An Unquiet Mind

Your last lines are pretty hard hit­ting! I think what I get from it is that noth­ing can hap­pen by force. The women have to feel that some­thing is oppres­sive before they try to change it. Force can­not work. For exam­ple one woman might think that eat­ing after her hus­band is not oppres­sive but some­one else might think it is. To per­suade a woman to eat before her hus­band might seem sac­ri­lege to such a per­son! The supe­ri­or­ity of men is so well ingrained that think­ing of one­self as an equal is impos­si­ble. For exam­ple there are many women who feels that it is her body which is sin­ful and needs to be hid­den from men. The idea that men are respon­si­ble for their lack of con­trol is some­thing alien to them. Even men have no qualms is say­ing that they lack con­trol! I mean, I would be rather ashamed to admit that I lack con­trol on any­thing and in fact I am rather proud of my abil­ity to con­trol myself. I think I would be offended if some­one said that women are so out of con­trol that men need to be cov­ered up from head to toe!

I have been read­ing Octavio Paz’s ‘In Light of India’ and he says reli­gions like Hin­duism and Islam are pet­ri­fied. We do have a renais­sance com­ing. and when it does finally come, it won’t be a day sooner.

mahen­dra:
I read your post, and here’s my response:

In the end, I think I dif­fer from Sarkozy: if women choose to be sub­servient, let them be. It is their right. Men should not tram­ple over that right, though they can tram­ple over such women, if they wish.

Most of us choose to be sub­servient in one con­text or another. For a salary, I wear a suit to work in swel­ter­ing weather. I choose here to be sub­servient to the com­pany. That’s free trade — I am trad­ing my right to wear what I like to for a com­pen­sa­tion. I don’t think that’s what hap­pens when a woman finds her­self sub­servient to a man (or men).

Call it my afflic­tion with the “knight-in-shining-armor” syn­drome , but I sus­pect the stock­holm syn­drome is active in most cases where you see a woman seem­ingly endors­ing sub­servience to men. Not for a moment that I believe that coer­cion, years of child abuse, depri­va­tion, and threats of being roasted in hell, have noth­ing to do with this “choice” — please read my post on Women in Hell and A Let­ter to My Sis­ter.

So, what can be done? To begin with, I expect the sec­u­lar demo­c­ra­tic states to leg­is­late against forced mar­riage, mar­i­tal rape, forced full-term preg­nancy, forced female gen­i­tal muti­la­tion, forced female foeti­cide and infan­ti­cide, forced illit­er­acy, forced wid­ow­hood, forced what­ever. And then, speak up against other social insti­tu­tions that deny any­one the nat­ural right to live their lives as they’d like. Let them know that we the peo­ple and the law are on their side.

[dupli­cate com­ment in my post that you have gra­ciously referred to above. thanks.]

a great use­ful com­mon­sense post as usual. the resources are pre­cious, would check them all out one by one, usu this fea­ture of your blog is what I learned to value.
I just started with read­ing about the other theisms, as that ques­tion is/seemed impor­tant to me, after read­ing I feel maybe all the other theisms are there too, esply the autothe­ism among eman­ci­pated women ( )

as for the new theme, facts are: it takes longer to load, the font size/type is com­fort­able to my old eyes, like the way the com­ment box looks, like the header which is almost wafer like, and warm, but dis­like the side­bar: looks kind of unmatch­ing with the blog col­umn some­how and messy to me. love the Geor­gia font and the color a lot though.
most impor­tantly, a big hug, and thanks for this post.

While Reli­gion may be man made, and par­tial towards men, Per­haps the secu­rity it pro­vides women com­pen­sates for the inequal­ity it cages them in, and before long the bird in its cage can­not sur­vive beyond its con­fines. Just to bring a dif­fer­ent angle the argu­ment, I won­der if the fam­ily bond­ing that tra­di­tional reli­gion pro­vides has more fem­i­nine over tones to it than mas­cu­line. Per­haps it has left some women between the devil or the deep sea, but most of them remain unaf­fected because they are ready to put up with some inequal­ity, for secu­rity. When I look at law­less­ness in some parts of Africa, I real­ize that unless women are in groups, there is not much of secu­rity in their lives or for their chil­dren.( this is ani­mal behav­ior at its finest) Here the social moral­ity that reli­gion offers will prob­a­bly be more than wel­come. One could say that reli­gion was the cause of law­less­ness in some parts of Africa, but I still won­der if it goes beyond that.

//Did women have ‘fewer’ rights than men or ‘dif­fer­ent’ in the con­text of Hinduism’s history?//
Hindu women didn’t inherit prop­erty from their par­ents, most of them still don’t. Polygamy was prac­ticed by most Hindu Gods. Swayam­vara was the right given to the girl to choose a hus­band of her choice but the terms and con­di­tions were set by the father.
Sav­itri won her hus­band back from Yama by her intel­li­gence and wit but we are made to believe that it was the power of her satitva that defeated Yama. Sita com­mit­ted sui­cide but it was glo­ri­fied. Ahilya was cursed to turn into a stone because Indra the King of dev­tas cheated her. Indra lived hap­pily while the poor woman had to wait for cen­turies so that Rama could come and bring her back to life. Lax­man had no prob­lems in leav­ing his wife Urmila alone for 14 years because he had to serve his brother. Nobody both­ered about her. Mahab­harat is full of sto­ries which prove that women had fewer rights than men in those times.

Mahen­dra, con­grat­u­la­tions for writ­ing such a painstak­ingly researched post on this com­plex and also rel­e­vant topic. I more or less agree with your ideas and wont say any­thing fur­ther at this point.

Hi Mahen­dra, thanks for the great post and like the cliche goes — may your tribe increase!

That came from a quote by Thoreau — “There are a thou­sand hack­ing at the branches of evil to one who is strik­ing at the root.” … good advice to aspir­ing revolutionaries!

I don’t think ‘Green’ was an issue as such (either pro– or anti-) with any of the world reli­gions, but if you look at the crux of the phi­los­o­phy under­ly­ing ‘Green’ think­ing, it is a fun­da­men­tal shift from the (in some cases implicit) premise which most reli­gions are based on: that Man is a spe­cial crea­ture in a class by him­self — more equal than all other forms of life, and hence has the power to do pretty much as he pleases. ‘Green’ puts Man on par with all other forms of life in terms of moral rights to resources. But more on that in another post / thread, as you said.

What about forced male gen­i­tal mutilation?

http://open.salon.com/blog/nabina_nag/2009/07/16/indian_womans_problem_1_-_other_women

Yeah reli­gion is very con­tra­dic­tory and pro­vides a lot of oppor­tu­nity for dis­crim­i­na­tion but it doesn’t mean you should stay athe­ist. There are plenty of other reli­gions out there that don’t dis­crim­i­nate such as pagan­ism, bud­dhism etc. And reli­gion is shaped by humans and not God, just because humans have mis­in­ter­preted it doesn’t mean you should stop believ­ing in a higher power.

Thanks. No, I didn’t know the founders of RSS were athe­ists! Another piece added to the Hin­duism jig­saw puzzle.

The burqa vs. ghung­hat arti­cle I’ve linked to dis­pels some aspects of the ‘Hin­duism was fine for women until the Moghuls came’ myth.

You hit my point regard­ing sep­a­rat­ing faith and reli­gion. That, for me, is at least a good start­ing point. For­get cross­ing it, why don’t most women even reach this thresh­old (Umbartha)?

Do sug­gest a good place or book where I can enlighten myself about Devi Mahapuran.

Does he talk about the renais­sance or is it you? I don’t see a renais­sance any­where. Liv­ing in India, I find things wors­en­ing every pass­ing year.

The Ratio­nal Fool: thank you (for your com­ment and allow­ing my sec­ond com­ment on your post).

And thank you for giv­ing the first insight to me regard­ing why eman­ci­pated women might be cling­ing to reli­gion despite the obvi­ous facts — Stock­holm syn­drome. Is it that liv­ing in an oppressed soci­ety (akin to a hostage sit­u­a­tion), it is their defense mech­a­nism that they believe their fathers and broth­ers and hus­bands will be the only ones who are in con­trol and will be able to save them from this mer­ci­less world? An inter­est­ing insight that I will keep in mind and con­tinue to explore.

My post is an attempt to under­stand why no one real­izes that Sarkozy’s state­ment of ‘burqa is not a sign of reli­gion, it is a sign of sub­servience’ is inher­ently flawed. In a woman’s con­text, sub­servience is an insep­a­ra­ble part of reli­gion. How can some­thing be a sign of one and not of the other? I fail to under­stand how nobody seems to ‘get’ this.

Your sug­ges­tions regard­ing what sec­u­lar gov­ern­ments should do are of course very wel­come and I have strongly fought for them on this blog myself. Thanks for reit­er­at­ing them in your usual clear and inim­itable style!

ramesh menon has a great set of books on the epics & the puranas in Eng­lish. it is the kind of stuff that makes your eyes bog­gle. I won­der when the reli­gion and the sys­tem itself became san­i­tized & prud­ish

i think that the rea­son that it is dif­fi­cult to sep­a­rate the two — faith and reli­gion — is super­sti­tion. i had an aunt who was wid­owed — she was told that unless she stopped wear­ing a tikka — her chil­dren will be cursed she told the ‘elders’ to take a col­lec­tive leap into the near­est well — a lot of women don’t. my take is that if God/Goddess is the cre­ator or Divine Par­ents — they will not wish us ill, no mat­ter how bad our behav­ior is — that is the tra­di­tion i was brought up in.
so it depends from fam­ily to fam­ily, rel­gious tra­di­tion to reli­gious tradition.

I also believe that unless peo­ple speak up and stand up against a minor­ity hijack­ing their reli­gion — then they are going to end up as Afghanistan

mahen­dra — Not sure but you are mak­ing it seem like there is always a group of power-hungry folks (mainly men) who are wield­ing reli­gion as a weapon to oppress the masses, and all the masses need to real­ize and awaken. While the awak­en­ing part makes sense, I think it isnt that sim­ple. IMO, basi­cally, reli­gion is used as a tool (mor­ph­ing its shaped into what­ever is appro­pri­ate for that per­son, for that time) by many many peo­ple — some­times with an effort to do good, and many times with an effort to gain advan­tage. The bad comes out of an not uncom­mon ten­dency in humans using what­ever means to gain advan­tage over oth­ers — this includes man AND woman, and this applies not just to reli­gion. In reli­gion, this can afflict per­sons from the top down to the bot­tom — at all lev­els you will see peo­ple use it to their advan­tage in their own way. And this is one rea­son why you find reli­gions them­selves being con­tra­dic­tory. Based on who has the upper hand on what era, the tenets of reli­gion *as prac­ticed* changes over time. But again, IMO, it would be a mis­take to think this is some unique prop­erty of reli­gion. But that said, it is hard to defend reli­gion much

Arun

Pre­cisely! When the politi­cians, both on the right and the left, rile against the Com­mu­nist China or Pinochet’s Chile, they have no hes­i­ta­tion in declar­ing that it’s not the peo­ple of China or Chile that they are against, but the total­i­tar­ian regime — the idea that a few men (and fewer women, if any) have the power and author­ity to dic­tate the lives of mil­lions of oth­ers. Why, then, when it comes to reli­gion, they pussy-foot around and put this very sim­i­lar idea on a pedestal?

I think you are unknow­ingly fur­ther­ing my idea that reli­gion pri­mar­ily works by instill­ing FEAR.

While Reli­gion may be man made, and par­tial towards men, Per­haps the secu­rity it pro­vides women com­pen­sates for the inequal­ity it cages them in…

The safety of reli­gions, it appears, is illu­sory at best. I am sure you have read the recent reports on crimes per­pe­trated against chil­dren in the care of the Catholic Church in Ire­land — ‘Endemic’ rape and abuse of Irish chil­dren in Catholic care, inquiry finds. Have you seen the films, Maya and Osama, both based on real life sto­ries of female chil­dren abused by priests and mullahs?

For a more rig­or­ous refu­ta­tion of the pur­ported deter­rent effect of reli­gion on crime, please read http://home.uchicago.edu/~psheaton/workingpapers/religionandcrime.pdf Does reli­gion reduce crime? by Paul Heaton of the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago. Here are a cou­ple of extracts from his conclusions:

… I find no sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant rela­tion­ship between reli­gious adher­ence and prop­erty crime or vio­lent crime. There is some evi­dence that reli­gion may encour­age crime in areas with greater pop­u­la­tion or few reli­gious adherents.

… If there is a neg­a­tive effect of reli­gion on crime and the sub­stan­tial increases in church atten­dance in the United States on Easter rep­re­sent a tem­po­rary increase in reli­gios­ity, one might expect to observe lower crime rates imme­di­ately fol­low­ing Easter. I find that crime rates are slightly higher for most cat­e­gories of crime in the first 4 weeks after Easter, con­trol­ling for sea­sonal and other fac­tors, although these increases are not sta­tis­ti­cally significant.

So, there you have it. Even if you didn’t want to take Mahendra’s or my word for it, evi­dence sug­gests that you’ll likely be safer amongst us athe­ists, than those who pro­fess to take their cues from easwar, allah, god, or what­ever

I will take your word for it. My premise on the argu­ment was not to mean “reli­gion was not all that bad” I know it is a addic­tive habit. and …all the bad weight it car­ries with it. I was think­ing in terms of ancient time that some­times lives in today’s world in pock­ets. I would agree with the fact that there is no rela­tion with crime and reli­gion. But does reli­gion really encour­ages it, or do peo­ple find loop­holes to suit their needs. I would not rec­om­mend totally trust­ing Athe­ists, because they too are inher­ently human. The fault lies when these loop­holes fall into reli­gious beliefs and gets the (pre­tended ) pro­tec­tion of reli­gion. It is fool­ish to believe that crime and dis­crim­i­na­tion will not hap­pen in a athe­is­tic soci­ety. Human will be human. In yesterday’s world as in some pock­ets of today’s soci­ety, reli­gion formed a sta­ble back­bone in a chang­ing polit­i­cal sys­tem. It there­fore han­dled the bur­den of ethics and is reluc­tant to give it up. Also how sta­ble is today’s polit­i­cal set up, or how uni­form is it, to pro­tect its vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens? In such a world, would the vul­ner­a­ble be ready to give up an illu­sion of sta­bil­ity that gives them tem­po­rary relief (at least in their minds) (and re empha­sized by social approval) over a chaotic soci­ety they see unfold­ing before them?

Thank you for the feed­back and the hug! I will be exper­i­ment­ing with the visual theme based on the feed­back I get.

Amit, thanks for giv­ing me a good laugh!

Meenakshi:

Please read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Infi­del. Per­haps, you may find answers to your queries in her life, which spanned a world (Somalia-Kenya) that gave her “an illu­sion of sta­bil­ity” and “chaotic soci­ety” (Netherlands-USA). Alter­na­tively, you could read my entire blog

yes, Per­erna, because 1) women were not strong enough to kill to assert them­selves, 2) the ter­ror of phys­i­cal harm hurt over­whelms us and we give in. 3) In the West or with Mughals, (who are basi­cally descended from peo­ple from the tribes that dwelt the harsh ter­rains of the mid­dle east etc) it is dif­fer­ent: they teach their women com­bat skills, they are strong them­selves and there­fore appre­cite strong women like them­sleves, that can weild a weapon.

Arjuna was smit­ten by Chi­tran­gada and Ulupi remem­ber? He was a war­rier, he expected his women to be smart and adept like him not lit­tle pussy cats.

Men are largely respon­si­ble yes, but women are equqlly respon­si­ble too. Vidyasagar or Vivekananda could oper­ate largely due to the tremen­dous sup­port to be dif­fer­ent they got from their moth­ers, who sheilded the aber­rant child from the wrath of the dom­i­nant father that expected con­for­mity for thweir sons.

They remem­bered that all their lives and worked for the empow­er­ment of women al their lives too — life is sim­ple if we see it for what it is and if we keep get­ting back to his­tory. but then they make such a mess of it, chil­dren learn to detest the whole sub­ject and never real­ize the rel­e­vance of know­ing the cur­rent of events that shape us, shackle us to mis­ery. So we look for Lib­er­a­tors, uddhra kar­tas who would come res­cue us!

I don’t think that way at all. See my response to your com­ment above where I talk about dis­till­ing the good in religion…

Yes. You cer­tainly do not need reli­gion to “be good” at least base on some of the core prin­ci­ples sug­gest. Of course, it is not uncom­mon for prac­ti­tion­ers to change that mean­ing of “being good” to imply you fol­low the reli­gious prac­tices and tra­di­tions — this is where I think they go off the beam.

Reli­gion has been used to con­vey “what is good” or say what is a healthy way of liv­ing. The trou­ble soon peo­ple who believe in it think “this is the only good, and every­thing else is bad” — thus the coer­cion to “fall in line”. This IMO has noth­ing to do with reli­gion, but every­thing to do with gen­eral human ten­dency. Iron­i­cally, the exact ten­dency which some practioneer/trail-blazer of the reli­gion may have warned against! Actu­ally, even those trail­blaz­ers who had found “a healthy way to be good” rarely con­vey “that this is just one way” . IMO, they are just so sure of the one thing the found, that they believe it is the only thing (iron­i­cally, per­haps not that dif­fer­ent from mahen­dra and TRF ).

But IMO, again, it is a mis­take to assume any reli­gion has one unchang­ing, cogent mes­sage from the begin­ning — and this mes­sage is in gen­eral bad. All reli­gions are a jum­ble of ideas from var­i­ous peo­ple over thou­sands of peo­ple — some with good inten­tions, and oth­ers with ulte­rior inten­tions, and many with a mix of both. Thus at times it is inclu­sive, and at times it is exclu­sive. Reli­gion is as organic and ever-changing as the life­time of a sin­gle human being. There is good in it, and to me, those things really apply out­side of the extra bag­gage that prac­ti­tion­ers have tacked on. But — no you cer­tainly do not need to believe in a higher power in order to “be good”. So why believe? Like I have hinted, because we are human, we are imper­fect . So why believe? Like I have hinted, because we are human, we are imper­fect .

Sorry for the long response.

Arun

lol

oh sorry then. I think I am too care­less in read­ing replies to my com­ments but also this new theme (or maybe it is just word­press in gen­eral) is really hard to fig­ure out the var­i­ous dif­fer­ent sub-threads. So if it seems like I am repeat­ing myself AND not pay­ing atten­tion to what other say­ing, then pri­mar­ily mea culpa, but let me also pile on your thema

Arun

I am a lurker at your blog, and will take your recomen­da­tion on the Infi­del. Thanks

Meenakshi, I appre­ci­ate your par­tic­i­pa­tion in unrav­el­ing my perplexity.

“Reli­gion is not always at the cen­ter of the prob­lem some­times it is cul­ture.“
Yes, as I acknowl­edge in my post itself, it is not the only prob­lem. It is one of the prob­lems. Why not do away with at least one problem?

Cul­tural approval and accep­tance: in other words, if you don’t do this like every­one else, xyz bad things will hap­pen to you. When applied to each indi­vid­ual of the com­mu­nity, the entire com­mu­nity acts like you wish and order them to act. That is what I meant that reli­gion works by instill­ing fear. Who decides what to do and what not to do? Mostly men (& few women if any) in power.

Like I men­tioned in my post as well as in my reply to Nita’s com­ment above, I am not sur­prised by the hordes of women who con­tinue to remain brain­washed and do not even know that alter­na­tive schools of thought exist. My per­plex­ity is about eman­ci­pated women who have been exposed to dif­fer­ent cul­tures, dif­fer­ent ideas, expe­ri­enced literature/films/other media, who fight for gen­der equal­ity on the streets, in their work­place, but con­tinue to cling to religion.

Change can­not reach the grass­root level of soci­ety, and wide­spread changes can­not hap­pen unless thought lead­ers, fem­i­nists, intel­lec­tu­als lead and show the way. But what we find here is fem­i­nists and lead­ers in the field of women empow­er­ment advis­ing women to ‘work within their faiths’, and writ­ing books like She­faly men­tions below in her com­ment. Why? If this con­tin­ues, I do not see any pos­i­tive change for women empow­er­ment hap­pen­ing at all.

Mahen­dra:

The rea­son why I brought up the res­o­lu­tion thing is because of your response to Pre­rna. I dis­agree with the sto­ries she cites because they are one ver­sion of some­thing that may have hap­pened. The whole issue is so hermeneu­ti­cally deter­mined that no two peo­ple will ever be in agree­ment over whether women were unequal and if so, to what extent and whether insti­tu­tions of patri­archy or women’s own prac­tices per­pet­u­ated such inequality.

The sec­ond part of your response is (unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally, I believe) cyn­i­cal. The charge can be heaped on all writ­ing on soci­etal issues, includ­ing your own blog post. I am sad on one count though. Chi­tra DB is a pub­lished author and writ­ing teacher indeed, but Ira­vati Karve, a woman of the city you live in, was an edu­ca­tor and a social reformer, mar­ried into a fam­ily of reform­ers too. I am sur­prised you put her in the same bas­ket as Chi­tra DB. Karve’s words were not an empty com­mer­cial propo­si­tion but an alter­na­tive fram­ing of a hith­erto patri­ar­chal telling of a story many Indi­ans deem an epic. How do you know that “pseudo-intellectuals” read these books? (I could take this to mean that by read­ing those books, I am now a pseudo-intellectual in your eyes but I shall pass on the temp­ta­tion to feel offended). Isn’t the choice to read what we do in itself a sym­bol of how much free­dom women enjoy?

And in your last line in response to me, I believe you are chan­nel­ing some­thing I said to you on Twit­ter: http://bit.ly/mPG2k

And once again you’d be wrong. Some peo­ple both effect change and write/ speak about it. Some do nei­ther. It is a con­tin­uum. For my good for­tune, I know many more peo­ple in the for­mer cat­e­gory than I do in the lat­ter. The dif­fer­ence has to be made through per­sonal choices that are dif­fi­cult but right. Rev­o­lu­tions are bloody; the real change in women’s sta­tus is evo­lu­tion­ary and it is real.

She­faly, I was being so cyn­i­cal because I do not see the point of going back into re-interpreting the epics and our mythol­ogy. Yes, it was unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of me, prob­a­bly because the frus­tra­tion is get­ting to me. Through my blog post, I’m try­ing to pull eman­ci­pated women away from reli­gion, and your com­ment seemed to drag it back into the topic of which inter­pre­ta­tion is cor­rect or can any inter­pre­ta­tion be cor­rect, and so on. I thought I’d already made it clear in my post that there is no point debat­ing any­thing about Hin­duism regard­ing what is ‘true’ and what is not ‘true’. It is a mean­ing­less exer­cise IMO.

No, I wasn’t chan­nel­ing that tweet of yours. And I com­pletely agree with you that change hap­pens grad­u­ally, it is dif­fi­cult, and evolutionary.

I do not know any­thing about Ira­vati Karve. To reit­er­ate, I do not see the point in an alter­na­tive fram­ing. If she believes it can lead to empow­er­ment of women, its good. That is not what I gath­ered from your brief com­ment. I should not have clubbed her into a stereo­type and I apol­o­gize for that, because I do not know any­thing about her or her books. But I will cer­tainly be least inter­ested in the book you describe.

the answer is so sim­ple Mahen­dra, it would shock you: because YOU teach her to not get it, with your par­ent­ing, with your con­di­tions for lov­ing her, with your con­di­tions for respect­ing her, with your rules for her social life etc. It is because of MEN, that moth­ers bring their daugh­ters up to believe they never can do any­thing, never will be loved if they aspired to fly “udney lgai hai” is not sup­posed to mean well for ‘good girls’.
I get it because my mum put a copy of Vivekananda in my hands when I was six, her Shan­ti­nike­tan upbring­ing made her force me to think, ques­tion, not con­form, fight her when she did attempt to make me do so her­self.
So today I got my wings, and I use my tools of thought, cur­ricu­lum to devise strate­gies that would help my girls to want to and finally empower them to go mke their own world rules. I fail often, fall down, get hit, slapped socially, tram­pled upon, all the time — I do care deeply too — but I do not give up, as I know what I have is good. It is of value. Then I have friends like you, my col­leagues, who are Jediis too. so we stay alive some­how, dream of apocalypse:)

I liked your com­ment where you say, one doesnt need reli­gion to be GOOD or do good. That is the truth.

so the equa­tion here: one une­d­u­cated vil­lage woman (not know­ing Eng­lish or even pow­er­less, con­fined) > (begets, influ­ences) Vidyasagar > changes the lives of hun­dreds of women (widow remar­rige, women’s educ­taion, San­skrit col­lege, alpha­bets in ver­nac­u­lar that is esay to under­stand, emer­gence of women writ­ers) > influ­ences Ram­mo­han > abol­ish­ment of Sati, the rest the world knows.

One woman > Vivekananda > hun­dreds of lives here, abroad
One woman > Jesus Christ > mil­lions of life the world over etc

None of these were even one third of what you or I am. Yet, they did get remem­bered through pow­er­ful sons they raised, empow­ered to be different.

So, then can you imag­ine what we could do? If we had the courage to join the right forums for change? Give up a reward­ing career, live in rented apart­ments with­out even a fridge, to work with a group that is mak­ing seri­ous attempts at chnage.

Do women really seek power or merely the com­fort­able cocoon of sex­ual and mon­e­tary secu­rity? Because keep­ing power, being pow­er­ful chnage agents require 24/7 vigilnqt hard work, con­stant — relent­less watch­ing over it, tend­ing to work in progress, pro­tect­ing work done — being a queen is tough, being a hand­maiden, easy.

“Peo­ple can be inspired to change and be brave , for a short period of insan­ity“
you make ‘change’ sound like a lux­ury, when it is a con­stant of life. A neces­sity. Truth: Life is tran­sient, by default. There­fore, sur­vival skill must include train­ing to com­bat, mon­i­tor, direct the force of change in favour and not let it tke its own ran­dom course.

“As for my chil­dren, prac­ti­cally, what I teach them is very dif­fer­ent from what they will learn” — your script­ing is the most immi­nent one on the psy­che of your child, (Dr MD Har­ris). Even their learn­ing pat­tern to a great extent is like the one you forged even while it was in your womb — that is how pow­er­ful you are. Remem­ber that story about how Aruni had learned every­thing while being in the mother’s womb or how Arjuna’s son picked up the strat­egy to break the chakravyuha? In pri­mary educ­tion there­fore, we have 0–2 years as a major consideration

“how they inter­prets this world” — is exactly how we, the influ­en­tial, sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers in his 0–4 years scripted him. That is why it is imper­a­tive you choose your pri­mary school with the best care. In ado­les­cence they learn to use their meta cog­ni­tion and their teach­ers etc but bef tht you are the ONE.

nd every­one of us are actu­ally shap­ing the course of events con­tin­u­osly, only some are using the force of chnge know­ingly, con­sciously, oth­ers are bum­bling through life, deluded by think­ing “am noth­ing, I can do noth­ing” when in fact they do, they are. this is dan­ger­ous. affects democ­racy, let us break this “dont know-dont care syndrome”

Hey, thank you, wishtobeanon!

Thanks for your com­pli­ment on my writ­ing skills, but I’m not wor­thy of it! Not try­ing to be mod­est, just being real­is­tic. I am at best mediocre in this department.

Just wanted to add that other reli­gions too (than Hin­duism), have cre­ated a lot of accom­pa­ny­ing social and cul­tural tools that sup­port them. A lot of these were designed to pre­serve a cer­tain sense of order in soci­ety (as defined by the reli­gious elite who were also the cus­to­di­ans of moral­ity and moral con­duct). In most soci­eties, the premises on which the frame­works of proper con­duct were built (and then baked into reli­gion), essen­tially involved the posi­tion­ing of Man as the supreme crea­ture on Earth, next only to God, and of posi­tion­ing men as supe­rior to women. These are the roots at which we must strike.

The belief that of all God’s crea­tures on Earth Man is supreme, has led to large scale exploita­tion of plant and ani­mal life and other resources on the plant, and to gross neg­li­gence of our del­i­cate envi­ron­men­tal bal­ance. Gen­der equal­ity is one thing, but ‘species equal­ity’ is some­thing else. It is in this other area that we are going to find major clashes between envi­ron­men­tal­ists and uphold­ers of reli­gious beliefs that pro­claim Man’s supremacy. It is already hap­pen­ing in North Amer­ica — in the sup­pos­edly most for­ward think­ing and pro­gres­sive nations of the world.

It is in this other area that we are going to find major clashes between envi­ron­men­tal­ists and uphold­ers of reli­gious beliefs that pro­claim Man’s supremacy. It is already hap­pen­ing in North Amer­ica – in the sup­pos­edly most for­ward think­ing and pro­gres­sive nations of the world.

I’ll have to dis­agree here.
1. Reli­gion doesn’t really have the kind of influ­ence on the lives of a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple in North Amer­ica (US, spec.).
2. Sur­veys show that major­ity of peo­ple do care for the envi­ron­ment — it’s the sys­tems which they live under and have lit­tle power to change, that don’t.
3. The con­flict is between envi­ron­men­tal­ists and cap­i­tal­ists, or rather, the cur­rent model of cap­i­tal­ism which doesn’t take into account the fact of finite resources. Many reli­gious groups in the US are ally­ing with envi­ron­men­tal groups on the issue of global warm­ing. So, there’s not that much of a con­flict, unless you con­sider reli­gious extremists.

I largely agree with this answer — in about 80–90% of cases/situations. There are a few how­ever, where I still find things incon­gru­ous: those who still are deeply reli­gious within them­selves when no social envi­ron­ment is influ­enc­ing them, those who may still per­form a rit­ual ‘pooja’ or cer­e­mony so that their child may get bet­ter marks in exam­i­na­tions, or con­tinue to wear a man­gal­su­tra at home even when it doesn’t mat­ter socially, or even those who con­tinue to per­form a prayer to God at home daily.

Now I know you would ask me, are these women really what you mean by eman­ci­pated women, and I would be stumped. Not flab­ber­gasted, because some of these things are dif­fi­cult for me to write about, and would be eas­ier dis­cussed in person.

Notwith­stand­ing these, assum­ing con­for­mance to social norms is pri­mar­ily out of fear of ostra­ciza­tion, what about fem­i­nist lead­ers who have risked a great deal fight­ing for women’s rights and who are already ostra­cized in many ways for their uncon­ven­tion­al­ity? They are estab­lished non-conformist rebels, who how­ever, still fol­low reli­gion, and con­tinue their strug­gle within reli­gious think­ing. These are the ones I really won­der about, as I know the social accep­tance pres­sure is too great for most of the other women.

1. It does, albeit indi­rectly. For instance, the prin­ci­ple of Man­i­fest Des­tiny, which is not really a reli­gion, but is founded on beliefs that are sup­ported by (Judao-Christian) reli­gion. While I agree that a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion is either agnos­tic or athe­ist, I’m sure you’d agree that they have a very strong moral frame­work. And their core moral val­ues are built on the same premises as the reli­gion they ances­tors prac­tised.
2. It is fash­ion­able in some parts of the US to care about the envi­ron­ment, yes. How­ever I don’t think all those who care (or say they care), fully under­stand the issues. In any case, they don’t care enough to mobi­lize their elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives to shape gov­ern­ment pol­icy in line with their con­cerns (else we would have seen signs of it by now). Also, in other pock­ets of the US, it is equally fash­ion­able to den­i­grate ‘tree-huggers’, to mock envi­ron­men­tal causes and in fact to chal­lenge the very basis of envi­ron­men­tal con­ser­va­tion. Accord­ing to these peo­ple, global warm­ing is a myth.
3. Agreed. Greed is far big­ger than reli­gion or sus­tain­abil­ity con­sid­er­a­tions, and cares about nei­ther. The cur­rent model of cap­i­tal­ism doesn’t take into account the fact of finite resources, because it is con­ve­nient not to. It is not as though they are dumb or igno­rant — the folks at the helm of Amer­i­can enter­prise are some of the sharpest minds in the world, but they oper­ate out of a dif­fer­ent value sys­tem, in which the top three pri­or­i­ties at any given point are the need to max­i­mize gain for self.

Hey, thanks, Nabina!

Well said!