On This Women’s Day, I Want To Apologize For Being An Indian Man

That rare species – an Indian man who is enlightened enough to own the atrocities committed by men on women through the ages, and apologizes for it!

There has been a reluctance on my part whenever I am tempted or prompted to write about women. Being a middle class Indian man in his early twenties who has been brought up in a town far away from the metros, I have struggled with my own inhibitions, most of which were and still are about women. I mean, what do I write about women? More importantly, do I deserve to make a comment about women, given the country and community of men I belong to?

Let me narrate a recent scene from my life. I was in my village to attend a thread ceremony. The two little boys with their heads shaved and kohl in their eyes sat silently inside the pavilion, as perplexed as they could be, looking at their father and the priest. Outside, on the porch, around fifty men of all ages sat on red plastic chairs with their eyes fixed towards a makeshift stage. A man wearing red pants and yellow shirt was addressing them.

Agitated and confused by the scene, I went in to a room where my mother and other ladies were sitting and complained about the happenings among their men.

One old woman responded in the most amusing way, “When my husband was alive, he would put two of those bimbos on both of his thighs.” Her tone was proud and at the same time quizzical, “You should also go out and enjoy. That is what men do.”

Even before that, even before I understood the difference between ‘men’ and ‘women’, I remember clearly how our classroom looked. The benches were neatly divided into ‘girls row’ and ‘boys row’. At the age of ten, I was once given the most dreaded punishment of all time. I was made to sit in the ‘girls row’ for one entire month. The teacher to invent that horror for me was also a lady. I sometimes find it funny how all these giant public schools in small towns claim to be ‘co-ed’.

Being ‘educated’ in such ‘co-ed’ environment, it is only natural that most Indian men are confused and hence comfortable with their earned ideas about gender definitions. The sex education we get are mostly from our coeval friends, who themselves have learnt through the great info-graphic that is porn or even more so through Bollywood. Since, most of Indian men learn through this ‘education’, they are often unable to see women beyond their appearance.

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It was only when I went to college and met some amazing young women that I was able to break my own conjectures. I remember finding it difficult to digest that a woman could drink and smoke and still be ‘good’. My eyes would go big like potatoes when after classes, a girl and a guy shared a smoke. Those times taught me to see a woman as a person first.

When I was able to do that, I realized that women are far superior human beings than men. Their capacity to withstand pain, their compassion for another human being in addition to whatever they were achieving professionally won me over. Even there, I found the men talking trash on the drop of a hat as soon as some girl outperformed a guy. As soon as a girl was successful, she was marked a slut by the male fraternity.

It seemed to me that all the money spent by the parents of these young men on their education was a waste. If you can’t respect another person, what is the point of getting educated? But then, how many men can actually see women as anything more than just women?

I don’t want to talk about how the patriarchal thinking has wronged women over ages. It is out in the open, it happens everyday, everywhere. Every time a  woman is tormented physically or mentally for being a woman, I feel more and more ashamed of being a man. I find it ironical how a country like India – where people are hyper-patriotic about their ‘mother’-land and worship a certain ‘goddess’ for wealth – treats its women so pathetically.

Years after years, whether it is the board exams or Olympics, women have been proving their worth and yet most Indian men are unable to remove their glasses of gender prejudice.

On this women’s day, I want to apologize on behalf of every ignorant Indian man, to every single woman in this country. I want to apologize to my sister, my mother, my aunt and maid. I want to apologize to every woman who works as hard as a man, maybe more, whether it is inside a corporate office or in paddy fields. I want to apologize to the sex workers of GB street and Kamathipura; to every bride and wife for what goes inside a house. Being an Indian man, what else can I do anyway?

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Image source: By Garry Knight – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link. Used for representational purposes only.

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