Geetha

A few weeks back, I came across this article and it was sad reading about it and had me wondering what could have prompted this girl to jump to death, and that too with an infant. How could she kill her own child? What kind of person was this woman? What was she thinking when she jumped? Did she make her decision at that instant or had she been planning it for a while?
You can imagine my surprise then, when I found out recently that this girl, Geetha, was my classmate when I was an undergraduate student in an engineering college. She used to mail the class mailing list occassionally and her last mail to the group was when her daughter was born. We were acquainted just enough to exchange a half-yearly email. Its very sad and unfortunate that she decided to end her own life. But what bothers and saddens me more is, how could she murder a child ?
On a related note, female infanticide is still practised in some regions of Tamil Nadu and I suspect in other places in India too. The problem is deep-rooted and has underpinnings in culture and traditions. When even some educated parents view their daughters as deserving less than their sons, its going to be a while for this practise to stop completely. (I understand that the problem is not solely one of education and I was generalizing in my previous statement).