Provoked; by Kiranjit Ahluwalia, Rahila Gupta.

Rarely does one come across a true life story lived so courageously and the account told so simply - most people prefer to brush things under rug for sake of social pretensions and economic considerations. Few care about a life or a million wasted as long as it is lives of women, in the process forgetting that women are mothers and home carers who bring up choldren, and sacrificing them and their lives and their health and conerns is not exactly healthy for the children in any way whatsoever, whatever the gender of the children.

How could anyone forget Provoked - the book I read quite recently, this year that is, but the film came perhaps earlier and I am unsure if it was this year or last.

The film is a good make from the book and it is amazing how well a city born well educated Aishwarya Rai - she had a couple of years, perhaps three, of architecture before her Miss World crown - played a girl from a small village in way far Punjaab.

There are some factors kept out, though not quite hidden and changed, from the book to the film.

For one thing Kiranjit was not uneducated, she had been to college in Gujarat where her brothers were well to do, and then had visited her other siblings in UK and Canada to find a husband, while the guy who persued her through the usual channels did it against his parents' wishes in not worrying about their consent to begin with.

Subsequently she did work in UK and was appreciated in her workplace too.

All this was kept out perhaps because people have a simple - and false - equation in their minds, that any woman abused by a husband must be an illiterate simpleton. Disabusing this notion in this story, a difficult one already where one has to understand an abused woman murdering her husband, would have been a formidable task, and perhaps it was wisdom to leave that to another time.

But fact of the matter is simple solutions such as education and economic independence and financial security are just that - simple, but not quite solutions. None of those prevent women from being abused by a husband, a lover, or any other male willing to try. The change required is civilisation of males of human species.