Europeans often ask me about female foeticide in India, but I’ve always considered it Western exaggeration drawn from an incidental case or two. Until I read about Revathy, 21, an autodriver’s wife in Tamil Nadu, whose prematurely born twin girls were put on incubators last month. Within two weeks Revathy slit one baby’s throat while her mother, Thennila, strangled the other. They confessed they could not bear the heavy expenditure of medical treatment today and dowry tomorrow.

This horrible socio-cultural practice in ‘Incredible India’, the world’s biggest hub for IT services, kills 750,000 girls every year as per UN figures. Shockingly, gender detection technology innovations like ultrasound, scans and amniocentesis contribute to the rise in genocide of unborn girls. Such killings took me back to Adolf Hitler’s order for mass euthanasia of invalids in 1939. Brandenburg, one of six mercy killing centres to eliminate "life unworthy of life", was the first Nazi experiment with gassing. Disguised as shower rooms, the gas chambers were hermetically sealed and connected by pipes to cylinders of carbon monoxide. Mentally retarded, physically deformed and chronically ill patients were drugged and led naked into the gas chamber. Families were falsely informed that the cause of death was heart failure or pneumonia.

My European life started as a sweeper in a lithography printing shop near Paris. Since I wasn’t conversant in French, my colleagues and I would discuss World War II films in gestures. I had adventured into France in 1973 at the age 19 to find Art, with nothing more than $8 in my pocket, and somehow managed basement residence at the Cite Univercitire campus. The common room TV set, something I’d never experienced before, engrossed me with war movies about Germany against the Allies. As they were in French, I gauged them as simple Hollywood entertainment. A French colleague called Jean used to say, “Ce n’est pas marrant”, meaning “It’s not fun.”

... contd.