When visiting smaller, mofussil towns to see the "fairer sex", Mr Thakraney, do you see thembeing persecuted and humiliated? Do you see them denied basic education, human rights, societal rights becauseof their gender? Do you see them working in factories and fields as earning members of their family, yettreated as second-rate citizens by their husbands and in-laws?
Do these women have a choice?
Women in urban areas stand up for their rights and use the benefits of education to make a career forthemselves. Not because they are smarter than their smaller town counterparts but because they are fortunateto have the opportunity to do so. I am thankful to be born in urban India, of supporting parents who neverdiscriminated against me because of my gender, who encouraged me to work in a demanding profession, late hourset al and who have never made me feel that I am weaker or less competent than men.
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Yes, I wear trousers, and shirts, and boots. As I do salwar kameezes and saris and sandals. I don't thinkmy clothes make me any less or more a woman. Whether a woman smokes, or drinks, or cries in a movie hall isimmaterial. Is outward appearance, looks and mannerisms, all that makes a woman? Why does it become"womanly" to wear only a certain kind of clothing, behave in a certain way and talk in a particularmanner (all rules and codes that, might I add, evolved in patriarchal society)?
Yes, men who cannot cook are "useless pieces of shit" - not because women don't want to cook, butbecause the men who think that it is purely a woman's duty to do so deserve to be thought of in that fashion.
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Yes, "men who cannot put babies to sleep. have no right to live" because they should be sharingin the joys and hard work of parenthood instead of pretending that babies are brought up by magic or that itis only the duty of the mother.
If women are dying of heart attack, greying faster, wrinkling quicker and collapsing at work, it is becausemany of these women have to take care of the home, their family and the workplace - in a daily, life longstruggle. In Urban India, double incomes are fast becoming a basic economic necessity.
How many married men even today, when they go home, do not expect their working wives to make a cup of teafor them?
This is not meant to be a war between the genders. There are men who are supportive, sensitive andnon-judgmental. As there are, no doubt, women who are pushy or manipulative - traits of human nature.
However, certain men like you choose to dwell on outward appearances and fail to look at the woman'sstrength of character, her resilience and her acceptance of multiple roles. These women of today have movedon. Unfortunately, men like you continue to judge them on age-old standards of beauty and jaded roleexpectations.
(The author, 26, is a media professional in Mumbai)
