I have a confession to make. When somebody calls me an obedient girl, I actually don’t like it. Yeah, if somebody tells me that I need to pull down to get into an hourglass like figure, I just want to scream,“ I am not an aspiring model!” By the way, who the hell made this rule that models need to be reed thin? How can bone and flesh be flattering? Is it the figure that we need to trim or is it the mind? I have a friend who is actually very “kiddish”. Actually in the literal sense. She is all sweetness and honey. And guess what! She is a great favorite with men. Without sounding very jealous, I find this all very silly. In the workplace when we women sit in boardrooms for a brainstorming session, they are expected to rub shoulders with men and history is the evidence that we have not only equaled men but we have outsmarted them. So why are we expected to behave like crawling infants the moment we leave the office premises? No. I am not agonizing. I am just a little confused. Who has defined this horizon of obedience? My mind surely revolts. And I don’t find any reason to disobey my mind. I saw an ad. in the TV where a man is shown in a very “pathetic” scenario. He observes fast for his wife, he is “eve teased” in the bus and he enters with a tray of tea cups in presence of his future wife. All this is shown to be very grueling and shameful for the man till he sports a particular undergarment which finally liberates him! It turns the tables which is evident in the real world. Coming to the recent attacks on Indian students abroad, everybody shudders at the idea of going abroad for studies. Why this hate, this anger against a particular color of skin or texture of hair or for that matter language? Why this stubborn resistance against a new entry? Is it insecurity or something else? Why I have brought the two instances together is the fact that I think somehow the origin of both is the same. It is in the mind. It actually might be the insecurity, the creeping fear that the other might be better. The status quo might be shaken. And just like a colonized country which finally decided to question its obedience to the colonizer, a non-white decided that his life is not the “white man’s burden”, a woman one day might somehow turn the pages of history and discovered that a well behaved women rarely made history!
