Diary of a Feminist

by

Diary of a Feminist: The Alarming Gulf

Women are strange be­ings. Suffering silently. Taking in whatever comes. You wonder if they are black holes — sucking in­side the cruelty, the in­justice. Without a whimper. With bruised souls, they continue to ex­ist. Hidden from the ‘all-knowing’ male eye.

But at times your black hole metaphor collapses. Some­thing happens. A rare event. They refuse to rake in any more. They explode. And the rebels are born.

They simply stand up and walk down the streets, picketing!

A rare phenomenon indeed, in the female population de­prived of education. Pinned down by the hard issues of survival, they appear immov­able. And their privileged few sisters rack their brains in vain to change their lot.

Continue reading →

by

Diary of a Feminist: Working Through the Inner Conflict

Did the traditional family of the past have a happy, blissful time? This question has intrigued me often. I hear from the el­ders, and read in books too, that once upon a time ‘They all lived under one roof. There was love and care and sacrifice. The hu­man values were intact’, etc. etc.

 

I don’t refute the elders’ claim. In fact I find it very soo­thing to believe that once the world was a better place to live in. It makes me happy to know that people were once happy!

Continue reading →

by

Diary of a Feminist: The Women of Rural Pakistan

Being an urban woman — dweller of a concrete jungle — you get an idea of your rural counterparts — the women who inhabit vast lands and terraced mountains — only through crude statistics that tells you of their illiteracy, of their deaths during child-births, of their unpaid labour, of their harsh life.

It’s seldom that you have a glimpse of them, not spun out of the figures of statistical bulletins but of real en­counters, no matter how brief, how abrupt.

Continue reading →

by

Dairy of a Feminist: Friendship Between Men and Women

Why can’t we have men friends the way we have women friends? A volatile question indeed, that of­ten puzzles a friend of mine. She thinks women can have friendship with men.

What she means by friend­ship is a relationship based on mutual understanding and care and sharing of interests and ideas — minus motive, sans desire. Just like a rela­tionship that exists between two female friends.

Continue reading →

by

Diary of a Feminist: The Surprising Casualties of Catastrophe

When a marriage falls apart, who suffers? Either of the spouses, logically. The woman, most prob­ably. But there are times when logic fails in our peculiar social scenario.

When I saw Aapa lately, I was dumb struck. She looked like a ghost of her former self. From a plump, hefty woman she had been reduced to a skeleton. Dark circles had made her eyes sunk deep in her shriveled face. Her skin had broken into a rash and her body itched from eczema — a long suppressed ailment that re-surfaced with a ferocity.

Continue reading →

by

Diary of a Feminist: The Ties That Bind

There is something get­ting on my nerves day by day: it’s hypocrisy in our society and our life. Above all, in familial relation­ships. It makes me sick and I dread the day when it would rob me completely of my trust and pride and good feelings I have for the ‘family’.

The ‘family’ of the East has been so glorified and its accounts so studded with adjectives like ‘love’, ‘warmth’, ‘cohesiveness’, ‘stability’, etc., that it’s almost a sacrilege to point out any flaws, glar­ing or subtle. You can only talk about ‘the good’ and dare not contemplate ‘the bad and the ugly’.

And the last thing you can question is the parent-child rela­tionship.

Continue reading →

by

Diary of a Feminist: Idle Husbands

Of all the misfortunes that befall women in our society I think the hardest is an idle husband. A husband who doesn’t work, doesn’t earn, doesn’t do home chores, and neither does he go away and leave the woman (and kids) alone. A woman stuck with such a husband is in a quandary.

An idle husband (nikthatto shauher) is not an uncommon phenomenon in our society. Women suffer in silence ac­cepting their condition as fate. They know the treat­ment of this diseased situa­tion is divorce. But they don’t want a divorce because of the stigma attached.

Continue reading →

by

Diary of a Feminist: Men’s Distrust of Men

“In women,” Bertrand Russell said, “zest has been greatly diminished by a mistaken concept of respectability”.

Zest is an in-born human capacity to enjoy life, to be interested in the world and the varied and the beauti­ful things it has to offer. In our society, I think, this basic human instinct is, to a large extent, killed in wo­men not only by a mista­ken concept of respectabil­ity but also by a distrust of men inculcated in women by men themselves.

Take for instance travelling. Not till very late, a wo­man’s going out of her house for pleasure was considered a horrible, ignoble act. Times have definitely changed. The women who have the op­portunity and desire to travel in-land or abroad, do travel. Still, by and large, conven­tional thinking persists — that it’s dangerous for girls to travel unless they are duly chaperoned. Girls who do travel may have to face raised eyebrows and sarcastic remarks.

Continue reading →

by

Diary of a Feminist: Understanding Polygamy

The concept (and practice) of taking up to four wives has always intri­gued me. Rather, enraged me. I always thought irritatingly, ‘Well, if a man can take four wives why can’t a woman take four husbands?’

As I grew up and delved further into the question I realised the complexity of the issue and naivety of my stand: polyandry is no answer to polygamy. Telling the kid one’s not sure who his father is among the four guys is as confusing as the disclosure that the poor soul has got four mothers (one real, three step)!

Continue reading →

by

Diary of a Feminist: The Intricacies of Unhappiness

If you believe in fate, you would ascribe unhappiness that abounds in people’s life to fate and no­thing else. ‘They are fated to be unhappy, to be miser­able’, you tell yourself. But if you are not such an abso­lute fatalist, you’d start wondering if it’s human beings themselves who br­ing unhappiness unto their lives.

When I think about them — Azhar Bhai, approach­ing 40, married two years back and now father of a son, Saira Aapa, his sister, a divorcee, in her early 40s and their ailing, widowed mother — I ask myself “Why have they always been such unhappy people?

Continue reading →