I am hesitant

I am a courtesy text

I am measured politeness

I am naive

I am an empty grand gesture

I am a balm veiled as a suture

I am rare

I am a pearl of sincerity rolling down a cheek

I am the solace that both seek

I am powerful

I am the first step in the right turn

I am your faith restored in the world

1) I have poured my heart out here – so some bits maybe incoherent and unusually emotional (no research here people – just naked thoughts!)

2) This is a long post of 2700+ words

I thought I would give a brief background about how I ended up taking the A-Z challenge. Then my emotions took over and I ended up writing 933 words on the background alone! So I have split this post into 3 parts. In case you wish to skip the background, and want to only read about my experience in the A-Z challenge, you could do so by skipping the first and moving directly to the second section.

Come, let’s change the world, let’s walk towards a new era

Let’s accept that some lives are incomplete

Let’s listen to every voice, let’s give courage to every scream

Let’s not hide our differences under the blankets of tradition

Let’s ask ourselves what our gender has got to do with our dreams

Let’s differentiate between ‘My truth’ and ‘The truth’

Let’s work continuously towards creating a world without any differences

The Hindi Film ‘Pink’ made the following words resonate with every woman across the country: ‘No means no’. When Amitabh said, “’Na’ sirf ek shabd nahi, apne aap mein ek poora vakya hai (‘No’ is not just a word, but a full sentence in and of itself,)” India took cognizance. The film is credited to have broken down the idea of ‘consent’ to its simplest form for men to understand it better. The nation began discussing about ‘consent’ and importantly so. However, to my own surprise, something about ‘No means No’ bothered me. And then it struck me…why should a woman have to say ‘No’?!

We all have been guilty of letting hope interfere with our logic. When you ask your mom’s consent to go for a night-out with your friends, and she does not consent, what do you do? You hope she will change her mind and then you badger her, until she gives in. Did she truly give her consent or relent to your pressure?

You must have heard the song ‘Na na karte pyaar tumhi se kar baithe..’. Sung by Mohd. Rafi, the song from the Hindi film ‘Jab Jab Phool Khile’ expresses the popular sentiment perfectly. In almost all the songs from the 70’s and 80’s, the heroine would be depicted as coy and very ‘proper’. She would have a change of heart only after many attempts made by her suitor. The moral – ‘Never give up’ because ‘sabr ka phal meetha hota hai’. This kind of harassment has been our idea of ‘romance’!

Well she was the much younger wife of the famous Greek Philosopher Socrates. And what did Socrates think about his wife Xanthippe? He said that he tolerated his first wife Xanthippe, because she bore him sons, in the same way one tolerated the noise of geese because they produce eggs and chicks. Basically, this analogy perpetuated the claim that a woman’s sole role was reproduction.

 

An incident involving the two went ‘viral’ (well we still know of it 2500 years later don’t we?) was how Xanthippe poured the contents of a bedpan on to the philosopher’s head after an argument. And that’s how the term “Xanthippe” has now come to mean any nagging scolding person, especially a shrewish wife. I think Xanthippe was one of the first Feminists and given how her name has such a negative connotation today, Socrates could may well have called her a Feminazi!

And nothing has changed really. Even today almost all of Feminism is being reduced to ‘angry frustrated women asking for rights’ or Feminazi’s! And this post is about deciphering why Feminism got such a bad name?

Before that…at the cost of repetition (sorry my regular empathetic readers – you can skip this part), Feminism speaks of equal rights and opportunities for all genders. And the definition of a Feminist that most resonated with me was the one that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Feminist from Lagos, Nigeria gave in her very well-articulated TEDx talk, ‘Why we should all be Feminists’ – ‘A feminist is a man or a woman, who says -Yes, there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it. We must do better.’