Women’s day
This concept has really caught on…..to
my chagrin even well-educated like the really educated ones also fall prey to
feeling special on this day. I wonder why do women consider themselves special
or important or succumb to the temptation of feeling so, upon anyone making attempts
to make them feel important or special if they don’t feel the same or made to
feel the same for the rest of the 364 days.
I think that before becoming
special we need to become equal and for that we need to get gender out of the equality narrative
to begin with. We need to treat boys and girls as human beings first and ensure every
one’s unalienable human rights irrespective of their gender.
We need to start raising our sons and daughters
as human beings. We need to stop slotting our children on the basis of their
gender. We need to treat sons and daughters alike in every which way. We need
to stop cultural conditioning of our children. We need to give roots to our
sons and wings to our daughters. We need to inculcate self-esteem, empathy,
love, care, ambition in equal measure in
our children which is not tied with their gender normative roles. We need to
get rid of gender stereotypes and the media both print and visual can play a
significant role in this long battle. Mothers
in the advertisement need to look like what we aspire our daughter to become
not what we want our bahus to ideally be (secretly maybe). Women can’t be all
the time shown as care takers only or cooking or washing or doing dishes. We shouldn’t
feel happy even when they are shown as super women, multitasking with elan…. Who
the hell wants to multitask….?
We need to get rid of our entrenched
archaic mindset, we need to realign our expectations from women in view of the
drastically changed realities of the 21st century. We need to redesign our role models that we want our children to look up to.
Lets ask ourselves one question
and try and answer that with utmost honesty …are we truly equal to men in our
houses in all respects?
If we are sure we are, we are ready to raise our children as
human beings who will grow up to become good people and form a society where everyone would be equal.
