March 8, 2022
On this very day, we talk more about men than women; their splurges, reprisals and the roasted-head bandwagon maneuvering like an occultists to snarl at the subtleties and seethes furtively endured by women for ages. Or a high-keyed note by the doyens on women achievers, women empowerment and women misandry!
But, what we fail to debate on is the spirit of survival! I have to tell you this story of my domestic maid who in spite of living with an inebriate and parasitic deems the strength to cut the ground under her feet rather than posing as a lame-leg disabled hermit. The “josh” and “junoon” in her to feed her family by mopping, brooming, cleaning utensils and doing other odd jobs shows her spirit to nail life as a conqueror to her impoverishment and impecuniousness.
We rarely talk about such women who feed their insecurities and inhibitions with self-audacious spirit, decimating the frosty-frozen prejudices which label women as subservient cave-in sinuous. We never talk about the “widows” and “divorcees” that are often expostulated for adding “chilies” to their life. Behind their stiffenend-shapy corset lies the breathlessness of uninhabited loneliness, a somber prelude to a day freckled with intolerant evasiveness and a spirit to survive on what has been left behind.
It is not easy for a woman to live in a country like India where patriarchal norms govern the taste of her peripatetic desires. We still allow widows to live an incapacitated life of dejection and disparagement. They are subject to perfidy of human disenchantment and inglorious rub-off from the tenants of the society. She could be seen contemporaneously as a pinnace of lust and loathe. Her passive integration of life becomes judgmental and the evanescence of life misleading. Her spirit to evoke an emollient caress to the inflicted wounds conjures a spread-serve of her motives and beliefs as the survival strategy.
We don’t talk about women with hijabs, ghunghat, and veils that are entrapped by patriarchal condescension; though, the “Spartan hijab” ruthlessly becomes a battle-axe for vote bank politics. The Paleolithic savory of patriarchy unflinchingly covers the face and head of a woman so that the binocular lenses of the man (kind) might not play a provocative staccato. Gibberish as it may sound; the nobility of a woman is at stake—all the time, every time.
We hardly talk about of women setting their body on pyre of inglorious scrutiny by men for their incandescent sexual proclivities. The cocottes and ecdysiast proffer their body to earn a living; but their sense of survival looks contemptuous to a person sitting inside a four-walled grandiloquent dwelling with frills and fancies that decline to abate. Movies like “Chameli” and “Chandani Bar” present a candid simulacrum of a prostitute’s life, which is more by grotesque circumstances and less by choice. This reduces women to a pile of loathe and disgust by the sclerotic demonized society.
Why one particular day ingratiates a woman to be overwhelmed for her indefatigable efforts when every day has been a piteous road for survival. The looming lethargy of shriveled flowers invigorated by an incandescent beam of peripatetic rays depicts the paradox in a woman’s life—withered drought that refuses to bargain and leaves behind a barren disillusionment of a tempestuous mirage.
The country is in a dire need to set-up social structures that put a stop to these aberrations through education and awareness. The spirit of survival is an agglomeration of courage, sensitivity and a will power of endurance. Let’s celebrate what leaves us eluded as it marks the beginning of what still needs to be achieved.