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A society that bans play is the same one that will ban little girls from going to school. It will also ask its women to stay at home and behind curtains too. Too bad, if she happens to be a professor, teacher, engineer, government servant, or even a doctor.
She and her children can starve to death but she will not be allowed to work and earn a living. If the pregnant woman has to undergo C-section, of course go ahead, but without anesthesia or antibiotics, for she is less than an animal, don't you see?

Stuff from the worst feminist nightmares? Oh no - just the brutal reality in Taliban-ruled erstwhile Afghanistan. The same Taliban that made not just the two thousand years old Bamiyan Buddhas disappear, but caused an entire wonderful Afghani culture to cower and shrivel under its brutality.

Ironically, it was the power of the pen over the sword that I became aware of, after reading Khaled Hosseini's best selling novels about his ravaged motherland. In his beautiful and poignant 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns', this physician from California, who migrated to America in the 1980s, traces for us the playful, artistic, warm, and tolerant culture of Afghanistan before the never-ending turmoil took over.

An Afghanistan where women taught Rumi and Hafez in Universities, worked as Scientists, Doctors, Engineers, Teachers; where little girls enjoyed their Trigonometry and Literature just like their boy class-mates; an Afghanistan where warmth of cooking, films and poetry brightened the laughter of guests and hosts; an Afghanistan where the Kite Fliers and Kite Runners fought battles of inexplicable skill as fervently as any Indian during Makar Sankranti.

And then the coup-de-etats and the Soviets and the Mujahedeens, and the Taliban. Especially the Taliban. Hosseini writes about the endless destruction of a culturally-rich and diverse people for three decades at a stretch. Professors reduced to begging, educated women forced to fates worse than starvation due to enforced unemployment (she will be kicked and beaten, if she ventures outside without a man at her side, let alone go out to work), little girls forced to early marriage and illiteracy; four year olds begging because the endless bombing had killed their parents, kite flying banned, music, art, dancing, films, shaving - all banned.

When the fraying threads of civilization starts to give away, the post 9/11 bombings occur, and the new coalition government forms under the aegis of the West.

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Ministhy Dileep is PG (PM&IR) from XLRI-Jamshedpur, and currently, an IAS officer working in the UP cadre. She has written three books - 'Unequal Equations', 'Learning with Tippy Tortoise: Tales for Kids', and 'Happy Birthday: Poems for Kids', and hopes to publish her first novel in the year 2008.