The Indefatiguable Woman !

I like the word 'balse' (pronounced bal say) which some erudite and astute dictionaries list it to mean 'minor error'. So I would say that one of the major balse of humanity is that it has always considered women as the 'weaker sex'. Many years back, Vandana Shiva, a prominent environmental activist, in one of her articles had noted that women fail to get the required appreciation because they do 'too much work involving too many skills so that their production tends not to be recdorded as work'

Take my own wife. She wakes up by 4:00 a.m. and puts in the requisite spiritual work by meditating for roughly an hour. Later she warms the milk and gets her physical exercise by going to a hata yoga school where she is active from 6:00 a.m. to 7:45 a.m.  On returning home by 8:00 a.m. she immediately gets busy cooking. She has to rinse the vessels the maid-servant has washed, cut the vegetables, cook the rice, make sambar and subzi and then to ensure that I keep my fitness discourages me from eating rice and prepares fluffy chappathis. The rice is essentially for my father and my wife. Later she clears the dining table and tidies the kitchen. She gets to read the newspaper for the day only by 10:00 a.m. and then showers and meticulously does her prayers and other rituals with quite intense devotion. It is only by around 11:30 a.m. that she gets to eat her first meal of the day, as it is a practice in our house to have a brunch. My wife doesn't spend too much time cleaning up the house because her body structure has not endowed her with too much stamina like some specially gifted ladies do. By the time she is done with the above tasks it is usually 11:45 a.m. and she is quite exhausted. She rests briefly, waiting for the second and final visit of the maid-servant. She is generally around supervising the work of the maid servant and after she is done, she would prefer to go to her room upstairs and rest, but she has to wait for my father to arrive after his morning stroll. So it happens that only around 12:45 or 1:00 p.m., after my father returns, that she gets time for relaxation.

Other housewives spend quite a lot of time cleaning up the whole house too. They dust the furniture, wipe window panes and sills, curtain pelmets and so on. Many families that have children have to ensure that the kids breakfast is done and their lunch boxes are packed by 7:30 a.m. Mothers ensure that their wards school bags are laden with the right text books for the day and their homework is in order. In many houses, women cook a second meal in the evenings.

If the woman happens to be working in an office, I shudder to visualise how at all they are capable of handling their jobs after all this. Where do women get their strength? Who calls women the weaker sex? And we now have some stupid and inconsiderate commission equating the status of a housewife with those of beggars!

Meanwhile I am busy meditating and also engaged with thinking about world problems and my spiritual advancement right from around 5:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. when my wife joins me upstairs. At other times I am acquiring the requisite intellectual skills and polishing my writing abilities.

A wonderful TED Talk on the wonderful ways in which women are moving up in the social scale can be enjoyed by clicking on the link below (GIVE A MINUTE FOR THE PROGRAM TO LOAD !):

http://www.ted.com/talks/hanna_rosin_new_data_on_the_rise_of_women.html

XXX