesus, it was common for wealthy men to have a male concubine that they had intimate relations with.  That was like 2000 years ago, but some cultures still can't break that barrier of sexuality today.