Nishanth S Coontoor
I looked at Rahul. He quickly looked away pretending to not catch my eye. I looked at Udval. He buried his face in the card set he was holding.
“You’ve got to pick a card. There is no getting away from it,” explained Ritama, the self-appointed rule implementer.
We were playing exploding kittens this cold Sunday afternoon.
For those of you who haven’t played the game, each player needs to draw a card from the card deck. You lose if you draw an “exploding kitten” card. You could choose to alter the card order in the deck if you had the card that allowed you to. Of course, I had no such cards. An “exploding kitten” was imminent.
I took a sip of chai. Picked up a Britannia Marie Gold Biscuit. I dipped it in chai.
The “chai”ed part of the biscuit broke.
Sigh.
“I don’t have luck on my side. I almost always have to work a little more,” I remarked. “Look at Ritama. She is winning. She has it easy.”
While others did their usual eyeroll in response to my overly dramatic reaction, I got no immediate reaction from Ritama. She was intently looking at her phone.
Suddenly, it appeared my statement had struck a chord with her – a wrong chord.
“Wait, are you saying we women have it easy?” she asked.
“I did not mea…”
“Here look at this GIF I just received,” she added, cutting me. “The timing of this message could not have been any better.”
The GIF showed a hero and a heroine. It seemed to be taken from an old Bollywood movie. They were dancing in the garden.
The lady in the GIF had some intense, but cool, dance moves. She danced from point A to point B. She then looked back at her lover-the guy. She was waiting for him to join her.
He merely walked over to her. Not dancing. Just walking.
And then they struck a pose.
The message under it read, “Gender Inequality: A woman continues to have to do a LOT more than a man to get to the same position .”
“That’s funny. But it makes you think. It’s an exaggeration, right?”
“So, I read about this guy called James Watson who discovered the DNA. He was about to give a lecture once. Before he started, he thanked the women scientist who introduced him by appreciating her breasts,” said Ritama. “When asked, it is said that he did not seem to understand what was wrong. He is a scientist. I don’t know how true this story is though. But this is what I was told in the lab today.”
“Maybe that attitude was prevalent in the past?” I asked. “I am yet to witness such a thing.”
“Then you got to listen to this,” added Udval.
“I met a friend yesterday who got married recently. We went to graduate school together. He works for a big firm now. When I asked him how his married life was treating him, his actual response was, “It’s going good. My wife cooks good food.”
“Yes, it was an open-ended question that I asked. And all he could think about telling me was that the wife cooks good food,” explained Udval. “I know guys who do not know how to boil milk! They have stayed in the USA alone, for years now. They believe cooking is not their job. They eat out every day. Getting married is their solution. Why do we still have this attitude?”
“Hold on, I need to add a few more points to this. Judging a girl by her ability to cook is talking crazy and stupid-I know that. We all know that. I don’t want to ignore the double standards that women seem to have when it comes to expectations in a marriage,” said Rahul.
Oh, I knew exactly what he was talking about.
“Arranged marriage or not, I have come across girls who call themselves a strong, independent woman. They are well educated and hold a job. But they want a guy who earns more than them, has a house and is ‘well settled.’ Does she not trust her earning potential to take care of herself? How can she call herself a ‘strong, independent woman’ when she has minimum dating cut offs?”
“Okay, look,” explained Ritama. “Let’s define and clarify Feminism. Simply put, its asking that men and women have equal rights. Do you all agree?”
“Of course, we agree.”
“This means that women are and get to remain strong and independent without double standards. This also means men view women as equal.”
There was silence in the room but there was clear agreement in the silence.
A minute into it, I remarked how it was weird that we are having to ‘ask’ for equality between men and women in 2018. There was nothing to be ‘asked.’ Nothing to be ‘given.’ Nothing to be ‘taken’ away. 2017 saw war victim Nadia Murad rise to become an activist for human rights. It saw Adele win 5 Grammy awards, including album of the year. The year saw an Air India all-female flight crew circumnavigate the globe. We witnessed Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon run again, 50 years later.
At the same time, we heard leaders pass lewd comments on women. Meryl Streep and J K Rowling called out the bullying. Emma Watson campaigned through the HeforShe movement. We witnessed Women’s marches.
Clearly, the issue had gotten more complex. Was there a solution?
“I think the solution starts at home,” suggested Nithya. “It starts right at the dinner table.”
“Get the kids to do the dishes -irrespective of their gender. Mothers don’t have to ask their daughters to always clean the kitchen, you know” she said. “And please, oh please, teach the sons to cook as well. Knowing to cook is a matter of survival – men or women – we have to both eat.”