"What?
Your daughter is shifting? But why?! She has a perfectly good home here with
you both around...and...it’s not like she is getting married and moving…or she
has a job in a different city and had to leave home right?" Aah... What a
wonderful conversation to overhear from the kitchen. I stirred through the
masala chai I was preparing for myself while my mom's friend was reacting
uninhibitedly to the news my mom had just given her - that her daughter was
moving out and was going to live by herself, 10 minutes away from home
itself.
What
I thought as completely normal, apparently, wasn't. And I think the lady wanted
to incept an unnecessary abnormality of the idea into my mom' s head somehow.
Resonating my state of mind, the chai I was stirring suddenly started bubbling
and then boiling to the top, almost flowing out of the vessel. Breaking out of
my trance I scampered to shut off the stove. I poured the chai out into my mug
and took it back to my room, along with my interrupted but still on-going party
of thoughts. I began to wonder about the reasons that made the idea of me
moving out abnormal or unusual. Hmm... Not married and my work is in the same
city so should still be living with parents. Right. So that basically implies
that for a 'girl' (and believe me I am rolling my eyes when I say this) any
thought, urge or desire and perhaps even the potential and capacity to live by
herself without the support of her parents or ''partner" is ridiculous? I
wonder what 'natural' parent or human instinct can reason with that ideology.
Because, if we must talk natural, then most Indian parents are extremely
unnatural. If we switch on discovery, Nat geo or animal planet and observe
animal behaviour, we see that the minute the infant has learned to use its own
hands, legs, paws, fins etc they are on their own. They learn to hunt for
themselves, feed themselves and sustain their lives by themselves. Indian
parents on the other hand often feel the contrary. Ever noticed an indian
mother proudly saying "my child just cannot eat his food without me"?
Or “my child just cannot get ready for school by himself/herself?".
Handicapping children by making them dependent is the classic Indian strategy,
which is weird because a strategy is often a specific plan or method for
obtaining a certain goal or result. What result parents really wish to obtain
through such kind of parenting is beyond me. And with us girls, everything just
magnifies in its severeness automatically. Often I have wondered about the
status of women in India and have usually reserved those thoughts for private
contemplation because there has been so much discussion and debate happening
around it anyway, especially post Nirbhaya. But maybe blurting it out might
just help, who knows.
A
common view I hear from people from my parents’ generation (especially the
women), is that “Girls these days just don’t want to compromise. No wonder the
divorce rates have gone up so much”. Now, as much as I am aware of the unreasonable
demands, expectations and behaviour some girls can have, this kind of statement
is not just offensive to women on so many levels, but it is just plain idiotic,
largely because it is so ill-informed (if informed at all). I once read a BBC
news article (link below) about how divorce rates in India have doubled up. Of
the many reasons stated for this phenomenon, one really caught my eye and I
quote that here- “Today the Indian male, as opposed to earlier, is a very
complex entity. We want our wives to be really progressive, modern, so to say,
which is why we married them in the first place. But at the same time we still
want our wives to cook food for us. We want our wives to be there when we get
back home”. I want to talk about this a little. A lot of us women are leaving
the comfort of our homes for studies or for a job and naturally this is going
to affect our personalities as individuals, in that it makes us
self-sufficient. Under these circumstances, we need to make our decisions and
choices, which demand basic independent thinking. We are required to manage our
lives-both personal as well as professional- just as any guy who moves out of
his home for study or work reasons does. As kids, we girls have very often
experienced biases in parenting. Meaning if we have a brother, then he is
expected to contribute to the family by running errands ‘outside’ the house
like paying bills, perhaps even getting the groceries, which he often does in
sulk-mode. We on the other hand were expected to know how to cook and keep the
house. The catch here is that since we are also going to school, then college,
and then entering work-lives, we also learn how to run those errands ‘outside’
the house, in addition to knowing how to feed oneself and keep the house.
To
be fair, yes not all girls know how to cook and not all girls even like doing
so. But the justification or reasoning we use for necessitating this skill-set
in a girl, should just as much also apply to a guy and vice-a-versa. If guys
are not required to know how to cook and keep the house because well “there are
so many tiffin services or mess and canteen facilities and because the ‘bai’
does it for you”, then the same goes for girls as well (I don’t know of any
tiffin service or mess that says ‘women won’t be served here’). Similarly, if a
girl should know how to cook because “she should know how to feed herself and
the family”, then the same logic should apply to guys too. The funny thing is,
both the arguments above can be easily refuted if one has ever known what it is
to live outside India and especially as a student. Because there, you are your
own cook and bai. Tiffin services, canteens or mess and a bai are luxuries we
have in India.
My
problem here is with gender stereo-typing. Why does something like cooking and
house-keeping need to be gender stereo-typed at all? My sole reason for knowing
how to cook should instead just be “self-sufficiency”. Just as I should know
how to fix the fuse if it blows, or change a flat tire and have a basic
understanding of my vehicle, fix my internet if it crashes down, or fix my
laptop even. All because I am an individual. Not because I am a girl or a boy.
That has got nothing to do with this, and I don't think it should
have anything to do with this.
The
idea of moving out and living independently was purely based on such reasoning-
that of being an individual. I wanted to grow as an individual and no growth
happens in one’s ‘comfort zone’. It has been a year since I have been living
independently and there is so much more life that I have breathed in already.
So much learnt, so much explored. There have been mixed reactions and responses
from relatives and family friends and it was interesting and sometimes even
entertaining. For most, it was an unusual concept primarily because my parents
live in the same city and they found it particularly surprising or strange (or
both) that I have grown closer to my parents ‘after’ having moved out. Here the
unexplored concept of ‘space’ comes into picture. When kids tell their parents
that they want ‘space’ it really is a good thing-for both parties. Because
space and freedom, don’t come for free. They always come with responsibility.
Youngsters need to understand that this space they crave and desire, needs to
be earned.
Bluntly put – if you really like the ‘my way or the high way’ slogan so much,
then you need to get your ass out of your parents’ house first to discover the
‘I’ before jumping to the ‘my’ part. That check point is necessary. One also
needs to learn how to successfully and effectively ‘manage’ this space. No
“management” degree or college can ever teach you this by the way, but on the
contrary, managing your own life and space successfully will give you an MBA
for life, the value of which, principally, is much higher than an MBA earned
from any premier institution (because this one will be priceless).
Managing
freedom effectively is the most desirable characteristic in an individual,
because it builds one’s psychology for sustainable growth. Isn’t that what we
strive for even as a nation anyway? Sustainable growth? Where does India stand
in terms of ‘managing freedom’ can be a very good backtrack for us in fact to
evaluate ourselves as a society and an even better thought to consider
seriously would be whether we can really afford to indulge in gender
stereo-typing and gender wars given that only the best accumulation of skill
sets will form a productive generation.
So
maybe it is time we start changing our perceptions and parenting strategies and
adopt those which do not discriminate based on gender. The atrocities that have
happened with women in our nation in recent times and which tragically are
still happening, have all high-lighted the urgent need for a shift in
perspective towards women-she cannot be treated with respect as an individual
in the society if she is not perceived as one at home. Let’s do-away with
gender stereotyping at home first and the rest I believe will fall in place.
Godspeed to that.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12094360)
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