Our women are empowered, are so our widows?

Recently I came across sad news of demise of my wife's 36 yr old cousin. This happened to be the first Covid-19 casualty in my wife's close relations. Shamshanam Bairagam came back knocking at the door of the house of my thoughts. This time I was able to let it in, spent a short quality time with it, and then let it go. The equanimity can be attributed either to the fact that this was not my first rendezvous with it or to the fact that the person was outside of "my" circles of influence and concern. It took a few days for my wife and her relatives to regain their mental normalcy. After attaining some normalcy, one of the first few things that my wife asked me was - "Do you think that the cousin's wife should do a second marriage? She is pretty young, and has decent looks.". My answer in the moment was "It is not my call and, in fact, nobody else's other than the lady herself. The only thing that I am bothered about is whether she will be allowed to think in this direction. And the block might not be just put by her parents or her in-laws, it might be put by herself.".

The concept of "Women Empowerment" is very close to my heart. It has strong impressions on my mind, in both positive and negative manner. Positive impressions are because of now-so-obvious reasons that every educated person must be knowing already. Negative impressions are because of the wide use of this idea to misrepresent acts, decisions, corporate policies, publicity drives etc. as campaigns that contribute to the cause. This misrepresentation is done in both public and personal social forums, most of the times intentionally but at times subconsciously. So when this question about my wife's cousin's wife came, it made me think if she is really one of the "empowered" women of today. Once again in my experience of life, the question exposed the futility of our superficially modern minds. Every time we are put into an unimaginable, real, and psychologically tough situation, we discover a new kind of shallowness of our minds. We are clueless about our thinking selves. We experience the emotions of being vulnerable, lost, pitiable, helpless etc. But as we spend some time in the situation, our unique human quality of adaptability kicks in and our minds get conditioned to accept, live, and survive this new state of being. So for my wife's cousin, she had to eventually stop crying, accept her situation and survive, survive for her two very young sons. And for her relatives including my wife, they eventually got on with their normal lives as the space occupied by her and the sorry incident was gradually freed up and then occupied again with the imaginable, apparently real, and presumably normal situations.

What I observed in the two months that followed the incident was the change in the behaviors and thought process of the people who were related but did not have a great presence or a role to play in the lady's mundane life. Indian men, elder or young, are always presumed to either be in or achieve a state of indifference very soon. The case was same in this incident as well. However, Indian women tend to spend a longer time, mentally, in such situations. The disturbing thing was that within a couple of months, both the elderly as well as young women-relatives also turned almost indifferent to that lady. Whenever the topic would come up for discussion, they would talk about the mistakes in judgement of the people that led to the incident, and then would end up saying that's fate and we can't do anything about it. I am not disturbed by this human behavior, it is pretty natural. The problem for me is the non-realization and non-acceptance of our hypocritical behaviors.

In the current world, both "educated" men and women feel proud and great in wishing each other on "Women's Day", "Mother's Day", "Family Day" and many such fads. In fact they implicate if someone didn't wish others in the family communication groups, it happened in my family even in the aftermath of the incident. However, many of us won't even be aware that there is an "International Widows Day" which is observed every year on 23rd of June. This recent incident and the just passed "International Widows Day" brought me to the thought that maybe only some of our women are, or can be, empowered. I have not heard about Widows, Divorcees, Single-mothers, Remarried women in any of the presentations and briefings which I have attended in the corporate world. Talking about such women still feels like taboo. I believe that the plight of such women will add many more inspiring perspectives to the already existing now-so-obvious perspectives in this area. Most of the times in our corporate events, it is the already empowered women, who have reached particular levels in management, talking about their journeys and then about bringing up the staff-level women in the organization up the ladder. Or they talk about having bigger percentage of women in the higher management. I see that there scope is often limited to further empowering to elite levels the already better-of women. The scope often excludes the women who can be brought to the initial state of being empowered, which would required much less effort, planning and showbiz. 

I hope that some empowered women understand the need to address this relatively ignored section among the supposed beneficiaries of their campaigns. I will appreciate and have an honest intent to contribute to such real campaign.

The 2nd "Good News" !!

Over last few years, I have been very vocal about my reservations against current-day Indian youth deciding to get married at an age between 25 and 30. I consider this age to be a little too small for a person to be able to make the best, or maybe the least painful :), choices for his/her life. Unlike people holding back expressing such un-social thoughts in front of their kin who are getting married, I do otherwise. I don't simply congratulate them. I question them - "do you really understand what you are trying to get into?". Quite expectedly, they neither understand my questions nor my intentions. They start doubting whether I am really one of their well-wishers. They start trying to figure out if something really bad has happened in my life. And finally they use their "Brahmastra", they say "you survived, we will also survive". They don't realize that in actual they are trying to cover these uncomfortable questions with the same wrapper which their parents used to first pack and then suffocate their free thoughts, when they said "Beta! We survived life like this, so will you..". That's a really smooth way to murder the thought of "thriving" life instead of "surviving" it. 

Of late, people in my circle of influence have become comfortable with this rogue side of me. However, as is life's characteristic of not letting this war of thoughts and opinions to be put to rest, a new domain of disharmony of thinking has sprung up in my circle. Recently, I heard two "good" news - one from my friend from college and the other from one of my close relatives. Both of them planned second childs, of course in their respective families :). While the reactions of my other friends and my wife, in their respective cases, were the default "congratulations", my reaction was "Why?" in both of them. The answers that I got were interesting.

My friend said "do bacche toh hone hi chahiye, family complete ho jati hai" (two kids are a must to complete the family). He said that in his typical middle-class, "educated" Indian Baniya tone. Baniya is a caste which majorly comprises of business-doing people in my country. Being a Baniya myself, I gave him a typical Baniya i.e. money perspective of his decision. I recently read one of the research articles that told that the average cost of bringing up a child upto18 years,  in an averagely educated middle-class Indian household, is 1.25 crore rupees. When I told this to him, he was spell bound. He had not even considered the money part in what he claimed as "family planning". I asked him if he felt confident and secure that his current job would last for another 15-20 years, and will be able to continue to pay him the average good salary which he is getting right now. His answer was an obvious No. And I could make out that a question about his happiness quotient would make him even more sad and disturbed, so I avoided it. Well, the beauty of friendship is that such conversations don't spell a bad cast on the core relationship. As I generally say these days, intent is more important than the act. I believe that my friend did get my point, but he could not accept it or express his acceptance. He knew all these unconventional thoughts hold a strong logic, but he was also aware that it is too difficult to break our own casts of conventional thinking which have been conditioned and made strong over all these years of our upbringing. 

My relative's reply was a bit more interesting. This relative of mine is in his late 30s and has a nine year old daughter. He also has these common existential issues of job insecurity, work related stress coz of holding a senior position in company, and not-so-good happiness score. I refined my monosyllabic "Why?" and asked him what was the thought process that went behind planning the second child. He told that he and his wife thought that the second child will be a talking/sharing companion to their daughter once she gets married. Their daughter will have a sibling to talk to when they won't be there. The answer left me thoroughly perplexed. I wanted to argue but in a feeble manner, to respect the sensitivity of our relationship. At our individual levels, he and I have complimenting personalities. But in terms of the societal relationship that we share with each other, I always need to be a lil submissive in the cases of ideological contradiction. In my feeble opposition, I asked him how can he (and his wife) be so sure about the circumstances in which their daughter will be after maybe 10-15 years from now. The answer was abstract and a try to evade the question, but I didn't pursue it further. The conversation ended, but I decided to elaborate on my feeble opposition inside my head. I continued to think that if my relative's daughter will get married in future, she will have her husband to share her feelings with. If not husband, there will be some fast friend built over all these years. If she will not be married, she might be busy exploring her life in realms that we might not be able to even imagine in our conventional view of life. There is a chance that she might not have any confidante, but that will mean that over all these years her upbringing must have made her an introvert or some other type. If that be the case, this planned companion in the form of her sibling will also be subject to the similar cast as she was, in which case I believe that the kind of sharing will anyways not help make the situation better. In my social circle, I have seen many close relatives and friends who are so hooked on to sharing everything with their siblings that there life outside of the act of sharing looks dead. 

In one of the idle afternoons, I brought up my views on these "good news" with my wife. Like a wife of 7 years, she started with a strong opposition to my thoughts, and the temperature of our tones gradually started to rise, as usual :). She told me that I cant expect everyone to be as mentally detached from family and relations, like myself. This was followed by some random arguments to augment her general disgust at my thought process. Like an experienced husband of 7 years, I retained the context but shifted the subject this relative to ourselves. This changed the overall perspective and we started thinking, and talking, in terms of what would be the impact of mothering a second child on her "personal" well-being. The smart move worked :). I told her that with our first child, she already lost her job, her career came to a halt, her health and physical appearance changed for what-seems-to-be forever, and her mental health is no better than before with all the marital, relationships, and social interpersonal misunderstandings, and the related emotional chaos. I told her that with great difficulty and after a span of 5 years she has started, though very sluggishly, on the path of recovery from the side effects of her pregnancy. Now, if we were to plan another child, in her personal perspective, her non-family life will be pushed back by another 2 years. Postnatal recovery might never come in her remaining life, coz of age and other psychological factors. Add to it the practical burden of financially supporting a family of four people, in a higher middle-class social atmosphere. Instead, in the next 2 years, if she focused on picking up pace in her recovery, attain some contentment and associated relevance in her non-family life, she will feel more happy about her life from an individual perspective. Agreed that if we planned a second child our child could have enjoyed the un-interrupted company of his sibling, but he could have also miss out on a lot of other possibilities of life coz of restrained mental and financial health of his parents. A bad mental health of parents would have in fact had an overall negative impact on his life. I told my wife, that 20-30 years back, our parents existed in a much simpler and less stressful world. There was manageable amount of stress from societal existence, and practical existence was much easier with lesser distractions and equally less aspirations. These days, if we compare to the times of our parents, we are under exponential levels of stress. Times have changed, not for the good. Its imperative for us to break our casts of conventional thinking, for the good. We need to assess ourselves, understand our limitations, aspirations, and capabilities, and then decide on such big decisions as planning a second child. When things were seen in her perspective, my wife concurred with my thought process ;).

In current world, a feeling of personal relevance is of utmost importance. Today's women, with a mindset of empowerment, cannot just be contented with the feeling of having parented "educated" children, or having given the lifelong support to their families. I have seen women who try to make themselves feel that way, but I have also observed that they are shattered to the core when they are brought to a rendezvous with their actual reality. The reality in which they are actually consoling themselves every day that you gave yourself up for this family. I believe that a family should never suck any of its member's relevance and importance as an individual. A collective decision which inflicts hurt to any member(s), is a fault of the entire family.

All this thought process does not mean that I am against a second child in principle. I am just of the opinion that such major decisions of life have to be taken from a more realistic perspective of oneself and ones life, instead of just being taken out of an ageing and unjustifiable convention. We boast of our culture being so open, modern, and accepting, yet the noble and very practical deed of adoption feels like a taboo to most of us. Adoption is a very nice and available option in a populous country like ours.  It can help the lady in the family to not go through the physical and related psychological pains of pregnancy, and also give her an opportunity to attain another higher level in womanhood, that of mothering a cute, little, lovable, motherless soul as her own child. Yes, she won't become Mother Teresa, but she won't be any less in her own little world. And that also gives the family an opportunity to have a member with a slightly different DNA than the boring one, which the existing members are already tired of and trying to decode and change for the better :).

So we ought to be very pragmatic and not get carried away by unthought-of traditions and conventions. One bad decision can ruin the life of our family member(s), and that is one thing that we should avoid to respect the scarce humanity. For the "good news", they are floating in the world around us, in very simple and beautiful ways, we just need to tune in to the right news channel :).

Do you love your spouse?

The title of this post could have been "Do you feel Love in all your relationships?" or may be a more simpler "Love, Life and Relationships". However, I came up with this title because of the fact that on most social occasions, and even at times while introspecting, we tend to associate the element of Love in our life only to our spouses or partners. People around us are not curious to know if we love our child/parent(s)/humanity/nature/existence or life as a whole. But almost everyone is interested to know whether Love exists in our relationship with our spouse. Reason probably is that the other halves of all these relationships except marriage are not chosen by us. When a child is born we don't control its form. We don't control or choose the humanity, nature or existence around us. We accept them either as a blessing if good or destiny if otherwise. However, we control who we chose as our or our child's spouse, the supposed-to-be life partner. We make this decision with our "great" human wisdom, the wisdom on which we bet a huge amount of money to treat and declare to the entire world of "wise" people around us, that we have found the perfect companion for our or our child's life journey. When we make this choice we consider that our great wisdom includes a degree in the subject of Love. We then go on to claim that Love will be and has to be an integral part of this chosen relationship. This is where this self-made mess starts, and this is where the culture of checking the crap-density of the mess of our fellow messed-up beings creeps in.

Have we ever imagined any relationship without Love? Or let me rephrase, have we ever imagined a life which need not have Love? 

I believe that Love has not only been grossly not-understood but also it has been misused to defend our full-of-hate stances in arguments that happen quite so often with our so-called-loved ones. We often term these arguments as emotional and try to attribute them to presence, absence or lacking of Love. But I feel that they are actually psychological in nature. They arise because of different and often conflicting interpretations of a particular situation or an incident. These interpretations are based on the arguing individuals' value systems, the value systems which are either not-understood or misunderstood by the individuals themselves. Love is not a value, it an eternal experience that has as many definitions as are the positive human emotions. Ambiguous! We tend to use this ambiguity of Love to elude the ambiguity of our core values. We pick a definition of Love which is in line with what we expect our so-called-loved-one to do for us in a particular context, and then shift the complete focus to judge whether Love exists in our relationship or not. 

Why do we not have an intent to identify our core values? Why do we tend to ignore the values which form the entire basis of our interpretation of situations, and thus lay the foundation of our understanding of life?

I live in a country that has its cultural history majorly influenced by Hinduism, a religion whose origins are claimed to date back to 1500 B.C. It is based on some revered ancient texts like Vedas, whose relevance and importance in current world is acknowledged worldwide. These ancient Hindu texts define principles that still apply to a great extent to our fast-moving modern lives. Hindu principles of life are quite open and liberal in nature, as compared to other religious beliefs and preachings. That's why they apply better to our lives when compared to many other religions. This open and liberal nature of Hinduism leads to two things in terms of an individual's understanding of the religion - first an interpretation based understanding of core values, and second the transcending of this interpretation (with few manipulations) into the individual's circle of influence. Every interpretation defines its own values, and each transcendence adds to a community of people believing in the given set of values. There may be some overlaps between the value systems of two such communities, but sufficient differences are deliberately maintained by the upper managements of each community, to sustain their USPs, and thus keep the follower-ship and associated money-mill running.

Our values form the basis of how we first perceive and then judge things or people around us. Simple chain of human cultural evolution goes something like - individuals form communities, communities form societies, and finally societies form cultures. Our country often boasts of its diverse cultural wealth on international stages. At the same time, it boasts of having the largest pool of intellect that is needed by the world to sustain global economy. Both the claims have some credibility, except for the factual misrepresentation of the diverse culture and the intellectual pool as drugs that have no side-effects. While diverse culture results in conflicting values, "intellect" is a misnomer for "education". What our country has is a very big pool of "educated" people who can do wonders if they are made to operate in an ideal world (which is modeled in the lessons of their curriculum). However, when put into the real world scenario, majority of these "educated" ones lose complete control of themselves and their lives. Of course exceptions are there but they are numbered, and the number is not big enough to put the claims that we do on the international stages.

A value-rich culture and a well "educated" mind, in a globalized scientifically advanced world, produce a confused soul. One of my fellow philosophy-idiot introduced me to the term "headless chicken", while kind-of showing a mirror to me :). I believe that our country has one of the biggest pools of "headless chicken" in the world. We have our own sets of abstract but fortified values that have sustained various evolutionary attacks over ages. Globalization has catalyzed an amalgamation of population from different cultures, bringing into the scheme of things a deluge of abstract values. The scientific advancement has made life so fast that often we do not have enough time, energy, or space to stop, think and move. 

It is like we are driving our modernized life in a traffic of confused values, and there are no yellow lights in the signals at the culture crossroads. We can either stop and park, or keep moving without thinking, like a "headless chicken". A popular strategy that we, confused souls, take in such scenarios is to follow and stick to the visibly safest path. The path often tells us to "study" meticulously but not "learn". It tells us to "believe" in rites, rituals, and ancestral ways of living but not "question" them, and thus restricts our minds to a closed box of "thinking". While moving on this path, we come across various crossroads where we need to take important life decisions that can impact the course of rest of the journey of our lives. There are the opportunities where we can switch over from the current path to a path that shows better life prospects but with a risk of uncertainty. Whether we decide to stick to the already traversed path or switch to a new one, our natural tendency puts us into a constant evaluation of the actual merit of our decision.

If we look at it, this is situation for many people belonging to the educated middle-class of our country, to which I also belong. And in this stressful situation, along with screwing our overall understanding of life, we screw up the understanding of feelings and emotions like Love.

Our main religion has many number of Gods, and equal number of stories that give an elaborate account of social values that we, as humans, should live up to. It just occurred to me that our mythological texts and scriptures give an account of Love life of only one major God, who happened to have loved numerous women, none of whom ended up being his wife. Ironically, we have the photograph of that God and his most beloved woman printed on the invitation cards for solemnizing of a relationship that never existed between the God and his beloved women.

In such a setup of confused values, as soon as we enter our adolescence, we enter into a battlefield where abstract cultural values are fighting our biologically developing psyche. Add to it the pressure of the earning educational degrees to survive in the ever competing world. This leaves us with nil or minimal time to observe and identify our own selves. We get pushed onto the traffic-laden street with no idea about how to navigate through it. So we chose to quickly complete our paper-education and then earn a job that gives meager-but-enough-to-survive salary, and then, just because of the age, start assuming ourselves to have matured enough to find the Love of our life. And what do we know about Love at that stage? Living in a beautiful house with our partner, singing or spending time with him/her in a beautiful scenic locations, dance together and feel Love on social gatherings, travel, party, complete the family with a child and eventually grow old together. We overlook one of the very important aspects of companionship, that is "understanding". And its very natural to overlook this essential aspect. We never tried to understand ourselves, how can we think about a relationship based on understanding. Without identifying our own values, how can we find a person whose values might match to our unidentified values. We choose that person superficially, by looks or surface behavioral traits (mostly in case of love marriages), or by caste, astrology and societal rules (in case of arrange marriages). And then starts the never ending pursuit of aligning our unidentified values in the name of adjustment towards each other, and conformance to the standards of life set by the extremely virtuous people around us.

Big account of the problem, what is the solution?

After trying to clean this mess for many years now, I have learnt that a very important tool to overcome the situation is to first identify our core values, and then understand the relationship of our core values to the societal setup that we live in. Our societal setup is neither an ideological truth nor a practical truth, its a human existential truth. It cannot be judged right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable. It just exists. I have come across verified researches, that are also in line with life principles defined in Vedas, that we are on a constant path of learning which eventually leads to self-discovery as we keep growing in the experience called life. The learning slows down as we get old but it never ceases. I believe that if we introspect properly, we can form a very "good" (need not be 100% "correct") understanding of our core values. What are my core values?

• Keep learning while living thoughtfully. Take a mental pause once in a while in the otherwise long running and established daily routines, think about what's happening in my internal and external worlds, and think about how I can achieve or sustain a balanced co-existence between the two.
• Be open to change that comes along with ever-growing physical and psychological worlds.
• Control the controllable, in terms of my roles and responsibilities.
• Appreciate and respect acts of innocence, kindness, compassion, and/or help that happen around me. Try to add to these beautiful aspects of human existence.
• Respect food, avoid food wastage, and be thankful to almighty for being lucky to get food whenever I feel hungry.
• Respect sports, understand the sportsmen's spirit. 
• Respect soldiers and the militia, try to understand and respect the spirit of the nation's defense forces. Try to do something for the soldiers in this lifetime. 
• Respect dignity and freedom of choice of life of individuals around me.
• Try to be a good listener. Accept positive feedback with grace, embrace the negative feedback from life and people, and try to respond and not react to the negative feedback.
• Try to be selflessly selfish or selfishly selfless. At times I speak or act against the common social conventions, in an unsociable manner. That's my maverick self. But I try to leash myself with some restraint so that it does not become anti-social. Generally, the behavior is backed with some value-based reasoning. 
• Be grateful to the nature and to almighty for blessing me with the material and non-material possessions that make me feel happy.

Some of these values seem very simple when mentioned, and are popularly talked about. But they are not easy to be realized and lived. I make a sincere effort to keep realizing these values in my routine, and keep identifying any new values that I have developed or may develop through the ongoing journey of life.

Our human nature is such that if we find a person with exactly (or almost) the same values, our natural instincts lead us to an insecurity that the relevance or importance of our value system might be superseded by the possibly stronger or better established value system of the other being. We subconsciously start competing and challenging each other in the acts that reflect these values. That's why there is the popular saying that opposites attract, while the actual thing is "likes repel". Ironically, in our typical marriages, we keep trying to mold our "opposite" valued partner, whom we should be actually attracted to (if we go by the popular principle), into a "like" valued partner, so that we can claim to love him/her. So I don't buy this theory of "opposites attract". On the contrary, I often feel getting pulled towards persons who reflect similar or complementing values. When I meet such people, I develop an innate willingness to refine the understanding of my own values, and imbibe from them new values that can add to my growth. These value-aware people can be from either sex. In case of same sex they end up becoming your "friends for life", in case of opposite sex they may become your potentially-perfect "life partner". Such a person of opposite sex becoming your "friend for life" is a theoretically possible aspect, but it has its own set of strong social and biological challenges. I will restrict my current thought process from venturing into this possibility, as I believe this will start another Chautauqua. 

This whole understanding of life, relationships and Love might be "good" or "bad", but it can never be "right" or "wrong" :).

So my solution to the problem is to relieve ourselves and our partners from the stress of trying to find Love within each other. Try to know, and then grow ourselves. Fulfill the responsibilities towards our current internal and external existences, try to achieve a balance, and start/resume on the path of learning and self-discovery. Many values exist in our worlds in many forms, not just in the form of people around us. Once we start realizing values within and around us, the feeling which we might define as Love will eventually fill our lives. Feeling of Love will happen, it will chose us, we can't chose it because it is ambiguous to us.

So what if someone asks me "Do you love your spouse?". My answer is "please share your understanding of Love with me, then I can answer if I love my spouse, based on the parameters that make your definition of Love". I am sure I will get into a discussion that will either unleash the expressions captured in this post or make that person move out of this discussion with a "maverick" :). 

So next time you are in a social gathering/setup and someone asks you "Do you Love your spouse?", what will be your answer?