Low divorce rates - Not as nice as they look...

Prone as we are to give in to our incessant desire to compare, it is difficult to accept the enormous difference in living standards when we come abroad.
It doesn't seem fair that some people in some parts of the world can lead vastly better lives than others elsewhere.
It doesn't seem fair that old people, like my grandparents, are not cared for by the government like those of my european friend's. Or that every guy here has been to some part of the world other than their own while a large number of my own relatives, (well-off in their own communities by any standard) will not in their lifetimes go further north than Delhi or south than Chennai. Or that you are going to be fed by the government if you have no food to eat and no job you can do.

But then our belief that the law of averages holds, and the lord Yama/Indra will take care of it, suggests that we must have something that people here don't. How can it be that these people have more than what we do ? There must be something that's better.

And the first thing that comes to mind, due to more a lack of imagination, than keen observation is that we have better family lives.No Divorces, No broken families, No pre-marital sex, No illegitimate children et al.

Ideally, if we had everything else as in this part of the world and still had the above, things couldn't be better.But little do those who raise such an argument understand that these are not independent to our current social and economic situation.

India's low divorce rate is explained as much by the degree of independence that women have as much it is a culture that we are so proud of.
More Divorces are better, India's divorce rate is a little too low.

I wouldn't want it to be so high as the US or the UK. But a little higher than now is definitely a lot better.
I'm not asking more women to divorce their husbands, rather I claim that less divorces are due to the highly dependent condition of women on me than what is believed.

My intention is to rebuff those who take lower divorces and better family lives as defence to the lack of comparable living standards at home against in this part of the world.
If more women taking up jobs and being financially dependent mean more divorces so be it.
We could have marginally worser family lives and more divorces to feed more of our people, make our women more independent, and send more children to schools.

A divorce will be easier to digest than the idea of millions of women stuck in their homes performing duties far lesser than their potential suggests.