Monday, September 10, 2007

The power puff girls

Will the world ever turn around and be different from what it is now?
Now, people say, “…the male chauvinist pigs in Delhi, you know how they are….” I do know how they are, not as strongly as I am not one of them- happily so, but because I have had the misfortune of meeting a few of them and hearing quite a lot about them through friends, through media. The corners of my mouth curl as I imagine what it would be like to live in a female-oriented world in the real sense of the world and not only as it appears on dark websites…in the crude form of femdom.
An excerpt from an interview: “So what do your parents do?” “Uhh…my mother is a pilot and my father is a househusband.”
Unflinching, unhesitant and bold- proud to have a caring, understanding father at home to tend to her, to listen to her after-school stories and to ridicule her History teacher for teaching his daughter unmindful muck instead of real facts.
Somewhere, a househusband cackles. Someone is coming to see his son today. For marriage. He is pensive and excited and wants his neighbour to be there for moral support (actually to share the preparatory work!) His wife and daughter had chipped in considerable amounts from their savings and he was proud of them.
Seven girls had rejected him so far and he does not want this to happen again.
One of the girls had said that the boy was a tad too dark and they had started badgering him to use Fair and Handsome. Someone else had wrinkled her nose at the boy’s long nose and they had had him undergo plastic surgery. But the result did not please the suitors and they called it off. An engineer girl who came to see the boy had asked if he was a virgin and had stormed out of the house when she knew he wasn’t. His father still doesn’t know why that team did not like his boy.
There wasn’t a single time when he had rejected an offer. The girls would always find fault with him each time. Someone even said the boy had stared into her eyes instead of looking down at his hands, as was the custom. The father was tired. The boy himself had agreed to tie the knot with anyone who married him. He had decided that he would take care of his wife’s house and their kids.
Spineless? Meek? Pashtuns may consider this demeaning, outrageous, against their nang and namoos, their honour and pride.
Lder, well-settled women would marry men who are just out of college- fresh graduates or HSC passouts. If the women die first, the men would have to follow their wives’ corpse on the funeral pyre- the Sata tradition- a symbol of their undying love for their better ‘a little more than’ half.
Ages on, some men would have had enough. It was too bad they couldn’t divorce their wives. They were all too powerful. So, it would be decided that some men meet at a secret [place, may be at the handsomeness parlour, to chalk out a plan to swim out of this oppression. A Men’s Rights Association would be born.
Hari wakes up. In a filmi setting, his brow would be bathed in sweat and he would be panting.
In the normal setting, he looks at the clock and wonders when that time will come. It has been his all-time fantasy that his life partner makes good use of him.
Oppression is only euphemism. May this oppression also have an erotic tinge to it. At this very moment, the corners of his lips are curling upwards.

1 comment:

Tamanna said...

Hmmm....They should put this one up in the school textbooks.