Summer Haiku

I Am Not Different.

I think I read this somewhere recently: “Feminist until a girl is married”. Strangely, I think I have never felt more anger towards  the issue of female repression since I was married. I guess, one really needs to be over into the dark side to know the extent of monstrous holy mess that constitutes it’s core.

Needless to say, the moment a woman marries, she opens her life to a barrage of inappropriate questions related to her womb—when do you plan to have kids, how many, and the onslaught continues. Perhaps, men get asked the same question too, but let’s get real, woman’s fertility is often synonymous with her ability to find and even retain a groom in India at least.

However, let me set the record straight: I am a feminist, I am married, and no I don’t have any plans of bearing children. This is my choice at the moment.

I feel that everything we do in life has to be a conscious decision. Often times, some things become so conditioned, that we go on doing the same thing on auto-pilot without even realizing the purpose of the task at hand. In this age of science, this level of blindness does not appeal to me. If everything is a conscious choice, then many life decisions about education, relationships and family must be questioned and examined. Only when one finds an answer that satisfies them or appeals to their sensibilities should the path be chosen. While this is a general guideline, following it is often associated with many challenges. Since most of my critics originate from my country of nationality: India, I will focus this article to the ambit of Indian society. In Indian society, collective tendencies dominate and there is little if no room for individual sentiments. While collectivism is a brilliant thing,  and makes us thrive in the sense of community, it brings with it an ugly monster of conformity. Think of it as the evil twin of collectivism. Brother Conformity wants everyone to follow a path that has more or less been followed by everyone before. Any deviation is frowned upon, and attributed to some character flaw. To illustrate: a woman’s choice to not marry consciously would be ascribed as a flaw with her personality or the misalignment of her nakshatras.

These aspersions usually find their way to women for some reason, I guess since the collective expectation of society from it’s women is high.  The minute a deviant comes to the foreground, all hell breaks lose- she is deemed “different”, “eccentric”, “selfish”. But this is just a woman exercising her individuality, her right to make a decision and break the conditioned patterns.  I think I can hear the woman saying: my choices are my own, I am not different, I am me.