I’ve had this grouse against most Indian men for a while. They behave like invalids in their own homes.
They are probably ten times stronger than their mothers, sisters or wives. They lift tons of weight in the gym. Yet they cannot lift their plates from the dining table to the sink.
They run in the treadmill for hours. Yet they will not stand for fifteen minutes with their wives to do the dishes when the maid is absent.
They’re so agile in sports. But cannot bend down to pick up their own wet towels from the floor.
They drive for hours together non-stop in their powerful cars. Yet will not drive to the corner of the road to pick up some groceries.
I’ve been mulling over this for years. And I’m slowly seeing the light.
Rewind to hundreds of years ago, when the women were so oppressed.
Those women did not have a life. Education, knowledge, freedom of speech were all denied to them and their sole purpose of existence was to serve the men. Be it a father, brother, husband or a son, the man in her life at any point was her lord and master. They were literally imprisoned in the kitchens and made to cook & clean for the men of the house.
Now, we all know what a woman is made of. Where she lacks in brute strength, she makes up with a strong will and a cunning mind.
How did all those women get the better of their oppressors? Fighting will just not work. If they try any other methods like ahimsa or satyagraha, it will not work either. They can easily be replaced and they’ll have to spend the rest of their lives in the thinnais of their homes…
So they went along, played the dutiful wives & mothers. They did not step outside of their homes, cooked, washed, cleaned, laundered, brought up babies and kept house.
But oh so subtly they made the men dependent on them without them realising it.
They did pretty much everything for their men, so the men just cannot survive inside their homes without their women. Call it a survival act if you want, but the women chained their men to them by making them believe that they’re not capable of taking care of themselves. In short, they were invalids inside their own homes without their women.
And some aggressive women came along and made rules that no man can enter the kitchens or try to do anythig that remotely resembled housework.
But over centuries, we women have worked our way out to free ourselves. We can educate ourselves, go for jobs, excel in sports, run governments and have proved to men we’re their equals in everything but brute strength.
But these poor, poor men still are rooted strongly in their age old beliefs that they’re invalids and cannot even make their own coffees at home.
Power to women!
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