Skip to main content

Superwoman


The biblical god stopped his creative spree with the manufacture of Eve. Eve put an end to god’s creative imagination apparently. At any rate, Eve was quite a force to reckon with: she changed the history of the entire human species. She upset the entire divine apple cart.

It’s a different matter that men used this tale to control women for millennia. The fact remains that women were essentially superior to men. Probably one of the major purposes of the Bible was to rein in that superiority and set up man as the patriarch. Not only the Bible, but also lot many other scriptures elevate man to a higher pedestal and subjugate women to the missionary position.

When Nietzsche regarded Jesus and Buddha as effeminate in contradistinction to the macho conquerors in history, was the philosopher missing a point? I think so. The conquerors have lost the limelight and the effeminate Jesus and Buddha have ruled the hearts of the faithful for centuries.

Nietzsche’s great error was to associate the gentle virtues of love and compassion with women and ascribe the tougher ones like assertiveness and domination to men. That association was one of the many perverted creations of man. If the woman was given equal opportunities, if she was not relegated to the biblical labour room with the sole tasks of bringing up babies and pandering to men’s egos, Nietzsche’s Superman would as well be a Superwoman.

If Nietzsche lived today, he would surely create a female Zarathustra. Today’s women have proved that they are in no way inferior to men. On the contrary, some of them have proved to be superior by virtue of their better dedication and readiness to toil.

So there is really no need for dedicating any particular day to women. The women’s day – national or international – is as obsolete today as the gargoyle. Soon the world may need to dedicate a day to the men folk; the poor creatures seem to be fast losing out in the ratrace to capture the pies in the skies.

Even as a commercial opportunity, women’s day is quite redundant. Any day is woman’s day now. Any day is good for a tango and its tangible delights. Just order the goodies online and have the fling on the go, on your way to your own paradise – feminine or masculine. We are all supermen and superwomen now, all of us, if we want to be.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 264: #takebackwomensday



Comments

  1. pranita deshpandeMarch 13, 2019 at 9:55 PM

    Beautiful post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sonal's PalletteMarch 14, 2019 at 10:02 AM

    I agree any day is a woman's day! Loved this post! You have a way with words :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Arvind PasseyMarch 14, 2019 at 11:44 AM

    So men are 'the poor creatures seem to be fast losing out in the rat-race to capture the pies in the skies'... loved that. I guess it is the same with examinations, job opportunities, and promotions where 'categories' are finding an in-road even for 'general' candidates. Where does this end?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 14, 2019 at 8:09 PM

      That's the point. Where does this end? Our notions are perverted and policies skewed.

      Delete
  4. wingsMarch 15, 2019 at 11:29 AM

    What is redundant is that contradistinction made by Nietzsche. Why comparison anyway? Both genders are complementary to each other. The problem lies with those who cannot understand this symbiotic relationship between both the genders. The last few lines well delineate this. Unfortunately, the majority of the so called thinkers cannot even perceive this idea clearly. A very well written blog driving home this point as well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 15, 2019 at 7:30 PM

      It is only in the latter half of 20th century women were given some sort of equality which changed the entire social structure and outlooks.Nietzsche lived before that and he took the given reality as the basis of his argument.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
14 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more