When I was young, I was really very stupid and the for that I blame the women in my life!
They had set examples and trends that became my concepts and from the moment I started to gain personal experiences in life, my concepts landed me in strange and awkward situations. Many a times, I had been blindsided by the preconceived ideas about people, relations and life as a whole.
I saw my mother busily working through the day, taking care of everything and everyone except herself so i developed the sense of selflessness to the point that I never took care of myself and always kept myself in the bottom of my priority list because that was what I had seen!
I listened to my relatives trash talking about their wives and the other women listening and accepting their views and I developed the sense of intimidation. I accepted it as a reality that it is ok for men to tarnish your image and degrade you , if and when they are angry.
I was told to be on my toes when my uncles visited or my father came late or if my brothers needed anything, no matter what time it was so i learnt that I was not as important as they were. Their needs were above mine.
All around me, the faces of the women told the same story " Men will always be like this, so endure, endure, endure"
I used to read the famous 'love-struck' novels in monthly digests and developed a totally unnatural notion of how love should be. All those moments where the male characters dominated the female (physically or emotionally) were termed as the 'romantic' moments which should have been seen as nothing but pure harassment.
Every time, when I look back and see what reading a typical female author had done to me as an adolescent girl, i feel aghast.
I distinctly remember one of the most embarrassing times of my life in 9th Grade, when our English language teacher, Mrz Zulqurnain ( who was a brilliant lady retired from Burn Hall and an avid traveler) started a discussion on the topic of " My Ideal" and I talked about "Azan Shah" - my new crush from some stupid novel... The quality I deemed very attractive was the way he was extremely "possessive" about the girl he loved. I couldn't see it at that time but today I can tell that the look on her face was of 'shock' blended with something that looked a lot like disgust !
But what did she know of us, typical Pakistani girls, who had mothers naive and ingenuous to never tell us :"Darling, there are no knights in shining armors. No Azan Shahs and no Salar Sikandars but its you, through and through, sole responsible for keeping the light alive in your eyes and fire burning in your heart. Little one, you must dance away to the the rhythm of the life and if, God forbid, you hear no music then dance to the beating of your heart but dance you must! "
This is what reading Urdu literature does to you. I mean the guy was psychotic but what else to expect of a 14/15 year old girl except dreamy eyes and missing heartbeats?
So, on and on it went Until one day, it dawned upon me that I have allowed the medieval thinking take the best of me and so i shunned them .. and gradually let my true colors take over. But could I have done it on my own? It was my mother.. the lady behind the transformation. I reckon with the passage of time she became aware of how unfairly she had been treated and how for granted her efforts were taken. It must be hard for her to imagine her girls meeting the same fate.
Today, when the world is calling out to men and women to be 'Feminists' in their approach, I realize that more than men, its women who need to change the way they see themselves. Why should the concept of romanticism be attached with dominance instead of equality, respect and freedom? Why should a woman's wings be clipped because it will feed some man's ego? Why must woman change to keep a relation with man going? Why must the harassment, bullying and abuse be endured by women so that the ratio of divorces remains low? Why are household chores a responsibility for women and a stigma for men?
Women do have power. They raise the men who shape the society because after all, it is a male dominating society and this fact is not going to change anytime soon. They also raise the daughters who are strong and willful naturally but are raised to be submissive and inferior. Thus , what women must do is educate themselves and change their ways of how they see the world and how they want to see so that coming generations don't blame them as much as I do!
They had set examples and trends that became my concepts and from the moment I started to gain personal experiences in life, my concepts landed me in strange and awkward situations. Many a times, I had been blindsided by the preconceived ideas about people, relations and life as a whole.
I saw my mother busily working through the day, taking care of everything and everyone except herself so i developed the sense of selflessness to the point that I never took care of myself and always kept myself in the bottom of my priority list because that was what I had seen!
I listened to my relatives trash talking about their wives and the other women listening and accepting their views and I developed the sense of intimidation. I accepted it as a reality that it is ok for men to tarnish your image and degrade you , if and when they are angry.
I was told to be on my toes when my uncles visited or my father came late or if my brothers needed anything, no matter what time it was so i learnt that I was not as important as they were. Their needs were above mine.
All around me, the faces of the women told the same story " Men will always be like this, so endure, endure, endure"
I used to read the famous 'love-struck' novels in monthly digests and developed a totally unnatural notion of how love should be. All those moments where the male characters dominated the female (physically or emotionally) were termed as the 'romantic' moments which should have been seen as nothing but pure harassment.
Every time, when I look back and see what reading a typical female author had done to me as an adolescent girl, i feel aghast.
I distinctly remember one of the most embarrassing times of my life in 9th Grade, when our English language teacher, Mrz Zulqurnain ( who was a brilliant lady retired from Burn Hall and an avid traveler) started a discussion on the topic of " My Ideal" and I talked about "Azan Shah" - my new crush from some stupid novel... The quality I deemed very attractive was the way he was extremely "possessive" about the girl he loved. I couldn't see it at that time but today I can tell that the look on her face was of 'shock' blended with something that looked a lot like disgust !
But what did she know of us, typical Pakistani girls, who had mothers naive and ingenuous to never tell us :"Darling, there are no knights in shining armors. No Azan Shahs and no Salar Sikandars but its you, through and through, sole responsible for keeping the light alive in your eyes and fire burning in your heart. Little one, you must dance away to the the rhythm of the life and if, God forbid, you hear no music then dance to the beating of your heart but dance you must! "
So, on and on it went Until one day, it dawned upon me that I have allowed the medieval thinking take the best of me and so i shunned them .. and gradually let my true colors take over. But could I have done it on my own? It was my mother.. the lady behind the transformation. I reckon with the passage of time she became aware of how unfairly she had been treated and how for granted her efforts were taken. It must be hard for her to imagine her girls meeting the same fate.
Today, when the world is calling out to men and women to be 'Feminists' in their approach, I realize that more than men, its women who need to change the way they see themselves. Why should the concept of romanticism be attached with dominance instead of equality, respect and freedom? Why should a woman's wings be clipped because it will feed some man's ego? Why must woman change to keep a relation with man going? Why must the harassment, bullying and abuse be endured by women so that the ratio of divorces remains low? Why are household chores a responsibility for women and a stigma for men?
Women do have power. They raise the men who shape the society because after all, it is a male dominating society and this fact is not going to change anytime soon. They also raise the daughters who are strong and willful naturally but are raised to be submissive and inferior. Thus , what women must do is educate themselves and change their ways of how they see the world and how they want to see so that coming generations don't blame them as much as I do!
