Truth Bites
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Another day of celebrating womanhood passed and it left me wondering how many of us actually have anything to celebrate for being a woman. For even as one part of the world celebrates it -
Somewhere in India a baby foetus is being extracted from the safety and coziness of its mothers womb for the mere reason that it would grow to be a baby girl.
Not very far away an unsuspecting school girl is getting her bottom pinched or groped on her way back home in a public transport.
Somewhere in our houses a young girl has been inappropriately touched by the household's favourite uncle and she blames herself for it.
In a distant village a little girl has been sold for an amount that would ensure her family sustenance for 6 months, unaware of the life of trafficking that awaits her.
Somewhere in the neighbourhood a young intelligent girl is denied the opportunity to study further as the family would rather spend on educating her brother who has little or no inclination to moving up the ladder of education.
An otherwise vivacious teenager could be getting her first heartbreak as the boy she adored just called her ugly.
The road that we walked on could be the very place where a college student was oblivious to the fact, that a masked scooterist has followed her with an acid vial in hand, until her face stung with unbearable burns.
Somewhere in the corners of the night a new bride nurses her shattered dreams and bruised hands after her perverse husband decided to stamp his signature with his cigarette butts.
In some high rise building along the metro's skyline a young professional who had walked into her workplace with a sense of achievement and dreams of climbing the corporate ladder six months ago, is filing a case against her colleague for sexual harassment.
Just a floor below the same senior is sneering behind her back with his friends confident that she would never be able to prove it.
At the super market a home maker is being made a spectacle of by young men who seem to be getting pleasure in making her squirm with lewd comments.
A kitchen accident is being planned by a lower middle income family, for their daughter in law, who has exhausted her families resources to support the family she married into.
In the suburbs, a domestic help is being beaten and called a thief, because something of importance cannot be found, probably just misplaced.
In the city somewhere the office secretary has just agreed to an indecent proposal by her boss for she cannot afford to lose her job as the income is necessary for the treatment of her ailing child.
In a fast food joint a young woman is being tagged 'loose' for having more male friends than female.
The family next door is unable to take pride in the fact that their daughter has just been recognized at the hospital she works for, because in their eyes she is on the wrong side of 30's and still unmarried.
Somewhere in the quiet of the four walls of a bedroom a wife sobs silently having discovered her husbands clandestine affair, wondering where she went wrong even as her husband snores peacefully in sleep.
In a doctors room ,the world seems to have come to a stand still for the mother to be who has just been diagnosed as HIV positive, and as she looks to her husband for some solace he refuses to meet her eyes.
Somewhere on the streets a hapless woman is being raped for no fault of hers ( except maybe that she is a woman ).
The very next day she is being judged by all as having ' invited it ' by her dressing.
We live in a highly patriarchal society. The lives of many women are pushed through hell and outwardly it may seem that no one seems to care enough to do anything serious or life changing about it. We are however in the right era. where we can actually bring about a visible change. The pace maybe slow and sometimes it may seem like we aren't moving anywhere from where we were in the last century. But the truth is we are. The price for freedom is heavy and the road to it never smooth. If each and everyone of us could just realize our worth, our power, our strengths - we would have a world where every woman is treated as an equal to her male counterpart, where her intellect is appreciated and her body is respected, a place where her physical strength would not be exploited to prove male dominance and her vulnerability not looked upon as a weakness, a place where she faces every new dawn in her life with her head held high and her demeanor tall and confident.
For it is said - " A man can't ride your back if it is not bent "
Music - Woman by John Lennon