You should be contented, you have a great
job, a great husband, beautiful lovable children and a great family (Read
Marital Family)... You be contented you have a great husband, beautiful
lovable children and a great family, so what if you don't work...? You
be contented you have a great husband, and beautiful lovable children, so
what if the family is difficult...? You be contented you have beautiful
lovable children, so what if your husband is not all that great...?
You be contented that you have a home over your head, so what if you don't have
kids and not such a great husband and family...? You be contented you
have yourself... so what if you lost everything! That last statement should
have been the first to begin with... You
be contented you have yourself!
Why are women not enough for themselves?
Why is all impression of contentment associated with their family bliss? Why
should she not be always inwardly contented, happy or alternatively why should
she not ask for more, if she has a blissful family life? The desire for more is
natural and human. While there are values and there are duties, that are
inseparable from every individual, there is yet a soul that needs to be tended
to, with tender loving care and it needs to grow too.
In India often women are given education,
just enough to get them past their father's door, in through the door of her
marital home. A little bit more education and somehow all doors tighten. Too
less education and then there are only walls, no doors going anywhere. This is
ridiculous. Trapped in gossamer web of culture and tradition, she fails to
notice her individuality within this whirlpool of unending expectations and
undue disrespect! Girls in India are children of discontent, their birth a
tragedy in many families, their ability to foster life is at once a blessing
and a bane.
What does a woman need? Maybe that right
to take a detour from work once in a while to go shop or have a cup of tea with
friends, while someone happily steps in to take care of home. Maybe the right
to opt into and out of work as per her own vision of how her children should be
nurtured. Maybe the right to disquietude without having to worry about cultural
consequences. Maybe the right to not be a chattel of her family (parental and
or marital) and her husband. Torture against women is an institutionalised
affair, you need special laws to protect against dowry deaths and marital
tortures. We can't even claim justice under general law, there is a need to
speed it up, there is such a pattern to
it! It is a vocation among certain class of society, organised dowry crimes!
Somewhere between the oft paining inside
and the oft resilient outside, a woman always suffers the need to be just her
and yet not be shamed for that. Just as much as I have been stereotyped, I have
stereotyped. In many ways this piece is more a realisation than a complaint.
Haven't we all? We are wired to question things in a certain way... we do it
till we are questioned in the same way! How and when did we each realise that
we were women? When did we realise that being a woman made us a lesser specie?
There must be as many stories, as there are woman in the world.
I decided to express this thought, with
the help of four stories. This is a series of five blogs, four stories to
follow this one!
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