The Conservatives

I am no feminist. It is true that I completed an  MPhil course on a lengthy and unwieldly look at feminist theory across the ages and spaces. It is true that I have always been an (loud but behind the doors) advocate for justice for women, a defender of the female faith, with righteous indignation bubbling inside me when I hear of educated women falling prey to patriarchal vices.

But always, always, with a weariness that goes with the well worn shoe.

I am no feminist. My mother whipped me into becoming one.

Despite the metaphor, I kid you not.

She refused to socialize me into gendered identities. She wouldn't give me Barbies and other such excessively femininely anatomized dolls. She encouraged me to play every physical sport on earth. She was tireless in her determination that I should at all costs have a career. I wasn't allowed the luxury of even contemplating the possibility of just being happily married in the future. She was vehement in her tirades against bondages that tie down women ideologically.

All this, of course, right through the ages of 0-18.

There were contradictions. I saw her helpless against some choices she thought she had made. I saw her floundering, many a time, against the compelling rationale and logic of tradition and male reason. She had only her inexplicable reasoning that can't be put into social language to depend upon.

Nevertheless, our generation, this generation of women who ride the waves of Twittering Faces and are surveyed by the masculine eye on the covers of bidding scam cover stories, be it spectrum or sweat equity,  are only The Conservatives.

I am the spokesperson for The Conservatives. I have thrown to the sea the monetary and emotional investment my parents made in my education, years of studious toil, academic excellence, for the sake of marital peace and concord. Unable to argue my case or defend my right or have the courage to take a stand, I am, back to where we started from. A prehistoric anomaly, date me beyond much before the Suffragettes.

Or, take the woman in the predicament cubicle adjacent to me. Lazy about her intellectual abilities, she is much more interested in her husband's career than her own. She has a mother who rose from Lab Assistant to Professor and Head of the Department, who managed home and work,  faced all odds (and ends) to walk a very thin line of frustration and achievement. Yet, my friend, a co conservative, happily gives up a lucrative bank job because she has a high income group husband and was all set to go to the US immediately after marriage.

Yet another co conservative gives up yet another lucrative government bank job on being persuaded by her husband (perhaps) of the lack of challenge in a sarkari naukri, of the inappropriateness of her long working hours for a happy married life. She too is the offspring of the working mother syndrome.

We may head public or private institutions. We are 'allowed' a prominent voice in the administration of public and external affairs. We are 'given' representation on workforces, task teams, educational institutions, scholarship processes, university admissions. But we make choices, willingly, that date back to beyond. Even our grandmothers have been more self righteous.

Complacent in our 'relative' freedom or the lack of war against the male bastion, we luxuriate in the space our fore-mothers made for us. The foray into the outside world our mothers fought for, we shrug aside and relax in air-conditioned cars bought by our husbands. A false sense of economic security lulls us. A good education, an MBA, has ' bought' us a coveted husband with whom we can speak in strange tongues and familiar dictions of interest. For all other purposes, we continue to display our husbands' underwear on the domestic washing lines of marital triumph.

Jane of no trade.

What is it about early mornings that stirs the desire in me to compose, create, make something beautiful with words?

As an eight year old I once woke up very early in the morning to come up with a poem by the time I finished breakfast:

When I wake up in the morning,

And see the bright sun shine,

In my heart I feel,

It's a good day for me.

But when I go to school,

I do many naughty things,

And then I feel

It's been a bad day for me!

I was praised at school, my mother choked on her milk when she heard it, and I was reasonably satisfied by the adulation. At around Christmas time, the same year, I produced another masterpiece:

O little pony

O little pony

Will you stop there?

For I have to go to Bethlehem

Baby Jesus is born there.

Clearly, it was a very productive year for me. There were other little masterpieces along the way but like every other unsung poet, I was eventually distracted by the mundane, the petty.

In the memory of very promising innings, my mother often asks me, why don't you write? Why are you not writing anymore? Your poems are so wonderful.

Well, mothers will always say that.

I have always been afraid of writing for someone else. I don't fear criticism but I fear a lack of approval or the absence of praise. When praise comes my way, I am suspicious, lifting the sheets to see if there is a monster under the bed. Self doubt or excessive self awareness is so natural to me that I have no idea what I really look like. When I catch a glimpse of myself in flashing car windows and tall shop windows, I am startled by the wild haired stranger looking at me.

I painstakingly hid my identity when I first started a blog. I abandoned it when I realized I couldn't do without readers as well. I would read other blogs and cringe at the non- attractiveness of my writing. I am the best fan of a reasonably good writer's writing. I am scathing with the criticism but I am most loyal as a reader.

This is my second attempt at keeping a blog. Ever since all my comfort zones have abandoned me, I realize I have nothing to lose.

Reader, I fear you not.

In a nut shell

To multi-task is a woman's destiny.Her destiny is not her femininity, which is altogether questionable. It is not her sexual identity, which is complicated. It is not related to the choices that she makes in life. The choices she makes are imagined. She has no choice.

And yet, she has to multi-task. Not so that she can fulfill all her responsibilities or because, as a modern woman, she has multiple roles to play.

Multi-task or Perish. That is why it is her destiny.

Of course, some may say that some women have it nice. They merely have to wave a hand in the air and this or that is done! Those women don't exist. They are fanciful creatures in our envious and our men's lethargic imagination.

I walk a winding path from the back gate of the Institute to its shrouded center. It is a quaint little jogger's path, reminiscent of University greens colonized by students, dogs and families who sprawl, read, listen to music, talk or just watch others walk by. It only reminds me of other spaces. There is no such communal activity here. Only the Institute's self sufficient internal organization symbolized by women behind vegetable burdened push carts calling on other women who step out briefly for the ordinary potato perusal- to go back to scanning the weeks' The Economist.

Or perhaps they are also busy coordinating their lives so that it makes sense to an outsider like me looking in through the windows. Perhaps they are checking in on babies, on pots on the fire, on the spot on the floor, turning a blind eye to the laundry, sighing after the speck of dust that resolutely clings to the edge of the table. They are, like the rest of us, barely managing to put themselves in order to go out and battle a world that has sized them up and told them what to do or what not to do. They trail in surreptitiously late and leave early, to catch up with the thoughts they left behind at home.

The woman who comes to sweep and swab my house has aged with the cunning she has had to exercise to barely survive a drunkard, five children, two grandchildren and a decrepit everyday life. She is old at forty and shrewd for her years. She keeps the tabs on the ways of the well to do. She tells me which keys turn for which door and how to keep to keep the stair railings shining.

What happens when one day the rationale for such an existence disappears out of the window? When the centers we had thought we had established for our lives disintegrate or just move away? What happens when there is simply no need to do what one did everyday grumbling, muttering but purposefully?

Will we be able to find the courage to stop, stand and stare? Or will we raise swords, imagining that the point is not lost after all, those centers of our lives have not crumbled away?