MUTINY

Much to talk about, more to think. Lots to Do.

It is very entertaining to read about high-profile events that address Women issues. Top judges met at the conference of All India Federation of Women Lawyers in Chennai to express their disapproval of the atrocities committed on women and we had upholders of truth and justice talking on how advancement in science and technology has further doomed the Female gender by providing means to detect and murder a female fetus before having a chance to live. We have moved to more convenient ways of feticide and infanticide, somehow believing that ease is a cover for guilt, that the less messy it is, the lighter it is on the conscience.
To rake up a childhood full of conditioning to realize and accept one’s sex and gender is not pleasant (please note I am referring to the fairer sex). Condition of women is perhaps one thing that is second most true thing around the world (the first being that we all are humans, wherever we are from and wherever we go). But Discrimination is the D in our DNA. Color and caste is there (and will stay there for some time still) but suffering for being a woman still has a long way to go before things are changed.
We have perhaps reached the brim or epitome of some twisted state of status of women in our society. If a woman wants to work, she is thoughtless, over-ambitious and unrealistic, but worst of all, a bad wife and a bad mother. And if she decides to quit working to look after the family, she is a colossal fool and unhelpful. Some would say things have changed a lot. Of course they have, but not where it matters.
Memories of condition of women in a small town in south-east India brings memories like seeing eight-year old girls helping their mother as domestic helps and cooking for their brothers who come back tired after the day’s tiring school and play, parents begging alms for dowry for their barely adolescent daughter, envious eyes of my friends watching me go to school (they being unfortunate enough to be girls from their community, me lucky that I am not). When I joined college, my mom’s best friend was attacked at the Hospital where she was a nurse at the nursery, accused of killing an infant girl. Later it was revealed that on delivering her fifth daughter, the child’s mother was forced by her in-laws to kill the new-born if she wanted her older children alive. To us these threats might seem empty but that is not the case there where women have no voice, where after marrying off their daughters parents think that they are done away with a burden and any further contact (apart from the birth of a son) is an inconvenience. How pitiable would it have been for the mother to choose between her new-born and her older kids? How cruel is it that the mother not only had to consent to the killing of her child, she also had to do it on her own? Bizarre to read about and weird?
“The chill running down your spine when you walk down the roads after dark, hiding your fear and walking past hooting and wolf-whistling throngs. Alone is not the word. It is Lonely and freaking”. This is a woman in Bangalore talking of her experience everyday as she walks from the pick-up point of her office cab to her apartment at 9 pm. Safety is the next level. I am talking about respect. Masked under various facades, this is one reason that has remained salient to all cultures with respect to status of women.
How deep ingrained is this concept or practice of demeaning women? Even in the age of Sanskrit literature, women were not allowed to talk in the language of scholars – Sanskrit. As seen evidently in plays like Bhasa’a Swapna-Vasavadatta, the plays were in Sanskrit where men were talking and women conversed only in Prakrit. Not that they did not know Sanskrit, they were just not allowed or not expected in the social setting then to converse in Sanskrit, which was referred to as the conversing medium for scholars, taught in Gurukulas where only men were allowed. We have long been conditioned in such a mindset. Things are changing with Women finally beginning to speak out and claim their rights, with lots of women’s right activists coming to the front and with schemes to educate girl child; but is this change for good or are we at a phase of a societal morph? Nobody can answer now; we can only speculate and anticipate. Right now we live in a world of polarities. On 8 March 2011, the International Women’s day Centenary was celebrated in India. On one hand, for the second consecutive year, Air India operated on Monday night an Ultra long haul flight from Delhi to Toronto with an all-women crew, while on the other hand, a survey by ICRW topped Indian men as the most indulgent in sex-violence and in most of these cases women are suppressed and the matter never comes to light.
It remains to be seen how future generations with better education and opportunities for women will change the condition of women or owing to their nature of being a nurturer and forgiver, of being tolerant and self-sacrificial will bring greater pitfalls in the long run. Till then women need to back each other and society need to support and allow women to realize themselves to their full potential. We all have a role to play towards this – be it by stepping out of convention, by deciding to speak for ourselves or just by writing. Expression can lead to confidence and influence and one influence can bring a lot of change.