Women's Web

I am writing this piece fully prepared to receive sharp reactions from the current generation of young and prospective brides and grooms. I had earlier tried to defend arranged marriages and ended up supporting marriages arranged not by parents as I initially planned but that arranged by the couple concerned. Who knows if I would fail again and end up endorsing the opinion of the very youngsters whom I plan to criticize in this post of mine? I would make a very bad defense lawyer so never ever hire me to plead your case.

I have had a busy month…no, busy 3 months actually having involved myself in the organization of a National Seminar hosted by our college and conducted by the Odia department of our college. I had to take two days off after the seminar got over to put my house in order.

Having had an unusually cold winter (we still need to wrap ourselves in the morning), I had to deal with winter wear as well. So the two days went by in sorting out clothes and hand washing a few, airing out a few more and machine washing the rest. Curtains and sofa covers had to be changed and the left over food in the fridge either consumed or thrown out. OMG! It was so much easier helping out in the seminar. At least I had some excuse to offer myself!

Let me begin by wishing each one of you a very happy year 2012.

I think I had an okay kind of year 2011. The year began with my service getting extended by two years and in no time it has passed by and here I am looking forward to retirement in Jan 2013. There is a likelihood of our retirement age getting extended to 65 years and my husband has already begun to hope that it does not. It must be hard for him to spend time alone at home while I lead a life of my own with my colleagues and students.

Since my work life also doubles up for social interaction, till date I haven’t felt the need to socialize much outside college. If I retire next year I may have to start making friends in and around home. As of now I limit my interactions to a nod [...]

My post on women empowerment has drawn out comments that equate strong women with unhappy marriages. I wonder if bad marriages –at least some of them – are due to the fact that men are unable to accept women as empowered human beings. But then would they be happy with submissive wives and treat them well? I am afraid not. I feel that a good and bad marriage are the result of the mutual understanding between the partners in a marriage and has nothing to do with women empowerment.

In these days of couples threatening to divorce for the flimsiest reason let me give an example of a mature and understanding person. He was 26 when he married a girl half his age. 60 years ago this was quite common.

When a woman marries a man much older than her, he is more like a guardian than a companion. The woman in my post whom I shall call Rajani was in awe of her serious minded husband and treated him with deference rather than affection. She was just thirteen and it was suffocating to play the dutiful wife and daughter-in-law all the time. And then her younger sister Prema got married 5 years after she had married and she had gone to attend it.

Her brother-in-law and his family seemed so different to her own. With them around it was always fun. Her brother-in-law and his younger brother sang very well [...]

I’ve taken a long time to write about violence against women. Not that I’ve never witnessed or heard about it. It is my inability to do much for the victims that makes me hesitant to even talk about it. All or at least most of us have been victims of mental if not physical torture at the hands of our men folk – not necessarily the husband. However, many have found a way to deal with the situation and found a middle path. I do not consider mental torture less traumatic or humiliating as compared to physical torture. Sometimes it is done so subtly that one would not even be able to pinpoint the sore areas in a relationship. The victim may even take a while to actually understand the actual sense in which a humiliating remark is directed at her. It is none the less equally hurting sometimes even [...]

In an earlier post I had written about certain misunderstandings I had as a teenager and a young woman and how I now stand corrected. One such misunderstanding was that people who did not believe in the existence of an all powerful God were bad. They were people without morals. Somehow they didn’t fit into my list of good people. God fearing people were the good ones. Of course I was wrong. We have a long list of so called god men involved in scandals and rackets proving that they too have their weaknesses like any of us and need to be forgiven for their shortcomings. That reminds me that with age, I too have become a lot more relenting and issues that would have upset me twenty years back do not even surprise me.

The need to look up to a supreme power for sustenance is not felt by many. [...]

An acquaintance of mine supposedly distributed sweets when her daughter s divorce was granted by court. She was happy that the days spent in bitter court room battles were over and done with. Her daughter would now be free to concentrate on her career and future. She was granted custody of her 3 year old daughter and the husband was allowed to have the child in his care during weekends. Fair enough, I felt. Parents often tend to transfer their anger and frustration on the child and it was perhaps better for them and in the interest of the child s welfare to separate rather than cling on to a relationship that was almost non-existent.

I could not help comparing her reaction to the earlier one when she was equally happy over her daughter s engagement to this very person. On both occasions she was happy for [...]

I have just finished reading The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee and I find myself viewing the well known epic Mahabharat from an entirely different angle. The author ought to be commended for approaching the epic from Draupadi s point of view. I would not say that I have never wondered how Draupadi felt on being married to five men or how she felt after the war was won. After all she was instrumental in pitching the Pandavas and Kauravas against each other and at the end of it just the five Pandav brothers remained. Draupadi lost her sons, brother, father and a whole lot of well wishers just because they chose to support her cause. Did she feel avenged or did she feel guilty? The book had answers to many questions that would often come to my mind. The concluding chapters were the best. Draupadi [...]

Meenu (name changed) joined the Intermediate Science course in our college last year. Initially I did not realize that her gait was peculiar or that she walked with a limp. She always occupied a corner seat and seemed to be a cheerful young girl with a keen interest in her subject. Her smile was contagious. It was only when she started attending practical classes that I noticed that her friends had to support her while climbing stairs and she took slow and measured steps even on level ground. It took her a few minutes to steady herself before getting up from her seat.

A little before Republic day her friends approached me saying that she wrote poetry and wished to read it out after the flag hoisting ceremony. She had not known that the last date for receiving entries was over. Could I do something about it?? [...]