Tuck in your pallu.....for what?

A gender ratio skewed against women. A literacy rate skewed against women. Infanticide targeted at female foetuses. My heart bleeds every time I see girls grappling with these issues and those whose precious lives are extinguished before they see the light of day. The statistics, the numbers and that much well-intentioned legislation later, little has changed on the ground.

Consider this. 2011 Census says only 65 per cent of women were literate, compared to 82 per cent of men. Why so? Is it because a girl cannot add two and two or she is not capable of anything more than knitting and sewing? Don’t think so. She drops out, so her brother can study. She cooks, so he can eat. She earns, so he can spend. She lives a tougher life, so he can have it easy.

Among the girls who do manage to go to school, quite often there are a handful of them who are at the top of their class and the top of their game. With a spark in their eye and spring in their step. They are ready to take on the world. In my own class of mechanical engineering, a department that is considered most unlikely for women, eight out of top ten students were girls. Most of them pursued a Masters degree in mechanical engineering.

Sadly, many do not make it that far. They are compelled to dropout to earn for the family or get married.

If they do manage to finish school, they are boxed into professions that the society approves of. If you are a woman, you are not “cut out” to be a politician.

Research indicates that Indian women hesitate to put themselves forward as political candidates. Worse still, rarely are they encouraged by their family or peers to do so. When women can turn out in record numbers as voters as seen in the 2014 elections, then why not as elected representatives?

Remember, you are cut out to be a “good” housewife, a role most artfully institutionalized over generations, and feed your family in all your waking hours! TV commercials have perfected it. Haven’t you seen the MTR advert where the woman of the house wakes up before everyone else does, ties her hair up into a highly efficient kitchen-friendly chignon, tucks in her pallu around her waist, and charges into the kitchen with a big grin to make ten different tiffins to suit every other member’s taste and requirement! Thank you MTR!

A few months ago, FP reported about a new matrimonial website founded for the alumni of Ivy League institutions. Mind you, the boys must be alumni of “premier institutions”, Indian or international, to register. As for girls, the criterion is a degree from a school with a “countrywide reputation”. When FP quizzed the founder why such glaring differences, he replied that highly educated and well placed men are happy to find a woman who would mind their house. That is one educated man sharing the opinion of other educated men.

There are women in professions not considered quite typical and there are those who have and are breaking the glass ceiling. They have scaled the upper echelons of various fields with sheer determination to overcome traditional challenges and a strong will to multitask, and much less because their responsibilities have changed or are being shared. There are men who share responsibilities, but they are in the minority.

A career-minded woman is labelled “selfish” and “individualistic”. What is wrong if she wants to be true to herself? What is wrong if she wants to realize her true potential? And, what is wrong if she wants to chase her dreams?

Not very long ago, I was discussing with a friend how society’s treatment of women has hardly changed and how society conditions the woman to always walk a meter behind the man. And he dismissed my argument, “oh, gone are those days!” I laughed because I couldn’t cry. Just like anybody else moving about in swanky skyscrapers, it may be natural for him to believe in the romantic idea of a changing India. Or has the country changed and it is just that the change has somehow bypassed half of its population?

When you move away from the Silicon Valleys of India, you cannot begin to count the innumerable women who continue to find it a challenge to realize so much as basic rights as human beings – struggle to complete their education, fight for survival, and lose lives during pregnancy and childbirth. So really “those days” have not “gone” anywhere. They are very much here and palpable. You only have to look closer.

Let’s tuck in our pallu to empower our girls and understand them, we can make idli and dosa later.

By Indu Chinta

The author is a Coordinator at Vidya Sahyog, an NGO that works for education. Formerly, a researcher at The Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi.