Why women in India are doomed unless we get one thing right

As a country, India has a reputation for traditionally honoring women in a variety of ways. From worshipping goddesses to endless talk about motherly love, from taking oaths every year to protect our sisters and daughters to special government schemes for women, we have seen it all. Yet, take any newspaper available in the country and I’m sure you can find news of either rape, domestic violence, female infanticide or gender discrimination in it. These are only the cases that come out in the open. Let’s not go into how many such unreported events happen on a daily basis.

Now, before you begin to think about how the government has failed to successfully deploy any of it’s measures that benefit women or how the patriarchal world is always trying to demean women, let me share a few thoughts. Of course, everything mentioned above do constitute a fair chunk of all the problems women in India face, but what is it fundamentally that makes us a victim to all of these things?

We are deeply conditioned by patriarchy to think that women are lesser than men. As a result, we innately accept, propagate and glorify condescending treatment.

Think about your childhood. If you grew up in a typical middle class Indian household, whom do you recollect doing all these tasks — spending hours on end cooking, washing the dishes, doing laundry and keeping the house tidy day in and day out? The maid? Oh good, then you are among the privileged. For the rest, it was their mother. This is especially true in rural India where a man’s needs must be met at all times, even if that means a woman having to sacrifice sleep, health, possessions, family and friends or even sanity. The most heartbreaking fact is that this culture is propagated as “the right path”. Women who question this thought are labelled as ‘spoilt’ or ‘someone who was given too much freedom’.

There is a popular saying in Hindi , ‘A wife’s place is at her husband’s feet.’ I’m just curious as to why husband and wife cannot sit together on the same platform?

All these ‘chores’ become much sought after and well paid for once it is wrapped into a course called “Hotel management” and we celebrate those who are pioneers in the field, many of them being men. To those who think that ‘it’s a woman’s job and I have more important things to do’, let me burst that bubble for you. We often have young men just out of college, living with their roommates at their first job, bragging about not knowing how to cook or clean, the worst part being that this is widely accepted and glorified. Parents saying things like “My boy is busy studying or is on the cusp of a big promotion at work. He doesn’t have time for menial jobs like these. I’ll tell him to get a maid.”, is not helping either. Firstly, cooking and cleaning are life skills. They make us human. Secondly, thinking that a woman ought to do these things for herself and for the men in her home because men have more pressing matters on their hands, is like having to justify eating noodles with one chopstick because the other chopstick thought that it had to look after something more important, like eating rice. Didn’t make sense? Exactly.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against hotel management, getting maids or asking a women to help out with household work. What irks me, especially in today’s time, is when people expect women to run the household, pursue her career, take care of the husband, kids and in-laws HERSELF. Should she ask her husband to share the responsibility, she is branded incapable. Should something go wrong in any one of these departments, she is branded careless. Women being subconsciously conditioned since day one to accept all this as her fault will do so because ‘it’s the right path’. Do men come with some kind of ‘life game points’ that allow them to trade those in return for skipping these responsibilities?

Dear women, unless we step out of this bubble and treat ourselves just as humanely and fairly as our male counterparts, we are only going to be exploited irrespective of how intelligent, educated, wealthy or independent we are.