She Can't Do It!

Life for a woman is still very hard in India. Sadly the discrimination against women is deep-rooted in most of us and a lot of people discriminate without even the awareness that they are being indeed discriminatory. A lot of people have a simple flaw in their outlook towards women, “She can’t do it because she is a girl”. The worst part about this flaw is that a lot of women, in fact, a whole lot of women seem to believe this too - that just because she is born a woman, she cannot or is not allowed to do certain things.

Women are often held as prisoners even in their own homes. A woman can’t really do the same things men do; “her place is at home,” is what most people would say. Most people would also say that a woman has to be very careful about the way she carries herself, but men are allowed to do whatever they want. Even in homes where a brother and sister are raised together, there are many discriminatory practices that families engage in. The son may be allowed to make his own choices but the daughter will not be given the very same choices in most cases. The daughter has to live with a set of rules all her life, at home with parents or even at a husband’s, it doesn’t really matter if she agrees with them or not. She is a woman and she has no say in most such matters. I can’t even begin to describe how wrong all of this is, how sick and twisted it all is.

In fact most families raise their daughters with the primary thought that she is to be given away to a suitor one fine day. Raising a woman, most parents still believe that if she does not get married quickly, then there is a problem for them and for her. People educate their daughters so that she qualifies for a groom and not for a life of her own. Most traditional Indian families don’t give women even a whiff of freedom where she can blossom and begin to find herself, instead she is fed with a constant stream of bullshit that one day she has to give her all of herself to a man that she barely knows, bear his children and take care of his home. One fine day, the woman is forced to give up and give in to this, she is literally sold off like a slave and sick parents put up a ceremonial celebration for the sale, inviting the world to come and feast with them for the sale of their daughter. This is nothing less than sadistic for me.

The women in India are incredibly strong and brave. Their courage in walking the streets everyday itself is worth applauding as they have to put up with a lot of shit that society and even family throws at her. The fact that there are a lot of independent women nowadays is an encouragement and should be an inspiration for women everywhere. The ones who stand out often are scorned at and called names. Men publicly humiliate such a woman at every turn; she has to fight a lifelong battle even just to survive and live a life on her own terms. 

Reservations and special arrangements won’t help change any of this. What needs to change is the basic mindset among men and sadly also among women that they are inferior to men in any way at all. Deep-rooted discrimination in all of us, even people who often speak of woman empowerment, has created hell for countless women with the false pretense that she is indeed free when she is chained up in every possible way even today. In the end I would just like to point out this one thing that “WITHOUT MAN THERE IS NO WOMAN AND WITHOUT WOMAN THERE IS NO MAN”, men and women are part of a circle and neither can really be complete without acknowledging the other half on equal terms.