Continuing March

We have put International Women's Day behind us just yesterday but I am sure some people are just waking up to it. Literally and metaphorically, both!

So in continuation to the point that I was trying to get across yesterday I am here to speak about the bitter half. No, you read that correct. The bitter half has been complaining why no Men's Day (BTW it falls on Nov 19th, if I am not mistaken), give us an entire day to celebrate. Ask them what and I don't think they have a concrete answer yet.

It is better to leave certain things just as they are and move on like Sahir Ludhianvi wrote:

Wo afsana jise anjaam tak laana na ho mumkin, usse ek khoobsurat mod de ke chodna achha.

Coming back to the main idea of today's post. I have a son and a daughter, so it has fallen on my broad shoulders to bring to your kind attention a very important thing.  Let me first make a thing clear, I am not here attempting to bring this point out for conversation and debate because either I am biased towards a gender or because I am a feminist. I would rather, you think of me as a humanist, than anything else.

To cut to the chase, I have been very concerned for the mental state of our boys. All of them. I have reached that stage in life where I can't be bothered to discriminate between a boy and a man. For me they all fall into one category and that is babies. Don't come at me with your loaded vocabulary just now. There is more from where this just came.

So babies, I mean babas or men that we are trying to raise are subjected to dual standards I think. At one point we are telling the world how we need to make space for women and at another, go on about gender equality (Baith jaaiye, I know the argument in favour of women who have been ignored for centuries, but this is not the fight I am referring to at the moment). We, I think and often fear, might just be bringing up boys who will be quite confused when they go out in to the world and then it really won't be a better place for you and for me and the entire humanity.

Let me take the help of my own family set up to illustrate what I am trying to say. I have a daughter who is 13 and a son who is 6 years old. I am raising or rather trying to raise her to be fierce (she is not taking this seriously, and might have called me a bully! Kids these days!!). I want her to march boldly on the path of life, making her own mistakes, winning her own battles and  do things with a penchant. I might have not succeeded yet because she has just entered her teen years but I am not the one to get deterred. She hangs out mostly with boys, finds girl talk 'lame', is a K-Pop fan (Say whaaa?), tells me she looks like some fellow named JungCook (Must have been named after a Khansama grandpa) and likes to do multiple rounds on the monkey bar. But give her 7 Barbie dolls and she is happy to play house and weave stories of domesticity, going to work, returning back to cook a meal and watch TV. They absolutely lack adventure (and often I think story) that I at times don't believe that this is the same child who can unleash mind numbing retorts at the speed of light at me, at the slightest provocation. This, sweet child, cries when a friend messages her to say that she won't speak to her ever again and which lasts for roughly ten minutes.

I am okay with this daughter of mine (Do you think she has a split personality? *Shudders* God forbid) I accept her for who she is. We all, people around her, relatives, grandparents, teachers and acquaintances, realise that she is still figuring out her self.

And then there is my boy. All of 6- an absolute joy, with a motor mouth and relentless energy, fights very hard to control tears from spilling on his little face while his lower lip curls with the effort and cycles so fast that I can't bear to look at him fearing he will bump into the next thing. He proclaimed to me that he loves puppies and hates girls, in those many words. Can you imagine my horror? I put him down and told him, " You can't say such things." He replied as he walked away,"But that's what I feel". 

That is where my confusion surfaced. I know that there is hardly any substance in what this 6 year old said but my reaction to it was an attempt to change whatever he feels and has chosen to weave in those words. For a while, I couldn't let him be who he is. 

I asked myself why can I not be as accepting of him as I would have been of any boy who would have asked to play with the dolls or a kitchen set? The stunning answer I got back was because that would have been my moment of glory, to find that my boy doesn't seek guns and fast cars but is instead happy to play house and wear pink tee shirt/ shorts. I can't flaunt a son who does what boys usually do. And before you rise to the occasion, baith jaiye, because had someone told me this, I might have had a hard time believing it maybe. The boy was never introduced to violence (The first film we took ourdaughter t watchin a cinema was Ghazni and for our son it was Bachna Ae Hasino) or to cars. 

My friend Seema Shastry who gifted him his first book can be the reason he loves trucks (and the first word he uttered was DUMPTRUCK) but no racing cars or guns or even a bat was given to him till he could drag us to the shops and buy those. I understood then that this came naturally to him. I do dare to say as far as this is concerned that boys will be boys and girls will be girls, at their core. And please let them be.

Unfortunately, I have also realised that glory eludes me yet again (as has been often the case). I have a boy who yearns to be a truck driver, likes chases of all sorts and makes a bang-bang sound all around the house the whole day. He wears a pink, green, yellow, white tee shirt if I ask him to but never agrees to wear shorts even in the humid Kolkata weather. He would rather play out an accident scene and then pretend going to an office like his father does but runs away screaming if you tell him that he can be a fauji (soldier).

I am making a case for accepting the child as she or he is. I write all this to bring to your kind notice that if it is okay to let our girls be equal to boys, it is equally okay to not demand that the boys change and not do things unlike their ownselves.

Stuff does not have a gender. It is alright for boys and girls to play with dolls, bikes, cars and hopscotch, football, cricket- anything of their choosing. Careers or jobs do not have a sex. Choices are for them to make to do and become what brings them joy and contentment.

Let us not, in our enthusiasm, burden our sons into being and saying and believing who they actually are. I, in no way, am making a case for disrespect or asking for any sanction for boys to be condescending in any way.

All that I think I am trying to say is that as parents let us not be sexists towards any gender.

Till next time

A