Let us please disallow any practice that takes away a woman’s dignity

Here’s a humble plea…let’s co-create a better, equal, world.

At an engagement ceremony in the family on Sunday, I witnessed, helplessly, as gender inequality played out. The mother of the groom, a single parent, was discouraged openly by the priest, from leading the ceremony from her family’s side. Her friend and the friend’s husband were “allowed” by the priest to lead the ceremony though. The implied message was that a male member and his spouse alone could lead this “auspicious” event. Single mothers (separated or widowed) may not, I inferred, lead. Interestingly, neither the groom nor his mother protested.

I didn’t volunteer to offer my perspective to the groom or his family because I am not very close to them to have known if they would be open to my “interference”. From the way everyone was so “comfortable” with the conduct of the ceremony, I am quiet sure they may have resented my “intrusion into their space”.

Even so, I am sharing my thoughts here to highlight the responsibility each of us has to throw out archaic practices which, in the name of religion or tradition, disrespect a woman, take away her dignity and treat her with a contemptuous bias. I don’t understand how an unrelated male leading an engagement ceremony is more appropriate, relevant or acceptable than a single mother – for heaven’s sake, the boy’s own biological mother! – leading it? I seriously don’t get it. This incident only reiterates in me the belief that a lot, lot more has to be done in the area of gender equality – and a lot of it begins in our homes. I wish the groom, a strapping young man, had stood up for his mom – who has given her all for raising him and his sister – and invited her to preside over the ceremony. It would have ushered in a progressive, refreshing, new egalitarian era.

I am not suggesting here that we turn activists at all family dos and social events. Activism is not necessarily required in all contexts; we also don’t have to be belligerent and aggressive. We can and must learn to put our foot down firmly on such practices that are clearly outdated, distasteful and stupid. I am sure if someone from the groom’s family had told the priest that the groom’s mother would lead the ceremony, he would not have had a serious problem. And if he had had a problem, he could have been reasoned with – either by talking him out of his regressive logic or by reiteration that he must conform to his client’s brief and expectations. Surely, the priest could be made to accept that choosing to accord dignity to a single mother is not blasphemous; because without her, there would be no son, no groom!!

Lest I sound preachy and hypocritical, I must disclose and reiterate here that I do have a dysfunctional relationship with my mother. I talk about this openly. Yet, I have not disrespected her at any time; I may not value what she has achieved or agree with what she has done or does, but I do respect her for always going out and doing what she believes in doing. I am also very grateful to her for having brought me into this world and for having raised me and for teaching me the alphabet. We have different outlooks to Life, our values are not in sync and so our chemistry has never worked. My way of according her respect is to let her be who she likes being without intruding into her space with either my presence or opinions.

Sunday’s incident leaves me very baffled. I am not sure how we can garner support towards changing attitudes and mindsets. So, I make a humble plea. I wish, as a people, we have more conversations on this subject. I wish people stand up for gender equality instead of being button-holed by shallow reasoning in the name of God, religion, tradition, culture and society. I just wish we all co-create a better, equal, world…

 

Live-in, be BFFs, make lots of love, have children – do you really need to marry for doing all this?

Marriage is a hollow, irrelevant institution – it is perhaps the singular cause of gender inequality.

Last night, over dinner, Vaani and I had an interesting conversation with a friend’s daughter. We talked about marriage – and its increasing irrelevance.

This young lady is in a long-distance relationship. Her boyfriend comes from an affluent, conservative family. The boy’s parents are keen to have the engagement done now and the wedding sometime next summer. The young lady is not sure what she must do. She is wary of walking into a family which does not believe in the bahu, the daughter-in-law, following her own bliss and career. The girl’s brother is advising the couple not to rush into a marriage. His view: “Understanding each other is very critical before you end up in a marriage.”

I agree with him. In fact, although Vaani and I are married, I have come to see marriage as a totally avoidable practice. Here’s why I feel so – and this is what I shared with the young lady too last night.

In the garb of according societal approval and fulfilling religious norms, marriage actually, unnecessarily, limits Life between two people. Clearly, the reason why two people relate to each other for long periods of time is not because they are married. It is because there’s a friendship between them, they understand each other and are willing to be non-judgmental about each other despite the circumstances. This relating is continuous, and is never limited by gender, class, religion, nationality or language. Of course, to build and sustain this companionship, two people need not be necessarily married. On the other side of this view, people can stop relating to each other after being together for a considerable amount of time. It is very natural. But as we see all around us, it is only marriage that makes any divorce painful and messy. So, if you place societal requirements aside, marriage is irrelevant. What people do today while they are still in a marriage they can and will do even otherwise. They will either relate to each other and be great friends or they will grow out of liking each other and move on or they will stay together and have other relationships that will make them feel complete and fulfilled. But when they do all this without being married, they will do so while being a lot, lot more, happier.  Simply, they will experience total freedom and zero guilt in doing what they really want to do! If you examine society around you, there’s isn’t unputdownable evidence that supports the utility of marriage as a social contract – it has neither aided the building of great companionships nor has it prevented people from exploring Life outside of its framework. This is why, I believe, marriage is irrelevant.

The other problem that marriage has created is that it has, again unnecessarily, made a very basic human need, sex, appear illicit and salacious whenever it is indulged in outside of a marriage. This is outright ridiculous. As Osho, the Master, says, the bees, the birds, the fish, and every other species don’t find the act of having sex illicit. They do it freely. They don’t have any rules that promote monogamy and condemn polygamy. So, why are we humans outrageously supportive of this regressive framework called marriage that restricts free access to a basic human need, to a beautiful spiritual expression – sex?

Also, it is the imposition of the draconian code of conduct of marriage that has singularly led to gender inequality. This is particularly true in Indian society even though it is evident in several other cultures world-wide. Consider this: the moment she marries, a woman must serve the interests of the family, often at the cost of her career, her passion, her bliss. She must rear children. She must not step outside of the marriage, the relationship, even if she finds someone that she can relate to. But the man she married can do what he pleases, with whomever he chooses. And because she agreed to be subservient, and often just a doormat, if at all she dares to seek a divorce, she has to be at the mercy of her estranged husband and seek alimony for survival through an inert legal process, that’s always messy and emotionally draining! Doesn’t all this sound so stupid, so repulsive?

I would any day champion that people just develop great friendships while living together. If they grow out of liking each other, they can, and must, move on. And if they want to procreate and have children, let it be a mutual choice, not a necessity. Yes, for reasons like securing passports or buying material assets, if there must be a piece of legal documentation, let there be. But don’t get wedded to the legalese. The real contract is in the spirit of togetherness – of a friendship, of relating to each other, of enjoying each other, of giving and receiving, of always being there for each other, no matter what the circumstances are. As I share in my Book Fall Like A Rose Petal  and in the film Rise In Love  (that a young film-maker made to understand how the companionship between Vaani and me thrived in the face of adversity), Vaani and I are friends first and then a married couple. In fact, if I was meeting Vaani now, I would not have chosen to have a marriage. We would have lived-in together and would still be loving each other as much as we do now. Our marriage has not helped us stay together. Our friendship has.

So, my (unsolicited) advice to my children, Aashirwad and Aanchal, and to anyone wanting some perspective is this – marry only if you want to; please don’t marry because society or family wants you to. It is a meaningless, irrelevant, practice. Between being stuck in a relationship and being able to relate to each other no matter what, relating to each other is more valuable. Between your marriage and your happiness, obviously, happiness wins hands down any day, doesn’t it?!

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Why ‘settling down’ is sinful

It is to live dangerously that we have been created!

Ever since senior journalist and TV anchor Rajdeep Sardesai asked Tennis ace Sania Mirza that question about ‘settling down and motherhood’ a couple of days ago, the question itself is being seen as an affront to gender equality. I believe going forward this question will be categorized as one among those that we must never ask a woman. I don’t disagree.

Further, while I believe that the entire argument in favor of ‘settling down’, if at all, must be gender neutral, I prefer to campaign for avoiding the very argument.

Anxious parents and a ‘holier-than-thou’ society define ‘settling down’ as ‘having an income, saving money, creating material assets, raising a family and begetting children’. It’s a simple thumb rule that the world expects you to conform to – “if you have attained adulthood, necessarily, you shall earn money, marry, buy a house and procreate”. If you notice, in the popular notion or context of ‘settling down’, no one talks about ‘being happy’. Which is why I find this ‘settling down’ discourse sinful.

I believe we are missing the moot point here. The reason we have been created – to be sure, each of us has been born without our asking to be born; that’s incontrovertible evidence that we have been created – is not to merely ‘earn a living’. We have been created human so that we can experience the beauty and magic of this ‘uncertain, inscrutable’ Life and be happy. Osho, the Master, says we have ruined this experience by building a social framework, partly financial, partly material, and wholesomely driven by our wants and expectations, around something that can never be boxed or contained. Life is free-flowing, it has a mind of its own. It is unpredictable. And every moment of living is like a bungee jump, a deep dive into the unknown. Into this deep dive, by introducing a pay check, we think we have stemmed the uncertainty and made the whole experience predictable. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Financial security is an illusion – it is human-made and so doesn’t conform to Life’s free spirit. Which is why, despite all the money you may have, you still can’t fix some quirky health situations, you can’t unentangle complex relationship issues, you can’t buy happiness, you can’t find inner peace or you just can’t get a good night’s sleep!

Osho encouraged us to dump the false comfort that financial security gave us. He invited us to embrace uncertainty and live dangerously. He called his point of view ‘the joy of living dangerously’. He championed for a Life beyond ‘earning a living’, beyond the ‘slaving-earning-saving-procreating’ paradigm. He invited people to be happy, doing whatever gave them happiness. Alan Watts, the British philosopher, invited us to choose the Life we want to live by first imagining what we would be doing in a world where money was not an object. Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist and author, beseeched us to follow our bliss. All their clarion calls asked of us to choose to be happy even if it meant being unsettled. Happiness above all else, was their mantra. I completely agree with all of them.

For reasons that I can never understand or explain beyond what I share daily, here on this Blog, or what I have shared in my Book ‘Fall Like A Rose Petal’ (Westland), Vaani and I have been ‘living dangerously’ for years now. We have no money and we have ceased to seek financial security. Yet we are not insecure, we are not unhappy and we are not spending all our time – or sleepless nights – worrying. In a purely worldly sense we have still not “settled down” – we have no income, no savings, no assets, no health or Life insurance and a mountain of debt to repay – yet Life goes on for us. Just as it goes on for so, so many “unsettled” people around us, all over the world. The common thread that links all of us “unsettled folks” is that perhaps through discovering the “joy of living dangerously” we have learnt the art of “living in the now, in the present moment”. Let me hasten to add that living “unsettled” is very, very challenging no doubt, but it is the adventure that is the reward here! Which is why, having tasted that adventure, and enjoyed the reward, we find that “settling down” is perhaps sinful – if ever anything is sinful!

Expunge any practice that disrespects women from the face of the planet

Any home or family that alienates its women is regressive.

I was shocked to read a friend’s post on Facebook yesterday. She was attending a wedding in the family. And she was disallowed by a family elder, ironically a lady, from participating in the ‘mehendi’ ceremony, because she (my friend) had lost her husband a couple of years ago. In another episode, a friend who is pregnant and is due to deliver in a month, said her family wants her to postpone her ‘maike’ visit (to her maternal home) because a distant relative had passed away on her husband’s side – so until the period of mourning was over, she could not ‘carry the stigma/shadow of grief and death’ into her own home. In another horror story we have heard, a woman was disallowed from inviting her divorced sister home, by her mother-in-law, because a young, divorced woman was “capable of corrupting the minds of the men” in the house.

For heaven’s sake, we are in 2016! Well into the 21^st century! And we still have such cruel, crude, primitive, biased thinking that is prevalent?

I believe we have an urgent need in each family to examine how our women are treated. I think more than in workplaces, we need a policy in our homes to ensure that women are not harassed in the name of God, religion, rituals, tradition and culture. And as in the case of all three women, whose stories I have shared here, it is often, unfortunately, women who either directly try to alienate other women or partner in such alienation. When I was much younger, I rabidly fought a lot of this discrimination against Vaani (and her family) by my own mother – but I lost out every single time. This is one of the principal reasons why I choose to remain detached and distant from my side of the family – to protect our own inner peace and sanity. I wish I had been stronger then. But at least over the past decade or so, I have been championing this thought that any home or family that does not give equal opportunity and respect to its women has to be condemned unequivocally.

Last year when my father-in-law Venks passed on, and we were readying his body for cremation, the priest asked me if any of Venks’ grandsons were around. This, as I understood it, was to light the source fire from which, notionally, the funeral pyre would be lit. I told the priest that two of Venks’ grandsons were on their way from different Indian cities and they planned to reach the crematorium directly. Since the source fire (in an earthern pot) had to be lit at home, I suggested that my daughter, Venks’ granddaughter, be allowed to light it. But the priest would just not agree. We got into a dignified but vocal debate on gender equality that lasted several minutes. Finally, I backed off, because I didn’t want to hold up the proceedings that were being led by the priest in partnership with Venks’ son, my brother-in-law. However, when it came to bid the body goodbye, all of us were asked to notionally ‘feed the body’ (vai-ikku arisi). I invited my daughter too to do it. The elders in the family and the priest didn’t quite appreciate this. For, per them, unmarried girls must neither feed the body nor see it off. Not only did Aanchal take my cue and ‘feed Venks’ body’, she and Vaani accompanied the cortege to the crematorium and literally saw Venks off. I am very proud of the choices my wife and my daughter made. After all they were close to Venks too.

I must confess here that although social norms, banal traditions and dogmatic rituals are all stacked up always to favor men, it is the women who are more resilient that us men. I say this from my own experience of fighting our crisis – without Vaani on my side, I would never have made it this far. And in almost every story around us, whenever I have met sensible, sensitive, compassionate men, I have always found them acknowledging this truth. The other day I was chatting with Gregory Jacob from Dubai (his family’s story of surviving a traumatic phase of bankruptcy is now a famous motion picture in Malayalam – Jacobinte Swargarajyam – in which Nivin Pauly plays Gregory’s role). And Jacob had this to say: “Amma is the backbone of our family, she is the warrior queen, she has been the pillar of strength for all of us. I guess we men aren’t really fireproof after all!” I can’t agree with him more.

I don’t want to preach. I just want to make a plea. Let’s be the change we want see around us. Let’s get rid of any thought, practice, ritual, tradition or custom that alienates a woman. And let’s start from our own homes!   

 

 

Band, Baaja, Baaraat Aur Toast!

Use every occasion to celebrate those who mean a lot to you – it will mean a lot to them!

Yesterday we watched a short video shot at the engagement ceremony of our niece Priyanka. In the video, Priyanka takes time to thank everyone who’s made a difference in and to her Life. She is honest, grateful and very compassionate as she pauses to reflect and share her innermost feelings about her mother, brother, grandmother, fiancé and the extended family!

This is refreshingly different from what traditionally happens at Indian family occasions – most certainly among TamBrahms – like engagements and weddings where families invest all their time and energies in performing rituals and in being subservient to ‘those that make the most noise” in the name of “protocol and respect”. For instance, the girl’s side are always the underdogs at these dos and the members from the boy’s family must always be pleased, their whims pandered to and even their unstated demands must be magically understood and met! Until the last decade, I don’t think TamBrahm weddings were fun. People were always either trying to please the other or find fault with the other. Resultantly even if the boy and girl were in perfect sync with each other, they too were on tenterhooks because they didn’t know when the next explosive situation between their families would erupt! Nett. Nett. No one enjoyed themselves. The celebration was always superficial and never real.

But in this decade, a growing, welcome, trend is emerging.

I think this generation of people, in their 20s, has developed a couldn’t-care-less attitude to what others feel, say or do. And I think this irreverence is most appropriate when it comes to dealing with senseless gender-based protocol, inequalities and egos. So, of late, I see a lot more youngsters at our weddings, engagements, baby-showers and such events really celebrating. Important, people are pausing to use these – and other occasions – to talk about each other. To share what they feel about each other and what they mean to each other. After all, what’s the point in eulogizing someone at their memorial service when they won’t be around to hear what you have to say? I feel there is great value in telling people how much they mean to you when they are still there. Surely, it will mean a lot to them.

Slowly, but surely, gender-based protocols and inequalities, in the name of tradition, are also being done away with. At our friends’ son’s wedding recently, the entire family from the boy’s side – all of them accomplished musicians – performed a fusion medley on stage celebrating the girl and her family. In a TamBrahm setting, and in India where the girl’s family have always been treated as doormats, it was really, truly, inspiring to see this change.

I wish that the force be with people like Priyanka, her generation, with families such as our friends’ and with all those who will embrace this new way. I believe family get-togethers and events like engagements and weddings must be used to raise a toast to those that have touched your Life. Even a death must not be mourned in grief or sorrow. Instead the way that Life was lived must be celebrated. True celebration does not come from rituals and protocols it comes from camaraderie and having fun being together. Hope this trend picks up momentum, becomes a wave and drowns everything anti (to it) in its wake!