Sunday, March 7, 2010

Women: It Is About Being Human

You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

…and so can we rate our country by ourselves…(unaided by any statistical tools nor being accompanied by any commissions report ). The one we refer as our mother, our goddess, the one who empowers the whole of the future generation of the country (in terms of health and merit) are the most marginalized, disempowered and subjugated lot. And thus the condition of our nation : being self-sufficient in agriculture, leading milk producer in the world, with much bragged about its cocky industrialization we are still a developing country-one among hundreds. For them who trusts more upon survey,analysis and written statements punched with data more than the visuals that they often witness with their own eyes, India, as honoured by World Economic Forum, stands at fifty-ninth position interms of a country’s competitiveness. And per capita GDP analysis has tagged the country with no.57.


But still we cannot afford to be cynical as that would definitely undermine the “little” progressively happening here. See for e.g., how women of potentiality, celebrities are taking up the causes and moving their feet, which previously used to rest only on petals and red carpet, into the quagmire of dirty politics. Some joining the NGOs. How hard are they trying for the betterment of this lot, but synchronously to make a fortune out of it is what they are trying harder for. For some it is the ultimate stance to grab media attention, while for some it is just a pickle that stimulates their taste buds and a saviour from the boredom of regular schedule. But the pompous women’s day celebration with contrasting stories of their miseries and achievements (though the hunger , malnutrition, maternal mortality, ill-treatment, insecurity outnumber the privileges that a women is served with in this country) all on a single page is really too little to be boastful of. The news of our government’s skimpy attempt to restrain the “sarpanch patis” (husbands of the women panchayat head) from exercising their unlawful absolute supremacy, dominating their wives and exploiting the 55% reservation in village panchayat (for women) at their own purpose has really portrayed that nothing more than this “little”, our administration can be of help to them, after 60 years of independence.
As is visible, most if not all, the women centric policies has proved futile and that is due to many fold reasons.corruption,bribery, chicane, lack of urge and sincerity etc.and all this can be rectified at large by changing our age old conventions, perceptions towards women and by feeling what is the pure & urgent need to have them in the main stream, why are some of us actually clamoring for women reservation in legislature.

We, each of us, surely need to change our outlook coz that would be beneficiary to none other than our development, our intellectual upliftment. This is a very common psychology that people like us (who have been under the oppression of a imperial rule for so long and suffer constantly from the fear of losing out, being annexed again at a point of time or other) look down upon them who do not earn. So, giving the women, around us, a chance to earn their living by themselves will help us in transforming, broadening our mindset automatically and will also retrieve them from their sulking complexities.


It is very difficult, here akin impossible, to divert one’s stereotypic one way directive thinking overnight but every body of us should acknowledge by heart that a house can not run without everybody’s equal participation in it, a country can not straddle its branches uniformly in all spheres of development by subsiding the rural progress… similarly gender disparity will also never let human to flourish with its full humanity.
(human being the evolutionarily and physiologically most complex and most wonderful creation of God.)


5 comments:

Sandy said...

Read this for some perspective.

http://sandywriter.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-take-on-womens-reservation-bill.html

Kalyan Mukherjee said...

Hi Tathagat,
very true. practically our women are suffering from an Identity crisis issue. The women who actually need empowerment are not being empowered. Instead the women in the city are being empowered where there is no need to empowerment at all.

Parth J Dave said...

True.. I completely agree with you. There will be development in our nation only when men and women are treated equally in our society..

Amazing post.. I really liked it!

Sanchita said...

Tathagata,

Let me congratulate you for creating such a lovely blog and the freedom and style you use to pen down your thoughts!

Thank you also for stopping by my blog as well, keep reading and inspiring. Let me be the first woman to comment on this article, which has the right facts and the right heart in place. What I have always wondered as a school girl and even today is why on earth should women have reservations in any segment in society when we talk of having equality all the time?? We need space, we need the freedom to grow, to branch out..As Tasleema Nasreen wrote once "khap-khola torowal"..each woman is like that, sharp, brave and confident..we only need to unveil our cover.

All we ask from Society is to allow us to unveil ourselves and not show us sympathy of any kind. That's all that matters. So please people, stop making those reservations and making us feel even more conscious that we are weak and we need "help"..we can do it ourselves!

Else, there will be a time when all the men start feeling about women rights, priviledges and reservations in the same way as many of us, belonging to the General category feel about SC/ST quotas..hope you know what I mean!

Tathagata Ghosh said...

@ Kalyan: yup!that makes the mockery of whole the process...still i believe that there is always a bit that 'we' can do for 'us'.

@ Parth : people like you are the only and ultimate answer to the riddle of "development of India".

@ Sanchita: thank you for your appreciation...reading your blog was entirely a pleasure...honestly.

thanks again for sharing your experience here as it worth a lot for this post... truly instead of widening our outlook,this quotas are crippling our mind , health...everything.Pathetic!we r narrowed down to nothing.