Being Female!

I was quite stirred by an article called “Unwanted daughters” by Harsh Mander in the Hindu Sunday Magazine dated 29^th August, 2010  on a major recent study done on female feticide in India by Action Aid India and International Development Research Centre, Canada. 

The article among  disturbing facts like methods of killing the female child, neglect, illegal connivances of doctors and nurses, etc also talks about some interesting explanations cited up by the study that they believe perpetuate this evil norms in India.  The explanations talk about the paradox that how some of the progressive policies of the Government such as inheritance rights for women, higher age for marriage, etc make them much more of an economic burden to the families as further expenditure on the girl and any property owned by them would only benefit the husband’s family after marriage as also that the woman’s physical capabilities like child bearing, productive abilities, caring abilities become the property of the husband’s household.  Hence the article goes on to say that the female feticide is taking place  more out of economic and material reasons rather than a desire for make child over female ones. 

The articl  then goes on to suggest as to how only through long term social reforms such as society changing their view of women, parents willing to live with their daughters in the old age, stoppage of dowry and other practices and enhancing the social and economic power of women within families can bring about any changes in this most heinous  and inhuman practices in our society. It also brought the fact to the fore that some of urban areas and the educated class are also very much part of the female feticide trend. 

After I read the article, I was with two contradictory emotions, one was of understanding and some empathy for the families who were killing their female infants (understanding and empathy would not tantamount to supporting them) and the other was a slight hopelessness and shame as to whether our society will ever be able to look at itself differently and even if it does, how will it take for us to bring any changes in these customs and how aware are we, the so called educated and progressive part of the society which has at least in paper, the capacity to influence positive social reforms through activism, practice and awareness. 

While pondering over these, I also thought another incident that I was a part of in the recent past. 

I was working with a multinational organisation where large number of men and women work together.  The group that I worked with had the following demographic data: their average age is between 25 to 35, average education qualification ranges from postgraduate to MBA from prestigious institutions, most of them come from middle or upper middle class, most of them live in metros and have lived there for most of their lives, their take home salaries range between Rs. 15 to 30 lacs per annum.   The group had about forty percent women and sixty percent men. 

While working with this group, a particular narrative triggered off a question for them to explore the psychological status given to femininity in the organisation and we suggested that perhaps the status given to females and femininity in the minds of people (both men and women) were lower than the masculine traits and qualities.  This created a furore in the group and many of them, especially some women were outraged that we could even hint at a possibility like this in their organisation context, while some others agreed with the hypothesis.  

During a subsequent dialogue some of them argued that they never experienced any discrimination either during their growing up years nor do they experience any discrimination in their work places.  What was hard for them to understand that even if they did not personally experience this differentiation, that there was a strong possibility of its presence in their organisation context and that it was probable that they themselves would be blind to their own biases and prejudices.  The data that they presented in the context of the workshop, however, pointed towards a generally held psychological bias more towards masculine attributes and qualities as more desirable as compared to feminine attributes and qualities.  The argument presented to them was that since both men and women would possess both masculine and feminine attributes in themselves, whether it was worthwhile for them to explore whether such a bias existed in the group and the repercussion of it in their work context.  

This has been my experience in not only this organisation but in working with groups both within a work context or outside, that while most  people  condemn the overtly displayed patriarchal norms of unjust and  inhibiting practices, they often remain blind to their own biases and prejudices.  Most do not take into account that most of us in the world today are products of the patriarchal culture, values and norms and that our belief system, biases, assumptions and practices would be highly impacted by the super structure of the context.  Hence injustice towards  anyone who is weak in the eyes of the powers that be in any context when happening somewhere else, is easier to condemn but when it is happening within me or in my personal context by me towards others, or vice versa or towards others, we are often blind to it. 

If I were to talk about myself, I became painfully aware of my own biases towards femininity when I was looking at strong biases held by people and by me shortly after the 26/11 incident in India.  It is in my blog post called "Communalism Revisited" (http://sharbori21.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html).   

I believe that today being female is not just about having a strong voice, opinion, capabilities, competence, financial power, status and power, but also about being self reflective, being sensitive to the larger context and towards oneself, having a sense of respect towards self as well as towards others irrespective of their social class or milieu and above all, living with a sense of conviction, commitment and responsibility towards oneself and towards the context, and living with this question: How do I wish to live? What is the quality of life that I wish to build around myself and around others, what responsibility do I have towards the larger context and finally what am I owing up and what am I disowning?

And needless to say the same argument holds true for men as well but I believe women of today need to be more aware of what is happening within as much as they need to be aware of what is happening outside.  

What has been your experience?  I would be interested to know and be happy if you share.  :-)

Your Well-being Is Your Responsibility

Concern with well-being has been with man kind for as long as we remember. However, the definition of well-being and how we generate it and who is responsible, however, has changed over time.

There was a time when people left the responsibility of one’s well being to their clan, their community and believed that if all was well with the community or clan, their well-being was taken care of as also the reverse; i.e. if they had a sense of well-being with themselves, then the community as a collective also had a sense of well-being with itself. Often in such diffused state, individual’s sense of well being had to be sacrificed at the alter of the collective well being.

Then came a time when we were told that a sense of well being came with who you are in your roles that your establish with the world at large – be it in the family, at work, in the world and wherever else. If we maintained the balance in the relationship well, well-being would be guaranteed was the assurance. This created the misbalance that we did not know how to relate to ourselves and to others without the given roles and found a sense of identity only within the given roles. Any sense of well being that came outside the scope of roles were discarded and generated stress.

Today, I believe we are going through a phase in the world, where the basic message that is being passed on to us is that “Your well-being is your responsibility alone”. We are going through a phase when we are individuals first and collective later but unlike the clan or the role era, the collective tells us who we should be and how we should be without taking any responsibility for it.

We are told, nobody else can or will take responsibility of your well -being and hence the individual is to maintain and generate her or his sense of well-being irrespective of the context. So, for instance we keep getting message through ads of chocolate, cars or even bottled water, which generates instant sense of well being even when the situation surrounding the protagonist is potentially fearful, disconnected or stressful. We are also given lessons on positive thinking which would generate well-being but often times some of these messages do not take into account the contextual reality.

However, there is an associated message as well, which is while you are solely responsible for your well being, you must not disturb other people’s well being. This effectively means that not only you have to be continuously aware, competent and rational, you must also remain vigilant that you do not become a source of disturbance for others. On the surface of it, this sounds quite alright; if everyone took responsibility of their well-being, this world will be a happy and peaceful place. The problem occurs when remaining vigilant and aware at all points of time itself becomes difficult and when such things are simplified to such an extent that they become absolute, like a dogma.

Before I proceed any further, let me clarify that the kind of individuals and context that I am talking about here are largely urban, middle class, above school level and are mostly into employment or business or are professionals. I must also clarify that as a concept I am a great fan of positivity and positive thinking but I do take offence when they are passed on as an absolute reality without taking their context into account.

Let me state a couple of small stories.

Story number one in which a woman who is feeling quite direction less in her life. She is in her mid thirties, holds a responsible job and is intelligent, caring, perceptive and competent. The sense of confusion and directionlessness comes partly from her past history of stressful relationships and partly from her work context where she is new and is trying to find her feet. Despite her best efforts, she often finds herself on the verge of losing control over her emotions, falls sick quite often without any associated disease and ends up taking decisions that she regrets later on. In this situation, more often than not, she receives advice from her near and dear ones both at work as also from her personal context that she needs to sort herself out and only if she could do that, i.e. go to a therapist, practice yoga, take care of herself, has better routine, all such problems will be taken care of and things will come back to normal. This woman, despite doing all of the above, finds herself at the same crossroad and then starts doubting her sense of worth.

And what does the context do, while she stands on her head trying to “sort herself out?” Her mother who is critical, gets hyper critical about this woman’s problems out of her own anxiety, her boyfriend stays away from her because he was unable to handle her emotional upheavals, her work context demands the same amount of attention, care, concern and competence from her irrespective of her situation and they all pass on this message to her that “please stay away from us, take care of your situation and come back to us as a “functional” person as we are unable to take care of your dysfunctionality. We however, wish you well and are willing to bear the cost of your medical bills, will hire a counselor for your or even help you find a yoga teacher, offer you gymming facility, etc, etc. This in turn increases this woman’s low sense of self worth and pushes her to the brink further and further.

The context in this case, would hardly ever look at reducing some of the stress causing factors that may contribute to her lack of well being, e.g. her mother becoming less critical, her boyfriend’s hyper sensitivity to her emotional outbursts, her work context not demanding her to be always sensible, rational and fair, etc, etc.

Story number two is a multinational organisation where higher and higher responsibility, ownership and performance are demanded from the employees. The employees don’t mind, they see this as a rightful demand on the part of the organisation in return of the money, status, position, learning and value that are being provided to them by the organisation.

So far, so good- Right? Wrong. In a situation like this most of the time the employees would not know what to do with the stress and tension that they carry for a context that is ever changing, highly competitive and very demanding. One can of course argue that this is the way of the world and that people who come for this kind of work have made a choice. However my point here is not about the choice but whether just by making a choice, the responsibility of the generating well being becomes an individual responsibility or is it both? After all, if the context learns to take care of its inhabitants, the context generates its own well being as well. However, most of the time, organisations such as these would term such stresses as symptoms of lack of work life balance problem and would organize training programs to take care of such anomalies without making the slightest difference to the internal environment which is tipping off the balance continuously. Alternately the context usually not question the value frames from where such stressors are originating and whether they are an absolute must for the “development” and “progress” of the context.

Therefore it is not surprising that often who we are and who we should be are defined and dictated by the popular media and even when we hear a heart breaking story of a model taking her own life, it often comes in the garb of how her professional life created this stress and how does one stay away from the stress through individual effort while the context goes away scot free in the name of being a “high stress” industry.

The opposite is also true, i.e. there are individuals and groups who would never look at how they are contributing to the stress of the context and would demand that the context makes all the changes while they retain all their dysfunctional habits and patterns in relation to the context.

Till such time both the individuals and context look at each other as integral part of each other and that this relationship is not just contractual (work context), or societal (family, relationships), but are complimentary to each other and one will not survive without the other, but at the same time one can not subsume the other, this confusion and stress will continue to haunt us.

On a different take, why is a constant state of well being so important? What is wrong with unhappiness, struggle, sadness, confusion, anger, grief and lack of well being? Aren’t some of these great mobilisers for new path, new directions and new action choices? May be this calls for another post, later!

What do you think and feel about your well being?

Do we know who we are? Really?

"I seem to see my self from his eyes while i have always possessed the
intelligence and politics to know or perhaps i should say interpret
who i am as a woman. But this knowledge i cannot assimilate in me, the
experience is of being in ruin, ............ "

mail from a dear friend to me, in response to an anguished mail sent to her.

Says another vivacious, lively, intelligent, perceptive woman, to me, on her first meeting with me as a therapist:

" I am so sorry that I have cried.... I mean this is a first meeting with you and all that".

"Why the shame?" I ask her.

"shouldn't I be calm and composed and not really show my emotions at all? I mean isn't this what the world wants from me, from you, from all of us?" she responds, albeit a bit surprised that i am even asking her this question.

"well you are here to meet a therapist, and you are talking about your distress and while you share all that, you would feel emotional - most of all, this is not a social visit" I try to pose another exploration point.

She pauses for a while ... and then she talks about her aspiration of wanting to be someone who should take all the shit coming her way and not flinch, not react but remain calm.  and her "role model" is a person who actually looks down upon the whole world and their cousins, has cholesterol problem, not able to have a healthy conjugal life and so on.

when i point this out to her, she agrees quickly but is not really convinced about being who she is really.

As I look at two of these instances and many others including myself at times, I often wonder, do we really have an idea of who we really are?   Or has this "me" become an amalgamation of images and perceptions generated and received from people around us, images which have provided a temporary relief, images which have saved us from many embarrassing moments,  images which tell us who we "should" be and not who we "are"?

for many of us, the inner being is shrouded in shame for being too alive, too impulsive, too demanding, too verbose, too sensuous, too argumentative, too questioning, too much to take.

for some others, it may be that the inner being is held back lest others make fun of us, lest others take advantage of us, lest others desert us, lest others make us feel weak and so on and so forth?

so what is our stance of being who we are?  how do we experience ourselves internally?   What is our politics of who we are?

The world  of relationships is totally made of perception.  We never really see the other person as who he or she is, but what we perceive he or she is, through our unique and individual looking glass made up of our world view, our biases and our values.  In other words, it is humanly impossible to see the person as it is.  What we can gather are only the objective data about name, family name, degrees, work, education, etc but can never be objective about the person.  We look at the world through perception and it is always subjective.

So, in all these, how do we perceive us?  Do we look at ourselves through these looking glasses as well?  is there a difference between me perceiving myself and others perceiving me?  what happens when there is a difference?  Is there a struggle to say this is who I am?

When I look at myself, I see myself and I quote from a mail that I have written to a friend, below:


quote:
"like i was telling you the other day, i feel very masculine internally, so my first descriptors of myself always are that I am intelligent, tough, quick on my feet, analytical and highly action oriented.  the next level would be that i am sensuous (not the way a woman is described) i.e. my senses are strong, i hear keenly, i smell keenly, i see keenly and i am quite aware of touch of any kind.  i am also very intuitive and am aware of the bodily sensations that i experience.

all these are devoid of other people, i.e. I look at myself irrespective of how others see me as.

the trouble starts from now on - any other descriptors of me such as:

loving, gracious, accepting, rude, scary, generous, pretty, ugly, argumentative, petty, kind, irrational, intellectual, stubborn, giving, caring, loyal, sexy, unsexy (can't think of anything else at the moment that describes me) are all other people dependent.  If they see me like this then i am like this, otherwise, i don't see myself as scary, petty, rude, etc, etc."

unquote.


I wonder what is it for others?  do we even ask these questions or do we tell ourselves, oh well, I have no problem in declaring to the world who I am and if they can't take it, it is their problem?  Really?

or do we tell ourselves, actually I don't even want to know who I am as it is too much of a bother, or it is of no use.  Too much of intellectualisation.  Really?

I don't believe people actually like to imprison themselves in either of these two extremes, most of us perhaps live in the in between world.  what about you?

irrational rationality

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine, who is a young talented poet, actor and a writer.  We were talking about a post on FB  and I asked for her views.  Her response was that she felt strongly but she wanted to think before she wrote.  I asked her to write about her feelings and not her thoughts and she said she would try, but never did write.  Another friend of mine, in her early 30s talked to me about how often she struggles with knowing what her feelings are, i.e. is she feeling angry or is she feeling sad and how important is it for her to "know" her feelings before she  responds.

These discussions provoked me to write this post about how I come across people, both men and women, who are very cautious about coming across to others as sentimental or mushy.  It is as though, expressions of passion, of anger, of love, of irritation, of reactivity, of loss, of joy, of desire, of longing, of disgust, of lust, etc, must always be moderated, thought through, considered, and then expressed cautiously like squeezed out portions of toothpaste from a tube!

What is interesting about this game is that it is never ending, the more you play, the more lost you are, because feelings don't come with meanings, they gush out without any barrier, flood your inner world.  Feelings make you feel alive, make you feel at one with yourself, they are the key to your inner world.  It is the world of feelings that also holds the key to our creativity, our passion, our zest for life and our will to live.  The more we try to understand our feelings before we act, the more are we operating from our need to control our world of future action and positioning ourselves firmly only in the world of consequences,   In the world of consequence, there is no present, only past and future and both are beyond our control.   The present is the only reality we live in and that can be experienced through our feelings.

Hence I wonder why do we keep playing a losing game with ourselves?

of women and for women

so the women's bill got passed in rajya sabha. feels good and i am quite impressed with sonia gandhi. the way she has been handling power is quite unprecedented certainly in that family but also among other politicos in india.

read one of the comments about the above by geetanjali kirloskar and she says she believes men and women are equal. i wonder when people make these statements, what are they really saying? from which point of view and what do they really mean? what does equality mean?

i just don't get it.

communalism revisited

Like thousands of Indians, i too have been witnessing and anguishing on the Mumbai carnage and the outrage and outpourings that is flowing non stop.

much as i like to think of myself as a open minded, liberal, rational human being, to whom, communalism is associated only with the likes of fundamentalists of all kinds, the inner voice told some other tale.

This came up during a discussion with a dear friend who confronted me with the issue that one can not be anchored on one's own heritage and convictions unless one explores, understands and accepts both the primal and the socialised parts of the heritage, in its particularised context.

This pushed me to look at the number of communities that i emotionally connect to; and i came up with the following in order of psychological priority:

1. Bengali

2. Hindu

3. woman

4. middle class

and this list can go on and on. however, it is during the process of this discussion that i was rediscovering the communalism that i harbour inside.

Being a Bengali is a strongest identity for me - my connect with the culture, the language, literature, the ethos, food, etc, etc. But this is not all, for me, what comes along with these are the inherent biases and stereotyping of the regional identities. e.g. rural Biharis, UPites and Rajasthan are believers in "might is right", violent and irrational, Sikhs from Pujab are brave, straight, trustworthy and honourable, non-sikh punjabis are show-offs, braggarts, fun loving; people from parts of Rajasthan and from Gujrat are money oriented and are not intellectually oriented, people from down south are more religious, soft, less violent, measured and prudent, etc, etc. Similar stereotypes about Bengalis are intellectual or pseudo ones, artistic, lazy, rubble rousers, cowardly, physically weak, rebels without a cause, etc, etc.

The second one is about being a Hindu - here i am more pan-Indian than a Bengali. there is a sense of pride held with a distinctiveness. However, i have noticed that i withhold myself from talking about my spirituality or religiosity with urban Indians even if they are Hindus. Is there a shame? I don't know - probably yes.

Secondly, do i trust non-Hindus generally? a straight and simple answer is - No. Interesting, considering that I married a non-Hindu. what breeds this mistrust is a deep sense of "us" and "them" which resides in the deepers recesses of the psyche.

However, there are distinctions here; the non Hindu friends from the same social class are held with this delusion that somehow they are outside the untrustworthy circle and then there are very little difference between "us" and "them". However,the paranoia raises its huge head at the moment of encounter with non-hindus of lower socio economic strate.

the rational mind of course desperately wants to believe that these are not true and that there are other view points through one can look at the "other" differently and with "equality"; but the emotional part of me (specially in times of stress), summarily dismisses it.

the third one is about being a woman - this is trans-national and is held with ambivalence. If i were to look at the negative communal parts of my psyche vis-a-vis this part, then the part that exists here is more subtle and hence more dangerous. one part is holding men as "guilty" unless proved "innocent" - this at the unconscious level is extended to all men, at the conscious level, extended to men who are overtly "manly", "macho", "chauvinist", "loud", etc, etc.

the more shameful part as I hold it, is the way this part looks at women - part of it holds women as generally "weak", "victims", "stupid", "inefficient", "attention seeking", "dependent", "scheming", "shallow", etc, etc, unless of course they prove themselves. the other part looks at women as "powerful", "nurturing","critical", etc, etc. Do I see other positive qualities in women as well? yes, i do, otherwise, i would not have survived, but i see them in very few women and i carry a shame around it. I know rationally that what i see in these few women, exist in other women as well either as a potential or as explicit, but my primitive emotional response is the first kind.

the fourth one is about being middle class - this too is held with ambivalence - but the important thing to note here is that neither the upper class nor the lower class are trusted or welcomed into our midst. this most times is irrespective of the religious identity of the other (remember in childhood, there was strong indoctrination about mixing with the "chhoto lok" or "lower class" or not being too close the "rich" or the "baro lok".

what i guess i am trying to work out here is that there are many many communal fencing that i have and it is not confined only to being a Hindu or a Muslim, and what i am hoping to do for myself is that unless i articulate and acknowledge them without guilt or shame, i don't have any space to take the next step that can lead me/us to building a proud and aware community/India and ultimately a world citizen.