Oh! Poor Man

What's hugely distressing, sardonic and unpardonably hypocritical, and in all probability is leading our society down helpless despair and imparity is, where a happy looking man in neat, ironed clothes at work, carrying lunch boxes packed with delectable, sumptuous food is attributed to being blessed with wonderful and loving wife; is, on the contrary, audaciously endorsed as a disciplinarian with so-called high morals, when she starts panicking of being late with a meeting extending beyond 8, afraid of being rebuked; when she never makes it to team dinners at swanky hotels, skipping glittery evenings of lavish cuisines and flowing alcohol, lying of ill health or responsibilities at home, reprimanded by 'the man' and in-laws; when on a shopping spree she unwillingly racks away that exquisite one piece that held her just right at the waist, with plunging shoulders giving her butterflies as she turned to the trial room mirror, feeling 21 all over again, complaining of coarse texture in a rather fine material, half imagining the scalding parallels that would be drawn at home afterwards.

Well, why do you think we even need feminism? The fact that one needs to be handed out pre-set rules about how they must interact and go about human beings of a particular gender, speaks galore of our incompetency as a community. The fact that one has to probed in the eye with demands of equality only goes to reveal our lopsided idea about a perfectly balanced society. In other words, feminism, like a bottle of disinfectant, is more for us, men to wash clean their vision, redevelop and align their deranged ideals along the common line of humanity; shifting their fulcrum of prejudices to the centre of this see-saw, of what could be an egalitarian world. More so for the poor man to know that freedom was never so little, so tameable as to be crushed in his fist. It had always been a milling two way street and the only way forward is to stop and make way for others. For everyone. To live.

By Sobhan Pramanik