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The women of India
There was a constant theme about my travels around India, the women of India, different stages, different phases, bound by the same charge, being a woman of India.
India, if you haven't watched Vir Das | I COME FROM TWO INDIAS, https://youtu.be/5A-F9qu6c_4?si=_ILA3fuTV9yQ385g please do, there is nothing I could say about India that isn't expressed in this profound speech by an artist using his mark in the world to convey an important message.
If you choose to read on, here are some Vir Das lines -
"I come from an India where we worship women during the day and gang r**e them at night,
I come from an India where we scoff at sexuality and yet F**k till we reach a billion people,
I come from an India where journalism is supposedly dead because men in fancy suits in studios, give each other handjobs, and yet women on the road with laptops are still telling the truth"
Divorced, married, career-orientated, careerless, spinster, first love, at home, away from home, orphaned, with parents, straight, queer, in every city I travelled to there was a story waiting for me to listen to.
Ever pondered that thought, would you rather have been born blind or have had sight and then lost it? In a similar perplexing sense, there is this belief to educate girls and allow them to be exposed to a false sense of autonomy, so that they have a voice, if they choose to use it. It is ingrained in them to fall in line, I have seen a friend who believed in her autonomy and called herself a feminist, fold, gone, in a snap of a finger, she lost her fight, her voice, her choice. Some are told to have an arranged marriage, and even in love marriages, men can default to the orthodox thinking, that a man chooses for his wife and, even worse his family. What leg does she have to stand on?
I am not saying it is all doom and gloom in all of India but even my happily married Indian friends aren't enough to justify the collective of desolated souls. Some even back the collective, sharing stories of how they stood up to their husbands to allow them their freedom. Then I met a confident woman one minute and then as if he were the switch to her voice box, she stopped talking.
An Indian woman is expected to be ambitious but not too ambitious and if you are a high achiever you better get married so that they don't see you as lesser of because you are a spinster. And the flip of that, not being given enough tools to have a career, what then?
I witnessed young lovers meeting in the park and then I met a girl who had been used by her first love, ran away from home so she could hold her own broken heart. She ran out of money and needed to return home, the truth all came out and she was made to feel ashamed of falling in love.
I met kids removed from the street, fed hope, only to be sent back there when they turned 18.
I cried with the women who were given a chance to lead their own lives, at the cost of their mothers', holding their husbands at bay, a life for a life they say. Those women carry in their free lives, guilt, a heavy load on their hearts and so too, the pressure to do something purposeful.
I am not against all things, India, for most of my time in India, I fell in love with her. There is beauty in her gods, her sense of family, her people, and the many cultures they have. I even had an appreciation for the laws of unwedded couples, not that they need to sign a million things and declare anything, just the romantic in me feels virginity and sex should be preserved as something virtuous and not something that can be joked about as being a number on your forehead.
Then all the while, I think of the stories I heard at Dream Village, one woman was 10 or shall I say one child was 10 years old, I am reminded how cruel this world can be to people who don't have a choice, the children who don't get a choice.
