There is hope and there is time.

I was connecting my Lumia to my Onkyo home theatre system to listen to one of my favourite mix of MixRadio, when a particular raw nerve in my brain connected me to my life when I was in class V. I was depressed about not having a cassette player at home then.

I remembered going to my mama's (maternal uncle) house with a hope to get their walkman which was lying un-used. Ignoring my shame, I remembered asking for that walkman. I remembered getting a naked speaker from a friend and buying a big bellied earthen pot for five rupees. I remembered fixing the speaker to the earthen pot to get better bass. I was unhappy, but I had hope.

When I was graduating in Economics from Cotton College, there were motorcycles all over the place. Cheap 2-stroke Japanese bikes had flooded the market after 1991. I didn't have the fortune to ride one though. I had made a deal with one of my bike-owning friends that I would introduce him to one of the girls that he liked, who was incidentally my good friend. Luckily the deal worked and I had got the opportunity to ride a Yamaha RX100 twice - once inside a cricket field and once on the road. I had become a 50% biker. After that day on the road, my riding had to wait for another 3 years.

I once had asked my relative to let me learn driving his car. He had refused. I requested their driver. He too had refused.  I was sad, unhappy, anxious and perhaps depressed. But I had hope.

I kept working at whatever came my way with limited short term expectations. Neither did I have big ambitions, nor was I devoid of little hope. I was walking through life, giving the best I could.

Today I am 17 years past my first job. I am about to be 39 years. I have all the materialistic comforts that I never thought possible in my lifetime. 17 'only' years changed my life forever to the better in terms of what I earlier didn't have. It was completely unexpected. My limited short term expectations never could reach such heights.

Our lives are long, really long. Anything can practically happen. An ordinary man, Mr. Narendra Modi becomes the Prime Minister. Mr. Arvind Kejriwal, another ordinary citizen and an aspiring civil servant, becomes the Chief Minister of Delhi with a new political party in little over 3 years of his political career.

There are times when one feels that there is no ambition, and there are times when one feels there are too many things to do without a sense of focus. In both the scenario, one must take a long breath and think again. Moments when there seems to be a lack of an ambition, there are daily work that may need immediate attention such as getting the shoe polished. Doing your day to day jobs also give you a sense of accomplishment which will ready you for the bigger ambition.

Moments when you feel confused with multiple options, a long breath will help you realise that there is time to do all of them sequentially one after the other. If we take business ideas, a small business idea needs a minimum of 2 years to stabilise, and one can do 5 such business ideas in 10 years. It is another matter that you may be happy getting stuck to the first business idea that you had initiated.

My life mantra is that there is hope and there is a lot of time in one lifetime. Let us be genuine, be good, work hard at whatever life gives and life will give you what you hope for.

My Happiest Investment.

In my life of 38 years, I have invested my time and effort to achieve many things at different points of my life. In some, I succeeded. In some I succeeded partially.

I read. I travelled. I helped riot victims.
I worked late nights and whole nights when the office time was 9 to 5.
I quit my corporate life to be with my parents.
I prayed.

My happiest investment so far, however, was one of my new year resolutions many moons back when I was penniless, jobless and directionless. It was after becoming a graduate with a prospect of becoming another educated unemployed youth in Assam.

I had thought that whatever be the case, I will try hard to be a good human being - truthful, helpful, honest and harmless. It was a lot of hard work and sacrifice not to be bad, not to lie, to be helpful before self, not to take shortcuts to earning money, not be revengeful, and be honest about your weaknesses.

From a monthly salary of Rs. 1500 in 1998, life conspired to enable me to study at the best communication institute - MICA which charged Rs. 750 for its prospectus (and another Rs. 700 for the CAT prospectus). It gave me the strength to resign as an AVP in Deutsche Bank 15 years later to come back to look after my parents. It has made me positive and courageous to tackle life.

Even believing in being truthful, helpful, honest, harmless and selfless gives you immense power, self belief and a sense of pride.

Today in this new year, I reaffirm my resolution that life is short and the happiest investment is to sacrifice everything to think good, do good and be good.

A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF YOU, MY ELDERS, RELATIVES, FRIENDS, BROTHERS AND SISTERS.

Life

Life keeps you unhappy in search of ... hmmm... something. Anything it can be. Almost anything. Even death.

If you get death, you will still perhaps search for something else.

Is being incomplete, life?

Understanding Gender Equality to create happy families!

“We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” ― Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem is the demi-god of feminism and I do agree with quite a few of her widely spoken philosophies about women getting equal respect inside and outside the house. However, I have a major difference of opinion when it comes to the above statement, as I believe that it may be killing the very basis of a peaceful, prosperous and healthy family life. Moreover, it does not promote gender equality as Gloria Steinem had believed.

Gender equality is not about raising  our daughters more like our sons and vice versa. It is not about women doing what the men does. It is not about women behaving how the men behaves. Gender equality is not about gender neutrality. 

Gender equality is about equal respect and dignity for men and women in their own roles, which are guided by biology, physiology, anatomy and more importantly, choice.

According to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Gender Equality, also known as sex equality, sexual equality or equality of the genders, refers to the view that men and women should receive equal treatment, and should not be discriminated against based on gender, unless there is a sound biological reason for different treatment.

Quite unfortunately, I see that we are confusing Gender Equality with Equality of Gender Roles. I see daughters being primarily raised like boys with a clear objective of having a career and financial independence. At first glance, there is nothing wrong with it, but if we look closely, we are curtailing the choice of a girl to decide her own role in a society. We are imposing a role for her to become financially dependent. It is similar to enforcing an engineering or a medical degree on to boys, irrespective of his visible or latent interests.

The girl is taught to, not be like her mother, and to earn for herself. It starts from the tender age of schooling where she has to compete with the boys in the traditionally masculine school curriculum. For instance, the school curriculum doesn't generally have competitions in the typically women centric activities like cooking, dressing up etc., as much as it has competition in the men centric activities like running (athletics).

Instead of teaching about the need to respect men and women equally to our kids, we are teaching a certain way to grab respect, and that too, to our female children primarily. Women have started demanding equal opportunities at everything men used to primarily do, in the guise of getting equal respect. As John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize winner for literature would say, “And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.”

There is a serious fallacy in the understood and perceived concept of gender equality. The fallacy is its benchmarking against what men used to do, or does by being biologically masculine, for no fault of theirs. We are trying to create equality or homogeneity in gender roles, instead of true gender equality. In effect, we as a society are not even moving towards gender equality. We are in fact creating gender tensions.

Here are a few tension inducing facts in the Indian society:

1. Since the girl is considered 'parraya dhan' in an Indian family, she has more pressure to earn for a living as compared to the boy, who may inherit his father's properties. So if we indoctrinate a girl child towards financial independence, she is more likely to be under pressure.
2. A boy can easily find a bride till the age of 40, which is sadly not true for a girl. It becomes very difficult to get a groom after 32 years. So, if a girl gets caught up in the career spiral, she may never get married. We see a large number of spinsters in urban India today.
3. Trying to become like men in terms of career and lifestyle, the women folk are slowly losing the virtues typically attributed to women. They smoke as much. They drink as much. They sleep and wake up late. The patience level of women (generally considered higher than men) is diminishing with changing lifestyle of women. A boy may share a smoke with a girl without a question. He may actually encourage it. But he would not want a wife who is addicted to smoking.
4. Men are not brought up differently to understand the changing expectations from a women. For instance, a mother would tell her daughter to be a career woman, but would refrain from telling her son to get ready to marry a career woman by learning the household chores (for instance) as well.
5. Since the boy is not brought up to share household chores, we see Indian women working equally hard both at office and at home. Men just work at their offices. This creates tremendous tension in the family life and we have seen increasing divorces and lesser child births.

In effect, the confusion between gender equality and equality /homogeneity of gender roles is not only creating chaos, but also we are ignoring the learning processes towards the ultimate biological reality - a happy family life. Raising a family, living a peaceful, healthy, cultured family life is not getting enough focus in the learning phases of a kid's life. A happy family life is a must for overall well-being and happiness, and the basis of a happy family life is peaceful mutually beneficial co-existence of a man and a woman, with their kids.

As Author David O. McKay would say, "No other success can compensate for failure in the home."

It's no stretch to say that a person has a serious advantage in life if they come from a loving, supportive home. Many people still succeed though they come from less-than-ideal family situations, but having our basic needs met, knowing that our parents love us and learning life lessons at home make all the challenges of day-to-day living that much easier to face. Likely, as an adult you want a happy home for your family. This is no coincidence that natural evolution has organized us into families so that we grow up in happiness and safety, and so that we learn to love others selflessly.

A happy family life - may be nuclear, preferably joint - is the reason why there is an urgent need to re-define the concept of gender equality. We need to understand that gender equality is about respect and the celebration of choice over tradition. It is not about what we DO. It is about what we FEEL. The current understanding is weird and warped, and is proving to be the primary reason for disintegration of families, rising divorces, unhappy marriages, suicides, murders, bad childhood and perhaps rising heart and tension related diseases.

I am in no way meaning to say that a girl should not be educated. Neither am I saying that she should never work outside her family. In fact, I think family life becomes rewarding if the wife of the house is smart and highly educated. All I am saying is that we should give priority to building  happy families where kids can grow up happily. All I am saying is that life cannot center around making money and becoming consumers of conveniences.

Let us examine a few lifestyle realities of our times.

1. Earlier it was shameful for a girl, not to know cooking. Today it is perhaps fashionable. Neither should that be shameful, nor fashionable. It should be part of the upbringing process. Even boys should learn cooking. I have met girls who have discovered that they love cooking only after their marriage, when they were compelled to cook.
2. Child marriage is bad, but not marrying till the age of 30 is equally bad. Once, in a quick study in my place of work, all boys above 24 were married and all the girls above 24 were unmarried. We had girls above 35 as well in the set! This upsets the natural process of reproduction and maintenance of cosmic equilibrium.
3. When I talk to my kid-cousins and nieces who are in school, their questions to me is not about what to study, but about what kind of career to choose, as if education will only make sense then. However, education should not be about getting a job, or about building a career. Education is primarily to lead a happy informed wholesome life. There is no harm in a doctor becoming the wife. It is only good for the family and the neighbors. Becoming an active doctor has its cons. For one, it is highly stressful and demanding in terms of time.
4. Housewife is derogatory. Home-maker is the in-word. This is a direct off-shoot of the shame associated with being a housewife in our times. It is with utter disgust, I say that we as a society have failed the role of a wife in a family. We have demeaned it, just because it does not earn a monthly salary. One of my aunt (a housewife) has a beautiful garden in front of her house, and to me, she is a 'gardening expert' or an expert gardener. The joy that the garden provides to her husband and her kids, and the pride they all feel when visitors come to their house, are no less than the monthly salary that the husband brings home. Likewise, it is a for a good cook, a clean house, well mannered children, well cultured children, happy grandparents and the list is endless.
5. I want to work because I want to be financially independent. I find this lifestyle statement dangerous, materialistic and mechanical. I do support working but not with the end goal of financial independence. One should work because he or she likes working in that particular field. It is difficult for men to follow this philosophy, as they must earn by any means (they can't give child birth!). Girls need not get into this vicious cycle of finding work just to earn money. If she is a singer, she should continue working (singing). If she is a doctor and loves treating diseases, she should continue working. Secondly, financial independence can also come from sharing the income of the husband. Every month, 30% (or an agreed amount) should go to the bank account of the wife without her asking for it.
6. Rise in crèche is going hand in hand with the rise in the number of lonely grandparents. A family is not a family if the kid goes to a crèche at the tender age of a few months, and if there is no support system for the grandparents who have given birth to you. With working wives, it is seen that grandparents just come to visit. Either they stay in their  own house alone, or keep shifting between sons or daughters. Similarly, a kid is left to the crèche in the name of development of social skills as the mother has to go to work that she most often hates. 

My readers may not agree to all my points, and to all my analogies. That is perfectly fine. However, my request is to think, discuss and debate about the main point that I am trying to bring up in this blog - 'the strive towards achieving gender role equality, in the name of gender equality, is harming the most basic unit of human existence - the family'. If family system and values disintegrate, cultures and races will disintegrate. Human civilization will disintegrate into chaos, extremism and barbarism.