Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label women

Women and Equality

The latest issue of Frontline has put women’s equality on the cover.  India, which dreams of being a political superpower, is still paradoxically grappling with discriminations of all sorts: caste, religion, gender, language, and what not.  We still have religious leaders like Swami Swaroopanand Saraswati, the Sankaracharya of Dwarkapeeth in Gujarat, who preach such claptrap as that the recent firework accident in a Kerala temple occurred because of the people who demand equality for women with respect to temple entry.  We have political leaders like Pankaja Munde, Women and Child Development Minister of Maharashtra, who uphold the discrimination in the name of “tradition.”  The Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro How long should we let ignorance and falsehood dominate religion?  The Shankaracharya’s teaching is sheer falsehood while the Minister’s reveals ignorance.  Both falsehood and ignorance have played a significant role in religion throughout its history.  Most religious t

What Women Want Most

One of the stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is about a young knight of King Arthur’s.  The knight could not control his lust when he came across a beautiful maiden.   Arthur’s Court was scandalised by the rape and the knight’s execution was ordered.  The Queen and her ladies, however, interceded and got the punishment commuted.  The knight is given a year’s time to find out what women want most in the world. The knight went from place to place finding out what women wanted most.  He got different answers from different women.  “Wealth and treasure,” said some.  Honour, jollity, pleasure, gorgeous clothes, fun in bed... thus went the women’s options.  Some even wanted to be “oft widowed and remarried.”  Seeing that women could never agree on one thing, the knight rode back with the odour of death in his nostrils.  On his way back, he came across an old hag.  Chaucer’s narrator, Wife of Bath, reminds us that those were the days of fairies and elves, days before relig

Women and Mr Mukherjee

A friend mailed a copy of a report about how an American court of justice endorsed the firing of a female assistant simply because her feminine charms were perceived as a threat to the family life of her male boss. The court didn’t see the firing as an instance of gender discrimination but as motivated by “feelings and emotions.”  The boss and his wife thought that the female assistant’s attractiveness was a threat to their family life as their feelings and emotions were swayed by the employee’s physical attractiveness. This is funny indeed.  If we go by this logic, it would be quite impossible for women to be attractive and hold on to their jobs at the same time.   Extend the logic a little further.  Can a boss fire any employee (of any gender) for disturbing his/her “feelings and emotions”?  Can a boss fire an employee on account of jealousy, for instance? The seven judges who passed the above judgment were all male.  Their argument is not any different from th