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.
