Rubaiya is back

Rubaiya Bintenahar is coming back to the RG Kar Medical College Hospital, Kolkata to continue her studies.

Rubaiya is a third-year medical student who had been branded a witch and confined to her house in her village for 23 days. She had received psychiatric treatment earlier and a worsening of her condition was taken as a sign of possession by her father who brought her back home to be treated by a witch-doctor. After the story was picked up by the media, social activists and the administration convinced her father to allow her to rejoin her studies.

What I found really touching is the image (reproduced here) that accompanied the newspaper report. The man walking behind her with the heavy bag is identified as her father. He looks so much like the stereotypical protective father of a Bengali girl, carrying the heavy bag to spare his daughter. In the university where I study, every year at admission time there are some fathers like this who insist on checking for themselves whether the dormitory beds are soft enough for their darlings. Looking at this photo I cannot bring myself to believe that Rubaiya's father meant her harm. Yet, he treated her so cruelly.

Reminds me of the famous quote by the physicist Steven Weinberg:

Good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion.

Except that this time it is garden-variety superstition rather than religion which is to blame.