Life

This is a 38mm long, 10 weeks 4 days (8 weeks 4 days after conception) little embryo, temporally living in my belly.

The gender of the embryo is not yet defined, its sex organ not yet formed. So I call this little thing "it".

My belly is still flat, no weight gain yet. If three weeks later, the decision be made to kill this little thing, because it doesn't have a penis, nobody should be able to notice.

When we were in the hospital, watching the ultrasound image, it was jumping around, stretching arms and legs, flipping over, kicking. And we saw that, it was smiling the whole time, with its thick lips fully resemble its father's.

It is a life. Grows by second.

Two weeks ago we saw its heart beat for the first time, 150 times a minute. It didn't have a little bit human shape by then, looked like a frozen turkey in the supermarket, it didn't move at all.

Only two weeks after, we saw the fully functioning arms and legs, we saw its smile on the face.

Maybe it already started dreaming, and wondering where it is living right now. Soon it will have the urge to know the world, to know everything, to explore.

We didn't care to ask the doctor if she could tell the gender of the little thing.

Because it is our baby, the gift from gods, the reminder of our love. That, is all it matters.

It is a life. Grows by second.

#save female fetuses

#stop female foeticide

Related post: Gender

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Reimagining India

The subcontinent was home to some of the most sophisticated early human civilizations. Critics of India's modern infrastructure would do well to recall that inhabitants of Mohenjo-Daro and Rakhigarhi built the world's first-known urban sanitation systems five thousand years ago and may have been the first to use wheeled transport. For centuries after Alexander's departure, India was governed by powerful Hindu dynasties who patronized the arts and took keen interest in religion, philosophy and practical science. Megasthenes, the first western historian to venture beyond the Punjab into the Gangetic plain, described a land so verdant and fertile that "famine has never visited India and there has never been a general scarcity in the supply of nourishing food." Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who claimed to have visited several ports in India during his 1292 voyage from China to Persia, declared Malabar (now Kerala) on India's southwest coast to be the "richest and most splendid province in the world".

....in Akbar's court in Fatehpur Sikri, notes British historian Alex von Tunzelmann, Akbar lived in "unmatched opulence... in rooms done out with marble, sandalwood and mother-of-pearl, cooled by the gentle fanning of peacock feathers." By comparison, Elizebeth was a "weak and feeble woman" who ruled over a "grubby, unsophisticated, cold, dismal little kingdom."

--Reimagining India, by Mckinsey & Company 2013