Utterly gutterly vicious
I happened to watch the domestic violence episode of Amir khan's satyameva jayate and though the facts about domestic violence never fail to shock me what shook me to my core was the fact that more than half the population of women in this country are victims of domestic violence and according to another statistic over 64% of women in this country have faced abuse within the confines of their homes. While its easy to say that we know men beat women and have been doing so for years, what was hard for me to digest this time around was the fact that they felt they were justified in doing so. Like we whip a horse or raise a cane at a dog to scare them or force them to obey, men who abuse women believe that if they are angry it is their right to hit their wives to keep her in check or treat her literally like a punching bag to vent their frustration on.
Where does this diseased mentality come from? Where do these values come from? Where have we gone so wrong in our education, in our popular culture ,in cinema, in our societal growth that inspite of easier access to education and seeming economic development we live in a country where a woman's home has become the most dangerous place for her existence?
The reasons seem to be many and these are questions that have troubled me for many years. I am reminded of a old and rather macabre joke from my childhood where a sardarji chops off the four legs of a cockroach one by one and then writes in his thesis that when the four legs of a cockroach are cut off, it becomes deaf. Have we not done the same thing to the women of our country? Haven't we wounded and denied them at every step of their life till they reach a stage where they even become deaf to the cries of their own conscience? Their conscience which is telling them that they deserve better, they do not deserve to be beaten,they deserve meaningful employment, they just deserve to feel whole and human again? From the time a girl is born we start placing limitations in her way. In many cases she is denied the right to be born and if she is then her entire childhood, teenage and young adult life she is groomed, trained and conditioned to become a wife. In many cases even today a girl is denied the right to education or pulled out of school early because ultimately she needs to cook and clean so what use is differentiation and integration?
Since she does not have sufficient education she is often left without the option of a job or a career. Though there are women who take up jobs from home and join home based businesses, which is an extremely sensible thing to do, in most cases married women are almost entirely dependent on their husbands for money. Even if we work then the terms of employment are far from equal. I worked in an organization where the main teams had a majority of female members. Inspite of that the office has no crèche or day care centre where a working mother can leave her baby during office hours. As a woman I know that if my child is just a couple if floors away in the same premises as me I will be far more at peace than if he or she is at home with house help or with my aging parents. However there are very few organizations which offer this facility.why? Why do I need to choose between perhaps the healthiest and most rewarding experience of my life, and my need for intellectual stimulation or financial autonomy? In our bid to gain equality we have been forced to adopt a male style of working, constantly competing against our male counterparts who will probably go home and spend the rest of the evening watching TV while we cook, manage kids and plan menus for the week.
When I studied literature we learnt that female authors wanted a separate cannon of literature with a female perspective since popular writing till almost the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen was largely dominated my male poets and authors. Similarly I feel, should there not be a separate female ethic at work? Can organisations not benefit from the qualities that we can bring that perhaps our male counterparts cannot? Have we even thought about what it means or how our essential femininity reacts in a competitive environment? In our bid to ape the success stories of men around us we are merely giving them even more importance. What I want is to be treated with respect and given equal opportunities but do I really need to lose my curves and wear trousers to office to prove my professionalism? Equality is a state of mind, it is a matter of the respect you give your employees- equality does not mean acting like a man and achieving what he has. Its a shame that to be more successful or climb the corporate ladder, we are becoming more male in our priorities, our aggression, our resistance to relationships and commitments, to family and children. I am not saying by even one word that a working woman is undesirable or that a woman's true place is at home. However the highest form of discrimination is telling me that me being a successful woman is not good enough, I have to be as successful as the men I work with.
Popular culture and television has not helped our cause in any way at all . We exhalted the women who had made their home the center of their universe- who desired no other intellectual or cultural stimulation, who got married young and then never looked back at picking up the strings of education or a good hobby, or anything that would be a personal creative outlet for her alone. We repeated over and over again that the virtuous woman sticks by her husband, she forgives, she tolerates abuse and humiliation not only by her husband but also by the other patriarchal women in her household, she is elevated through suffering and set afloat like a beacon of Indian culture on a stream of her own tears.
When are we ever going to get out of this cesspool? The tragedy is that perhaps the most servile characters of television are the most popular. Most of the protagonists on the channel I worked for have been slapped at least once by their husbands or severely humiliated otherwise. Why have we glorified a women's suffering? By all means celebrate a home maker, they are perhaps the most hard working people in country today but do not tell me over and over again that the path to happiness will be paved by people trampling all over me. In our bid prevent homes from breaking we have turned the women of this country into lame and deaf cockroaches who believe or even truly have nowhere to go. They have been left to live in an existence that in painful, incomplete and so stagnant that one day their brains and souls might atrophy and die but they will like the golden bahus of television not utter a word and wait for divine intervention.
But it will never come. We have to fight for our limbs first. We have to believe that we are worthy of an education, of a profession, of an income, of self respect and respect from society for whatever it is that we do, whether we look after a home, or run a business. We need to realize that there is nothing weak or demeaning about wanting a child, about looking after your home, it does not make us any less professional or competent. We cannot allow men and male paradigms to determine our lives. It has taken us several centuries to realize what it feels like to be human again, but hopefully before the turn of this century we will know what it feels like to be rejoined to the feminine, to feel comfortable in our shoes of being a woman. A world where being a woman is not an obstacle in my dreams but an essential catalyst to my success. But most importantly I hope that I will not be the one to hack away at my daughter's soul, turning her into a lame and wounded shadow of what she could have been.
The reasons seem to be many and these are questions that have troubled me for many years. I am reminded of a old and rather macabre joke from my childhood where a sardarji chops off the four legs of a cockroach one by one and then writes in his thesis that when the four legs of a cockroach are cut off, it becomes deaf. Have we not done the same thing to the women of our country? Haven't we wounded and denied them at every step of their life till they reach a stage where they even become deaf to the cries of their own conscience? Their conscience which is telling them that they deserve better, they do not deserve to be beaten,they deserve meaningful employment, they just deserve to feel whole and human again? From the time a girl is born we start placing limitations in her way. In many cases she is denied the right to be born and if she is then her entire childhood, teenage and young adult life she is groomed, trained and conditioned to become a wife. In many cases even today a girl is denied the right to education or pulled out of school early because ultimately she needs to cook and clean so what use is differentiation and integration?
Since she does not have sufficient education she is often left without the option of a job or a career. Though there are women who take up jobs from home and join home based businesses, which is an extremely sensible thing to do, in most cases married women are almost entirely dependent on their husbands for money. Even if we work then the terms of employment are far from equal. I worked in an organization where the main teams had a majority of female members. Inspite of that the office has no crèche or day care centre where a working mother can leave her baby during office hours. As a woman I know that if my child is just a couple if floors away in the same premises as me I will be far more at peace than if he or she is at home with house help or with my aging parents. However there are very few organizations which offer this facility.why? Why do I need to choose between perhaps the healthiest and most rewarding experience of my life, and my need for intellectual stimulation or financial autonomy? In our bid to gain equality we have been forced to adopt a male style of working, constantly competing against our male counterparts who will probably go home and spend the rest of the evening watching TV while we cook, manage kids and plan menus for the week.
When I studied literature we learnt that female authors wanted a separate cannon of literature with a female perspective since popular writing till almost the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen was largely dominated my male poets and authors. Similarly I feel, should there not be a separate female ethic at work? Can organisations not benefit from the qualities that we can bring that perhaps our male counterparts cannot? Have we even thought about what it means or how our essential femininity reacts in a competitive environment? In our bid to ape the success stories of men around us we are merely giving them even more importance. What I want is to be treated with respect and given equal opportunities but do I really need to lose my curves and wear trousers to office to prove my professionalism? Equality is a state of mind, it is a matter of the respect you give your employees- equality does not mean acting like a man and achieving what he has. Its a shame that to be more successful or climb the corporate ladder, we are becoming more male in our priorities, our aggression, our resistance to relationships and commitments, to family and children. I am not saying by even one word that a working woman is undesirable or that a woman's true place is at home. However the highest form of discrimination is telling me that me being a successful woman is not good enough, I have to be as successful as the men I work with.
Popular culture and television has not helped our cause in any way at all . We exhalted the women who had made their home the center of their universe- who desired no other intellectual or cultural stimulation, who got married young and then never looked back at picking up the strings of education or a good hobby, or anything that would be a personal creative outlet for her alone. We repeated over and over again that the virtuous woman sticks by her husband, she forgives, she tolerates abuse and humiliation not only by her husband but also by the other patriarchal women in her household, she is elevated through suffering and set afloat like a beacon of Indian culture on a stream of her own tears.
When are we ever going to get out of this cesspool? The tragedy is that perhaps the most servile characters of television are the most popular. Most of the protagonists on the channel I worked for have been slapped at least once by their husbands or severely humiliated otherwise. Why have we glorified a women's suffering? By all means celebrate a home maker, they are perhaps the most hard working people in country today but do not tell me over and over again that the path to happiness will be paved by people trampling all over me. In our bid prevent homes from breaking we have turned the women of this country into lame and deaf cockroaches who believe or even truly have nowhere to go. They have been left to live in an existence that in painful, incomplete and so stagnant that one day their brains and souls might atrophy and die but they will like the golden bahus of television not utter a word and wait for divine intervention.
But it will never come. We have to fight for our limbs first. We have to believe that we are worthy of an education, of a profession, of an income, of self respect and respect from society for whatever it is that we do, whether we look after a home, or run a business. We need to realize that there is nothing weak or demeaning about wanting a child, about looking after your home, it does not make us any less professional or competent. We cannot allow men and male paradigms to determine our lives. It has taken us several centuries to realize what it feels like to be human again, but hopefully before the turn of this century we will know what it feels like to be rejoined to the feminine, to feel comfortable in our shoes of being a woman. A world where being a woman is not an obstacle in my dreams but an essential catalyst to my success. But most importantly I hope that I will not be the one to hack away at my daughter's soul, turning her into a lame and wounded shadow of what she could have been.
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