Kamal Ghorui
‘Nari’ once again becomes ‘nara’
Forget ‘delimitation’ (a word as unwieldy as a bloated LS). Could we please unanimously agree to a limitation on male netas banging on about who’s doing more for women, and who will pay the price on Judgment Day, aka Voting Day.
For decades, we have protested against our ‘joint existence’, always mentioned as appendages of sons/fathers/husbands, instead of simply individuals.
It’s our losing battle, more so when politicians use us to win their battles. So, please allow me to add ‘football’ to the standard electoral roll-out of ‘mothers, sisters, daughters, wives’ who are supposedly being saved/damned by bills being tabled/stabled.
This time, ‘ Ma-behen’ has been given sole mention. Yet aren’t they the ones so casually slurred in that disgusting gulley-level gaali?
In the Hypocritic Code enshrined in Bharat, yes, Mata, women are pedestalised in cliché, but, on the ground, kicked around like aforesaid football.
Age-old pains way outnumber grandiosely given gains. Again this week, we’ve been used to score brownie points. Actually, blackening points.
Acchha, since you insist on chipko-ing us to a male-ing list – should that more aptly be ‘chap’ko – why, pray, are all our other roles being ignored this time? Cholbey na! Why are biwi-behenbeti not being thunderingly mentioned? Or, live-ins who, chhee-chhee, are now wanting equal marital rights? And, which, hai-hai! The Supreme Court is giving.
Again, since we’ve always been a he-mail attachment, it’s stupid to ask why women’s reservation was gathbandhan-ed to delimitation, like bride’s anchal to groom’s angavastram. As absurd to mention that 33% was already there in the 2023 Bill. Passed near-unanimously but never implemented – usual gap ’twixt statement and intent, no?
Listenji, women want not reservation, but equalisation. Not to be ‘fair sex’, but to be fairly treated. In that Great Protectorate of the home, they don’t want to be ‘married off ’, bullied, battered, burnt, sexually abused, ‘honourably’ murdered.
Spare them from what Imperial China called lingchi and which Taylor Swift correctly translated into her haunting ‘Death by a thousand cuts’.
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Alec Smart said, “‘Civil Lines’ are to go from cities. They’ve long gone from society.”
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