FEMINISM

Canopy of men cover us, and simultaneously throw all the paint on our face as if we be the canvas. After all, who doesn’t like to be colored? But a deeper question is, who likes to be colored in someone else’s preferred shades? I love blue. My father and all my brothers and all my uncles and all my male friends compel me to splash myself into red because they like it. Shouldn’t I disown them all? They keep an eye on me perpetually to ensure that no one raises their eye over me. Dear men (of this nature), take your eyes off me and you’ll solve half of our problems. Otherwise, rehne do… tumse naa ho paega (leave it… you won’t be able to stop it). We’re innate of a nation where harming a cow is a non-bailable offence and raping a woman has to be proved as an offence first (which takes approximately 7 years in the court) and after this, punishment can be abated on bail.

Feminism isn’t about asking a housewife to work to ‘earn’ a living. It is about allowing the women in your house to make their own choices. It revolves around allowing a wife to go childless if she doesn’t look forward to be a mother and comfort her with the thought that her decision doesn’t make her any less of a woman. It disseminates around those fathers who take fatherhood seriously. They don’t tell their sons, “Don’t be such a girl!” when they shed a few tears or wince in pain. It flings around raising men as human beings with a genderless soul and not as responsibility deprived tumors grown around a penis. It flings from the hearts of those people who don’t mock a girl with hair growth on her body barring head, if she fancies not shaving them off. Feminism isn’t about coercing women to take up sports, or fire on that runway. It’s about countenancing them to be the hell they’re instinctively and pull it off for a lifetime.

And did anyone notice where I ruined that feminism till now? When I say “allowing the women”, “countenancing them” and so on; I make myself sound a hypocrite. Why should they seek for consent?!! They shouldn’t.

More than any other nation, India needs feminism because if a girl can’t cook she shouldn’t have to. India needs feminism because a bride shouldn’t pay (read: dowry) a guy to marry her. India needs feminism because Indian women should realize that you can like a man a whole lot and still turn around and say a NO to him. Remember, a good woman knows her worth. She should know whether there’s any potential of growth together or not.

Above all, it is for the so called fairer sex to cognize that they’ve much more to offer to the world than stay bogged down by not being labelled as pretty or beautiful. Stay faithful yet detached. Stay committed yet relaxed. Love everyone and yet no one. Stay gentle and yet tough. Stay passionate and platonic. In short, stay predictable in your unpredictability. Stay obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in your own skin.

Conclusively, I apologize to all the women whom I’ve called pretty before calling them brave or resilient. I made it sound like something you’re born with is the most you’ve to be proud of. Being a woman, I’m well aware that your heart must have crushed mountains on so many occasions and you would’ve chuckled on the outside during the trying times. I don’t mean to say that you aren’t pretty but what I mean to establish as a way of life is you’re so much more than that.

A weak man can never keep a strong woman, he doesn’t know what to do with her and a real woman can do it all by herself but a real man won’t let her. A woman who doesn’t ask for anything deserves everything.