I have
finally decided to listen to the tiny handful of women who really care about
me, and live the rest of my life by the axiom ‘If you stop bothering about
girls/women, they stop bothering you’!
So from now
on, this blog will be written strictly from the pov of a male chauvinist (if
you are one of those who want to append the suffix –‘pig’ to that, you are welcome. I won’t miss you): a male
chauvinist who cares only about the women who care about him. The rest can go
and read Fifty Shades of Grey.
I am now
satisfied that I have wasted too much of my time and attention on females who
never intended to be either grateful or loving, or keep in touch, or give back
in any way (that means everything from bringing little gifts when they visit to
writing about me to waiting for me at stations or visiting me in hospitals) –
either because, being female, they were incapable of such things, or simply
because they disliked me from the start, and were simply buttering me up to use
me for all I was worth (even in the pettiest of terms, such as getting counsel
and ‘notes’ for free). It’s been more than thirty years, and more than 2000
females (my ex-students range from 16 to 50 years of age), and I am sure that
it’s time to draw some final conclusions.
There will
still be some girls/women who would continue to keep in touch, and they are the
only ones I need to care about. The rest
should remember that I am not interested even in seeing them or hearing from
them unless they are paying me by the hour, my
rates.
I feel
strangely relieved after having typed out the above paragraphs. It’s as if the
albatross has finally dropped from my neck. But woe betide the next parent who
comes to gush about how much his/her daughter ‘loves’ my classes…let them be
just good pupils by my lights, pay their fees on time and forget me as soon as
they leave; I shall be glad, and well rid.
I shall
still, of course, feel the deepest sympathy for women who suffer seriously from
all kinds of social evils, have profound respect for all women who refuse to be
merely wives, mothers, dressed up dolls, gossips and shoppers and rabid feminists (does that leave out a lot of women?), and have all the
time in the world for the few among them who feel both interest and respect for
who I am and what I do. I am sure that if some such comment on my posts
hereafter, they will neither whine, nor rationalize all their faults and
shortcomings, nor call me names for being what I am – a human being, only
incidentally male, looking all his life for people of both sexes whom he can be
glad to call his friends.
And I shall
continue to laugh publicly about girls getting angry when I tell them I no
longer think of them as anything but monthly envelopes and/or irritants; when
countless ‘didi-s’, some 25 years older and some only three, have taught me
what a fool I have always been to imagine otherwise!
The likes
of Lavona, Shilpi and
Pupu…I hope you have figured that nothing I have said in this post applies to
any of you (as yet!), so carry on as before. But I hope reading this post gives
you a better understanding of what a rare sort you are, and how grateful I am
to Providence that your sort still exists; women with brains and consciences
and some idea of what civilization means.
And, in
case some of you are wondering, no, this is not
a sudden outburst in reaction to some recent provocation. I have been recalling
my experiences with a very large number of individual ex-students (and
parents), and meaning to write this post for a long time. Now we all know
exactly where we stand, and can interact more sensibly hereafter if at all.
There is a very large number of females whom I should never have missed,
beginning with the ex-girlfriend who turned fifty yesterday.
P.S., July 07: ... and meanwhile, I have discovered this absolutely delightful blog. Also, you might be interested in looking up some of the things you find if you search via google with the keywords 'woman against feminism'. Try this blog, for instance.
P.S., July 07: ... and meanwhile, I have discovered this absolutely delightful blog. Also, you might be interested in looking up some of the things you find if you search via google with the keywords 'woman against feminism'. Try this blog, for instance.
59 comments:
Sir,
I completely adore this post. And, this coming in after the last one assures me that I have never read you wrong.
Eliot, who hated Jews, said, 'Women come and go/Talking of Michael Angelo.' There is nothing wrong in being proud of being a Bengali and not care anything about females who are symbols of an over-fed tripe.
In fact, I took this position long back in college. Women I love and respect are exceptions. For the rest, I'll show them my Bible-Manu Smriti. Petty opportunism using their sex is what they are trained for. Their parents tell them that 'go out and get the guys'. They themselves do precious little to turn the table and think for themselves. Prejudices, biases and opportunist guile of the highest order are excused because their sex is 'fair'. To hell with them.
I still maintain respect for a few and willing to extend my list with the confidence that it will never be more than ten-women long!
With warm regards,
Arani
Thanks for commenting so promptly, Arani. You have got me exactly right. Both you and I have found girls/women in our lives whom we can admire, adore, respect and love, so we should be thankful, and of course that's proof enough that there is nothing fundamentally 'wrong' with us (as you know, my wife and daughter will vouch for that!). My grouch is that a) so many girls/women pretend, for a while, an affection/respect that they have never felt, and then turn about completely and either vanish from my life or go about bad-mouthing me, and b) that these days every woman, regardless of her intrinsic worth as a human being, thinks she has a 'right' to my respect and attention. Things didn't use to be so bad: as you are aware, there have been lots of thinking women who have candidly admitted that there is much that is bad and even disgusting with women, just as it is with men, so it is both ridiculous and wrong to create a standardized stereotypical woman and then claim that all women are worth the same attention/respect/affection from men. Finally, my personal experience with the female of the species has been BAD with rare exceptions, and still for years and years I kept my mind and heart open, and all I am saying in this post is that it's time to say goodbye to all that. From now on, where I am concerned, every woman is guilty of what I accuse women of, unless proven otherwise...now that I have made up my mind that I don't want more women in my life, it's remarkable how easy it is to say these things. Women, most women, have always taken advantage of the fact that decent men can't shrug them off, no matter how much they bluster!
I have been quietly and not so quietly admiring the title of this post and the contents. I was puzzled even three years ago when it seemed and sounded that there were females out there who even imagined you were a male chauvinist. I couldn't see where or how they got that idea from. I remember an essay you sent me very many years ago - a critique on Mill, which you wrote in the mid 90s, and I remember thinking while reading it that you were much too kind about women. I read it more than once back then, and it's only last year that I very slowly realized that what you wrote there cannot please women/girls who imagine or make the mistake that they deserve your respect or attention simply because they are females and what you say and write would most likely make more than most males run for cover or miss your point because they are too scared of calling a spade and spade. I never realized till last year that you're not very politically correct...very slow of me this bit.
You've written and lots of times the sort of women you admire and respect, and if people read your Abigail Adams post and the one on Firebird, on Rani Rashmoni, and the one on Chen Shu-chu - then the females too would know, and never whine again. I don't quite know why women and girls imagine that they deserve respect and attention, and for being what exactly. And if they'd read this one carefully and the "admiring girl" one (which frankly makes me puke even more then it did back then) - then they'd know how to deal with you and not try to butter you up. Of course I don't know for sure....I remember you wrote the short post on Virginia Woolf and some empty-headed females seemed to have a problem with that, and when you weren't even talking about feminism or about women's rights.
Females in general have a problem with facing their own thoughts and feelings (or probably really have no meaningful thoughts and very confused feelings), and are terrified or sick of the horrible hollowness or emptiness or the shallowness or the petty spitefulness that they may have to face if they look inside themselves. The double standards that they play with hardly bothers them unless are forced to. Half of the times I've seen they don't even know what they want or how they honestly feel about anything or anybody - leave alone actually think about things and people carefully. How will they act like decent human beings? And almost every female imagines somehow that they can have their cake and eat it too, and see nothing wrong with it and they run around the much too decent man until he says 'enough'. At that point of course all hell breaks loose because the man now becomes very bad or else the female thinks sorrowfully or suddenly why the decent and kind man is being hurtful. I'm not saying all of this from a detached viewpoint at all actually even if I've used "females" and a distant "they". If I've managed to learn and keep learning some hard and unavoidable lessons in my own life and understood at least which rules never to break and what is important and what can be cast aside, you know exactly whom I have to thank.
All I can say is that if you are a male chauvinist for saying or writing anything you do, I couldn't care less. You can be a chauvinist or a whoever. I've known you now for a little over 26 years and this has been the best bit of my life..., and if any female who doesn't like you or has issues with this post wants to send anonymous comments, she can write to me instead of writing harebrained comments while hiding behind pseudonyms. I'll be more than glad to give her a piece of my mind. My email id is shil.sarkar@gmail.com
All this reminds me that I haven't yet written my formal second post on the females. I do apologise but it's the most difficult assignment I've ever taken up...
Dear Sir,
No sensible, thoughtful and observant person, male or female, can disagree with you, particularly when you have put your point so plainly and clearly. All that you want to say is beautifully summated in your sixth paragraph. You have told time and again the kind of women you admire and the minimum qualities that you expect from women who wish to interact with you and have your time. You always welcome very warmly those who meet your standards and give back much, much more than you get from them.
I am very happy that you have finally decided not to spare a thought for all the ungrateful girls and women who have caused you a lot of pain. I know it is not as easy as people think. I know that it really hurts you when you see people for whom you have done so much ignore you, forget you or worse speak ill of you soon after the immediate ‘use’ is over. And speaking about all those who try to preach to you that it is wrong to expect anything in return for the goodness one does, they are only insensitive hypocrites who have never understood you. You should not pay them any attention either. They are not worth it.
Although I regret and am ashamed of what I was even five years ago, I thank my lucky stars to have come under your tutelage which has had a major impact on whatever kind of person I am now. Thank you for everything you have done and given us, Sir.
From the time I have read your views on women in general, I have become more observant. The harder I look, the better I understand what you mean. One sees so few women who are not obsessed with their looks, their shopping and their kids’ marks and also who speak decently and kindly even when they know they won’t gain materially from the conversation. I have encountered very few girls who are going to be any different ten or fifteen years from now. As you say, the worst part is their unwavering belief in their ‘sagacity’. They absolutely refuse to see the light and want to be respected just because they are women.
As you had written elsewhere, people down the ages have been saying similar things about women. One can understand from the short stories ‘In the pride of his youth’ and ‘Wressly of the foreign office’ in the book ‘Plain tales from the hills’ by Rudyard Kipling how cruel, unkind, pretentious, insensitive and hollow girls and women in general have been.
I pray that you suffer much less in the hands of the ingrates now.
Warm regards
Rashmi Datta
Sir,
I think it is a lot about caring in the right way. Look Back in Anger--the play--suggested that nobody cares, anymore.Rashmi makes a lot of sense when she speaks of their 'unwavering belief in their own sagacity.' They are all out to extract, quite literally, their 'pound of flesh.' In fact, a careful reading of 'The Merchant of Venice' will tell us how Portia too extracts her pound of flesh. She speaks in prose, is astutely materialistic and her pragmatism is that of a woman who uses Christian ethics to abandon feudal concoctions and enter the world of capitalist exchange. She is the Indra Nooyi who tells the mad Shylockn that he ought to leave his 'irrational' angst and show mercy (read pragmatism).In return, not will his dues be returned but usury will gain Christian sanction. She also extracts her 'fee'--the symbol of exchange economy where there is no loyalty, no 'ring' of love. As the play ends we enter a 'new world' where the woman replaces the men and where the selves are split between commerce and love. This is the split that made women so undeserving and so undesirable.
Women I admire--the likes of
Radharani Deb, Swarnakumari Debi, Matangini Hazra, Leela Mazumder--lived their lives up to certain ideals.
Today, the only women we can remember are Vidya Balan and Kalpana Chawla. And of course, there is another breed--the ones who go to JNU and Columbia, who dope by the day, read Kundera and geopolitics by the night, shop at FabIndia, sleep with irreverent dopeys stuck between Beatles,Woodstock and Lorca, and then quietly 'settle' down in green pastures. I hate this kind like I hate the breed who write their recommendations. They inevitably talk about marginalized cultral practices like the 'jatra' and the even more marginalized positions of the actresses. I am bored. Terribly bored. And, the next Bond film is in distant November.
With warm regards,
Arani
Respected Sir,
Warm regards. In a departure from my usual way of writing comments on your blog-roll posts, this time I wish to direct my words towards the target audience, so that there might not be any element of ambiguity present while interpreting the underlying meaning of this post, marked by a pain and concern of the deepest sort, but ultimately deciding on a future course of action after a whole lot of introspection and reflection.
Women cannot have their cake and eat it too. The author wishes to point out a very important fact here in his post- most females, barring the exceptions, resort to use of their feminine charms and native resourcefulness, to beguile docile and willing males into following their wishes. I quote from Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” here- “Guile is the only weapon of the weak against the strong”. If women do not wish to validate their deepest fears- of being found out to be weak fundamentally, then they will have to change the way they think, act and feel. A radical paradigm shift is required- whence women challenge men on their own terms, bring about an element of sincerity in thought, speech and actions, and finally project themselves as self-empowered species. The author here has mentioned very basic human virtues, the absence of which in females he rues. The act of reciprocating love with love, of being grateful, of sincerely caring for someone without ulterior motives, of being sincere, open-hearted and frank- these are human qualities, without traces of any male or female affinity. Simply put, these are not male prerogatives- these are qualities all humanity treasures, seeks and wishes to cultivate.
Free will can only be provided to all when an element of responsibility and accountability for one’s actions are present. I quote from Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s search for Meaning” here- “I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.” Freedom, anyone? The freedom to shop-till-you-drop, to shirk most responsibilities, to be insensitive, to cultivate attitudes that proclaim loudly I-don’t-give-a-damn-for-you-I-will-always-find-another-sheep, these are not empowering acts of freedom- on the contrary, these are acts that alienate males even more, and increase the chasm of the so-called gender gap. The author has sought to portray these facts in a very clear, incisive and plain manner. One has to read many other posts of his to understand the fact- the author has always provided respect, admiration where it has been due- and even in this post of his, he does not, for even once, stoop to gross generalization. He has talked about inculcating basic human virtues, a sense of conscience among many others- a fact which he has observed in more males than the females he has had come in contact with. Every line of his post speaks of the long and protracted mental battle he has fought, between his wish to treat all humans alike and the necessity to applaud virtue where discovered, and the urgency to withhold praise without proper grounds. Can he be truly called an MCP, as he labels himself? I think not.
Sir, I thank you once again for writing such a post that is essential reading for our ages, men and women alike. Thank you once again.
With best wishes,
Debarshi.
Thanks, Debarshi. One woman who is not too fond of her own kind (the only sort of woman I like) has just said to me, 'Don't you get it: most women care only about their likes and dislikes, their needs and conveniences, their feelings, and don't give a damn about yours! Keep that in mind and you'll rarely go wrong in dealing with them'. And over the last twenty odd years, women (especially in well off, so-called educated families) have been brought up to be selfish, rude, petty opportunists always looking for the main chance, too. It makes for a deadly cocktail. We men not only have to gang up against the type, but be on guard, and avoid having any truck with them as far as possible. That's a lesson the sooner learnt the better. It all comes from the realization that there is very little that is truly interesting about women, and far too much that is simply bad, at least once they are past the first flush of youth! The great Greek philosophers knew that more than 2000 years ago; pity I did not learn soon enough. But I can assure you this much - I learn my lessons well.
Sir,
My father-in-law, a retired high school teacher in Kerala, had to visit a dentist while on a visit to our home here in Bangalore. The dentist, a retired army captain, upon hearing that my father-in-law was a teacher, refused to accept any consultation fees. Daddy told her "But I'm not a teacher anymore; I have been retired for nearly 2 decades now! Please accept your fees". To which she replied "Sir, once a teacher, always a teacher. Irrespective of who you taught and what subject or for what duration or how long ago, you shaped lives. And that is all that matters."
I second that dentist's thought. I've personally never had the chance to be your student; my brother was, many of my friends from secondary school were. I think I've only seen you in person twice (once at a quiz competition and the other time soon after my icse results at your home, when I had tagged along with a friend who used to be your student). However, I've never thought of you as anything other than "Sir". And indeed, not just you, but any teacher in Carmel or Xaviers from those years of our (sibling and mine) school lives, would always be a "Miss" or a "Sir" to me.
Respect for elders and especially teachers, nuns, monks, doctors -- I believe that should come from within oneself, and woe to those who don't or can't give respect where it is due! Our mom used to tell us that we should never hurt a teacher, no matter what; she would say it's just not done. It's a pity what these girls/ladies have done, considering that most of them would become/must be mothers who are supposed to inculcate good values in their offspring. Atleast for the sake of the next generation, I hope they come around to their senses...
Regards,
Sumitha
Many thanks for writing, Sumitha, and let me first say I understand and respect your values perfectly, but then let me add that I have never believed that anybody deserves either respect or attention merely because s/he is older than you, or even a sometime-teacher (too many people have used that tradition to shameful advantage in this country). Consideration and politeness, yes, respect and affection, no: they have to be earned and not demanded. But what I tried to say in this post was somewhat different: I wish so many hundreds of females hadn't tried to fake respect and affection for me for so long. Much better for me to have known that I never meant anything to them except the supplier of some 'notes' to get through some piffling exams. which were briefly 'very important' in their lives. And also that so many females did not try for so long to use their animal 'charms' to get me to work for them for free, and then vanish completely out of my life once the job was done. Would have been much, much better if they had worked on a strictly commercial basis, so that both parties knew what they could expect, and what was expected of them. I don't think that most readers can begin to understand how a man feels when he allows himself to be fooled and used like that again and again, scores of times, for half his lifetime. What I said in this post was that I have finally decided that no female is going to use me ever again.
Funnily, within just two days I have had three communications from some apparently mortified females begging to be 'forgiven' and 'given another chance'. You can well figure out how I responded to them. I am merely putting my new resolution to practice, and enjoying it hugely - no greater pleasure than to be able to tell worthless people just where they get off!
Dear Sir,
The post reminded me of a quote by Jodi Picoult saying - "Let me tell you this:if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them."
With regards,
Sayantika
So far as being 'disappointed' is concerned, this post was not about people in general but females in particular. And the quote is only partly right: a lot of loners are that way because they genuinely enjoy solitude. Given enough money - which means I wouldn't need to socialize unless I absolutely wanted to - I'd prefer solitude most of the time, as I daresay everybody who has a lot of interesting things to do by himself would.
Dear Sir,
I would admit that I was disappointed to read the first line but soon, I realised that you have nothing against women of substance, and not show. And more and more women belong to the latter category. A few days ago, I read about this ad where to promote interest in science among girls 'images of pink lipstick, blusher and perfectly manicured nails are interspersed with those of beakers, test tubes (foaming with pastel-coloured liquid), and fuchsia and white molecular structures.' http://theceweb.thehindu.co.in/news/article596125.ece
Despite the protests, doesn't that speak volumes about girls that they have to be inspired by such shallow images?
One of my classmates who used to go to your classes and seemingly had lots of respect for you had contacted me after a long time. I eagerly gave her the link to your blog, which she told she would do 'later' and I doubt whether she even bothered to check it. I completely understand why you are so disgusted with this breed of women.
Thanks and with regards,
Sayantika
Dear Suvro Sir,
You are absolutely right. None of us, who hasn't done what you have done, gone through what you have gone through, can 'begin' to understand your grief. Whenever I have spoken to you, I have seen in you a certain kind of affection, which I cannot explain, and which I haven't seen in my parents even. You are ever approachable, always warm and I have always gone away with a strange glow in my heart, a feeling of being loved, after conversing with you. I can talk to you about hundreds of topics ranging from books and movies and ideas to personal problems; and I see every time how you painstakingly clear all misconceptions, explain with scores of examples on the way, as one would explain a child, your voice hoarse from the day's exertion...and all this not for anything material in return! And I know that I am in no way getting any special treatment: you are probably doing this with scores, perhaps even hundreds of people day in and day out! I wonder how ungrateful, how animal like a person must be to extract favours from you for petty, trifling reasons. Those who come away from you without that glow in the heart, without that feeling of being loved are not human; thats all I can say. Let me not mince words and say that one does not 'need' to be a male to be able to see that. Human virtues should be visible for all who wish to see, male and female alike. Knowing how much you respect women who can think (a rare ability in itself, especially nowadays), as is evident both from your posts and your conversations (in the form of comments) with females, I would laugh it off if someone as much as even remotely suggests that you are an MC, and would get really angry if someone even dares to suggest the ‘P’. Our country has seen both the kinds – from Gargi Vacaknavi, the ancient Vedic philosopher to those we see around nowadays…the former benign and wise, the latter selfish, crude, shallow and even cruel, and certainly far numerous.
A lesson which is slowly dawning on me, both from your experiences and mine, is to let only a tiny fraction of people one comes across, to ever matter in life: the rest of them can live in their make-believe heaven for all I care!
This tribe has only given you pain and hurt, the intensity of which only you and God can properly assess…I feel relieved that you have finally decided to not let them matter anymore. I pray to God for your health, strength and happiness.
Sayan
Of all the comments that have come in so far, Sayantika, yours hit closest to the bone, for obvious reasons: that is precisely the kind of female I have lamented about and now decided to cut out of my life forever once they stop paying me my fees; enough is enough. And the girls currently under my tutelage should know why they get the very very gender-biased tongue lashings whenever they try to tell me how much they 'love and respect and admire' me. Girls should stop using words they neither understand nor mean - that will be the first step to any reform for the better hereafter. And I do not mean only when they are dealing with a teacher!
And that ties in neatly with what you have said, Sayan. God knows I have tried as hard with the girls as with the boys to give them that 'inner glow' you have so lovingly talked about, and it is a statistical fact that I have failed far, far oftener with girls than with boys, until now I openly say it is the boys who will have good memories and keep getting back: simply because lasting gratitude, affection, respect, admiration for someone (outside the immediate family, at least) are almost exclusively male traits. If I expect them from females and work hard to 'deserve' them, I am every sort of a fool.
Dear Sir,
You are the first person I have yet come across to proclaim himself publicly as an MCP! Having known you and heard you speak on the two-faced behaviour you have observed among a large number of women you have taught, I find this strangely hilarious. No one who has had even the slightest experience of interacting with women in general can in their right minds find this post offensive, because a whole lot of women really are surprisingly self-absorbed and couldn't care less about the next person regardless of whether that person happens to be someone who had helped her out several times or been her friend for long or had been a mere acquaintance who had acted out of kindness. A lot of people have it that women, especially young women are highly conscious of and insecure about what other people think about them. I find the reality quite the opposite - most of them are perfectly satisfied about themselves and are too busy being the centre of their own little worlds to care about what people think! If they did, they would at least try acting concerned about things beyond their own noses.
During my first days in college, I used to be taken by surprise with how fast and how easily and nonchalantly the men would offer to help people out without making a huge fuss about it. Honestly, having studied in all girls' schools for 14 years, I hadn't the least idea that relative strangers could actually try to help you out in trouble without your having 'asked' first. The idea of 'friendship' had been all about, till school, what Higgins had called "commercial principles" to Eliza's "I won't care for anybody that doesn't care for me." Truly,Sir, Pygmalion proved quite educative about what a lot of women seem to want from the world.
And thank you for the mention; it means a lot to me! And I mean to continue being this way.
Best Wishes,
Urna
Hahaha, Urna - the MC is self-declared, the '-P' the reader's option!
Now that you, a girl, has brought it up, yes, I have no hesitation in mentioning the fact that the whole problem arises from girls being both very insecure and very self-centred (and that 'self' focused far more intensely on the body and its adornments) with few exceptions. How much of it is due to nature and how much to nurture I shall leave it to the pundits to debate, though I incline to the former view, since most of my friends both male and female who live in more 'advanced' countries aver that women there are not too different. Yes, though it is politically very incorrect to say so, it is very easy to see the difference between the two sexes in a thousand little things: girls are far more excited about celebrating their birthdays than boys are (since a birthday allows one to indulge in unalloyed self-centredness and preening), and girls are far less likely to offer someone else (male or female) their seat on the bus or train than boys are, as both my wife and daughter have often remarked. Also, girls are far more accomplished at faking feelings than boys from a very early age. Finally, girls hate their own kind far more intensely - in our family we laughingly agree that a female-dominated world will self-destruct almost as soon as it is created, so good luck to the feminists! As surveys have repeatedly shown, working women overwhelmingly prefer male bosses, and in my classes most girls, when asked, candidly admit that daddy is far better to live with than mummy is. To all these things the most handy response of the 'women are better' kind is to maintain a loud silence, and pretend they haven't heard. So eventually men like me (and women like you!) will have to make up their own minds... the one saving grace is that virtually no really accomplished woman, whether it be the Mme Curie type or the Indira Gandhi type or the J.K. Rowling type, has ever felt the need for feminism; they have just been themselves lifelong. That's how I am trying to bring up my own daughter.
I can't help adding a bit.
I've got no doubts whatsoever that a great majority of females are obsessed about their bodies and adornments (it remains limited to this in terms of focusing on the self and that I'm 99.9% sure that this is something innate), and this is what they use to use even the good and decent man while faking respect or affection or trust - and this is what has got my goat or made me grumpy or vent and sometimes not silently...
And as for adornments - I know at least about the annual 19 billion dollar cosmetics industry which I rant about, and I don't think men and boys are using that stuff to paint their faces or look young. I know of self-proclaimed feminist graduate students living on student stipends who spend an easy-peasy $60 on make-up (I don't care whether that's once every two months or five) because they then turn around to critique the cosmetic industry in their own classes calling it an instance of androcentric values. I verbally throttled the said feminist ex-acquaintance for spouting this a few months ago (she said that I threatened her - I swear I didn't threaten to physically throttle her) but I really will write on this and more on my blogpost. This post of yours especially has given me a hard shove to go and write that one even though I'm too late. I'll just write it instead of making any more announcements...
Thank you for putting up those two bloglinks. I was relieved that there are people out there who are balanced and sane (and humorous too - especially for the first one), and see through the smut, and write unabashedly and logically on the same. Even I apologise too much for saying that women should behave like human beings and for poking at the mindless feminist rhetoric.
I'm glad you put this post up and yes, thank you for putting my name there (even though it makes me uncomfortable...). If anything I've started looking at myself even more carefully thinking of what there is that's genuinely good about me as a human being...
I'm very sorry about the very many missing words and strange errors and the grammatical errors I made in my previous comment. I hammered it and forgot to revise it in my hurry to send it.
And I'll wish A Very Happy Birthday to your Blog. As usual I've sung the birthday song for it. May you write for much more time yet...!
Dear Sir,
I have been reading and re reading this post. The only conclusion that I can draw finally is that women, in general, will remain petty opportunistic and insensitive to all the good that has been showered on them. I have been musing on this very subject for a long time. I have tried not to draw my conclusions based on what or how one single woman has done or reacted; I have, for quite some time, tried to understand and analyze the women I have been closely associated with. Next week I will turn 25, so I think it’s time to draw some defining conclusions which, I think, will help me decide on my priorities in life.
One observation that cannot go unnoticed is the fact that girls are too self-centered and are concerned only about achieving their immediate interests without being grateful to those (men and women alike) who help them achieve it. Petty interests like higher marks, earlier promotions, handsome groom with a fat pay cheque seem to be their ‘top’ and only priorities in life. Human qualities like gratitude, sympathy and care are too idealistic and too demanding to practice and follow.
One girl, in her late twenties, was whining about how shameless the boys are, who do not offer their bus seats to her. Another girl remarked bitterly that all boys are dogs, the reason: Once the girl falls in the trap (yes, and that was how she defines love!) boys do not pay the same attention and time they used to devote in the initial stages of flirting. Another one complained that all boys are polygamous in nature, hence not trustworthy! One girl, on entering college, felt that it was the duty of the senior ‘dadas’ (and not ‘didis’) to help her in all possible ways, since she was away from home. And then I have known a certain set of girls who perceive the whole world of males as incarnations of devil; their fathers, brothers and husbands being the only exceptions!
I will just elucidate my workplace scenario: a power plant site in a remote village. This example, I feel, will show how badly things are out of shape. I do not understand why girls get the posting and department of their choice (posting in a metro and in a department that is the least taxing both physically and mentally) while boys will sweat around in the sweltering heat for half the year. At the end of the year, during performance assessment, it is precisely this set of girls who cry foul over the promotion system and blame patriarchy, male chauvinism for their inability to scale the higher echelons of the company. What should the company do? Reward those who have never stayed an hour extra at workplace in the name of insecurity (though the site is well-guarded by CISF).
Can the average girl just open up her senses to appreciate how much help the boys have extended and how has she reciprocated the same?
With regards,
Abhishek Das
Shilpi and Abhishek:
Thanks for writing in. Yes, I know all about that kind of currently very-much-in-vogue reverse discrimination at the workplace. The females are managing more and more to get the best of both worlds, at home and outside. They are equal and weak (and therefore deserving of special protection and facilities) according to their convenience. What this pathetic and despicable tribe does not realize, however, is how fast they are turning basically decent males into haters and enemies, rapidly adding to the number of those who were always violent bigots. As I have said more than once before, I increasingly fear a terrible backlash worldwide, when exasperated and infuriated males by the million will force a turning of the tables viciously again, justifying every kind of atrocity by the primeval principle of might is right. And we know perfectly well that all firebrand feminists are going to run for cover as soon as they see the hordes out on the roads with their whips and guns. They spew every kind of filth and take every kind of advantage only because they are inwardly quite assured that most males are still far too nice and tolerant... how much longer?
I shall, by my utmost effort, work to hold my ungrammatical English in check. ;)
Now, my policy as an agitator against feminism, is to not talk about women in any way at all -- good, bad or indifferent. Or at least, not very much.
Women are just one part of the picture, you know. Or perhaps I should say, part of the landscape, like fence posts. And there is not much point in getting fussed about fence posts now, is there?
So, this manner of speech makes me very much like a slippery wall which they cannot grab hold of or climb. How frustrating it must be for them, to meet somebody who separates the personal from the political as much as I do! :(
Dear Sir,
In my University, I work as a teaching assistant in the Fall and Winter sememsters. When the semesters end and after the final assignments have been submitted, many female students from the class walk up to me and thank me for all my help throughput the semester. Some of them who can't make it in the last class write emails expressing their gratitude (in all fairness, male students do all of these things as well). I find this gesture to be extremely heart-warming and gratifying, so much so that it makes all the tedious grading and invigilating worthwhile. In contrast, back home in India, my mother who has been a lecturer both in high school and college for more than thirty years now often laments that teaching female students is largely a thankless job, and one should not do expect anything more out of it than the salary at the end of the month. There have been countless incidents where she went out of her way to help female students (such as solving several problems for engineering entrance tests, or answering questions out of the syllabus, or staying back long after the usual school hours to teach in more details, and so on), only to be promptly forgotten by those students once they were out of the institution. After all these years of teaching, she regrets that she has done far too much for far too many ungrateful female students. So, is it a cultural or geographical thing? I mean, I know that not all females in North America are angels, far from it, but is it fair to say that women in some countries are better than their Indian counterparts? And have all this ungratefulness and uncouthness and viciousness been ushured in- if I may dare say so- by the newfound sense of freedom and progress (feminists are welcome to label me as an MCP at this point)?
Thanks,
Joydeep
'Fidelbogen', thanks for commenting, but why should you be chary about using your real name? And would you care to tell us how you go about 'agitating' against feminism without 'talking about women in any way at all'? There could be something to learn here.
Joydeep, my heartfelt sympathies to your mother as a fellow sufferer. See, no bias against women here! Napoleon was categorical in laying down the law that women deserve no further education than what they need to be good housewives. What we have got instead is millions like Caliban (Shakespeare, The Tempest), the half-human monster who candidly told Prospero that the latter taught him how to speak, and he uses that priceless gift mostly to abuse his benefactor. So teachers especially should guard against feeling about female students as anything other than a source of livelihood: all the caring should be reserved for the boys. And a teacher who is also a parent should be most grateful if s/he has an offspring who is something better than Caliban...
Let all my readers notice that not one comment writer, male or female, has yet written to say, in polite and reasoned language, that my opinions are wrong, that most women are far better human beings than I credit them to be. In this context, I draw everyone's attention to the old blogpost titled 'A girl who admired her teacher', and the comments that came in response to it, and what I said about the idea of 'silent admiration'!
Hello. Use of screen names is standard in cyberspace culture, and esp. if you transmit unpopular political opinions, as some people do. ;)
How does a person agitate against feminism without talking much about women. Well, that could be a long story, but briefly. .
. . you talk about feminism in doctrinal, ideological, social, political, cultural, or philosophical terms. And not about women, except when they enter the picture as an element within said categories.
This separates the personal from the political, exactly reversing the feminist project -- which is precisely to fuse those realms.
Dear Sir,
I don't know if its fair of me to say much here given my limited interaction with women-kind. What with being in Xavier's for eleven years (female/male ratio (f/m)=0), and then Kharagpur for five years (f/m=1/15), seismic vessel for two years (f/m=1/14) and now during my Ph.D. (f/m=1/6) and being of an introverted disposition. As you can see, the ratio's been improving! But after reading your post and the comments, I don't think I am missing too much.
I have realised, even with the limited interaction I have had with them: one thing missing in many females I have met is logic. There's no way I can reason out something with them. It's nonexistent. As far as I am concerned, other 'problems' just follow. In the movie 'As good as it gets', the character played by Jack Nicholson is an author. When asked by a woman how he writes women so well, he says: I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.
Sincerely
Nishant.
Hahaha, Nishant, nice juggling with numbers! The ratio might keep 'improving' until you get married (1/1), but I cannot guarantee that you will like it.
I don't know whether the allusion to that particular movie is very tactful or not - do you remember it well? Melvin was a man with all kinds of neurotic problems, and he went out of his way to be rude to people; I don't know that I want him on 'our' side in this argument. In any case, I don't hold a brief for men being models of reasonableness and accountability as distinct from women. My issues are with women's extreme materialism, love of show and what many of them themselves call 'bitching', opportunism, compulsive dishonesty (where emotions are concerned, both with men and other women)and the recent tendency to roundly deny that they can have any faults at all - if anything's wrong with the world, even the weather, it's all the fault of the men! Finally (this deserves a comment of its own), their obsession with judging men only in terms of sex and money and pliancy...
Long ago, when we were in college, the celebrated filmmaker Mrinal Sen came over to give a talk on his recently released success Akdin Protidin, and what I remember most vividly is the way he scolded the girls in the audience (remember, these were all technically adults): 'I have travelled all around the world, and everywhere the girls in college asked me all sorts of interesting questions, whereas in India I have found that the only thing the girls want to know is "Whom did the girl in the movie sleep with the night she didn't come home?" Don't you girls ever think of anything else?'
Those girls he was talking to are the mothers of my kids now or older, and I can vouch from a whole lifetime's experience that nothing has changed. No matter whether I have tried to get them interested in literature or history, God or science, economic issues or politics, it all came down to 'Is he available? Is he trying to seduce me? Did he promise me some fun and then cheated me? Can I use my charms to get some special advantage?'... and a few years down the line, they invariably get into one of three groups: those who have forgotten me entirely because they found nothing of lasting interest, those who found me fun but 'dangerous' because they couldn't 'manage' me the way they can handle most men, and those who keep trying to convince themselves privately or aloud among their tiny circles of friends that I am a bad man, classic sour-grapes fashion. So, as I repeat, the few girls whom I have found refreshingly different should feel great pride in knowing how very rare they are... and pardon me for sounding so contemptuous and dismissive about 99 per cent of their kind.
Dear Sir,
A few recent experiences have made your grief and your decision clearer.
A woman, the mother of a student who used to giggle a hundred times in a ten minutes conversation with me even a few months ago now talks quite indifferently and hesitates to call me ‘madam’, all because she has now finally got hold of a petty job.
How crude and stupid women can be!
I have done many favours in the past for a girl whom I teach- from giving free extra classes to lending books to free counseling to helping out in her projects. I realised only recently that all through, she was only faking interest and respect and that she actually speaks ill of me behind my back.
This girl, now constantly complaints of her parents’ ‘restrictions’ on her and whines for ‘freedom’. (‘I am fourteen now!’). I have come to know that all she yearns for is the freedom to party mindlessly with other pinheads of her class, wear shorter skirts and buy expensive jewellery and not study. She is ever ready to take up the course her mother tells her to, do a ‘respectable job’ her parents approve of, marry when and with whom her parents decide, give dowry if asked, and most importantly think in the way her parents do and never dream of thinking or acting differently!
After this experience, I have very slightly begun to understand how you feel after allowing yourself to be fooled by thousands of such girls for so many years.
I am very happy that you have finally decided to put an end to it and that you have given a piece of your mind to all the fake repentants.
Taking a leaf from my limited experience and your vast one, I have decided to be more careful with girls and women in future.
With love
Rashmi
Dear Sir,
Your anecdote regarding Mrinal Sen in your last comment falls in line with what I have been trying to say. Is it true that women/girls in more developed Western countries are better (even if marginally) than the ones we encounter back home in India? If yes, then it would be interesting to find out what accounts for this difference- that is if the difference is significant enough to be be accounted for at all.
Thanks,
Joydeep
Dear Sir,
While I was writing that comment, I was thinking if I should add a couple of lines more. Since I didn't then, I'll do so now.
The example I'd cited was just because I found it amusing and it was not meant to be a generalisation or a corroboration for what I had experienced. In any case, Melvin had OCD, was blunt to the point of being rude but he had a heart of gold and he went out of his way to help people he cared for, paying the medical bills of the waitress' son for instance. Again, I didn't mean to set him as an example anyway. What I said was purely from my experiences, and that too with a subset of the total number of females I've interacted with.
By logic or reason I meant this: they can't behave in a certain manner or say or do certain things and then expect themselves to be treated in an entirely different manner. This encompasses many of the things you have mentioned. I am sure this is true for men and women, but I have found that, in general, I am not able to reason out as well with women.
Another disclaimer: after reading Gulliver's Travels, I am critical of humans in general. I just mentioned a couple of specific points that were relevant to the blogpost.
Sincerely
Nishant.
Rashmi, I am glad you see eye to eye with me on the strength of your own experience. I shall insist that most women know this is what they and their friends are like, only they much prefer to live in denial, especially when it comes to comparisons with men. I deal with hundreds of mothers every year, and I know just how they regard education, the scum - 'educated' people who shop, dress up, party, gossip, watch TV, bitch non-stop about friends, relatives and neighbours, bug their kids and nag their husbands, and have never read a book of their own volition in their lives!
Joydeep, whatever little or great difference there is is obviously due to difference in nurturing: in more civilized societies, girls have far fewer stupid superstitions, stereotypes, taboos and bad habits drilled into them since childhood. I often tell kids in class 'Get rid of the notion that what your mother thinks of eating pork or kissing is the last word on the subject'.
Nishant, thanks for the clarification. Yes, mankind as a whole is sometimes totally exasperating, I grant you that. It's only that thirty years of dealing with the female of the species has convinced me that, a few exceptions apart, I'd much rather deal only with the males. Far safer and nicer on the whole!
It's been a week since I put up this post, and the visits counter shows that very soon it will have been read a thousand times, so it's rather odd that not a single abusive or even politely critical comment has come in yet. Also, I am a trifle disappointed that so many girls who have long pretended to like or respect me have chosen to stay quiet. Tells me even better what I always ought to have thought about them...
Dear Sir,
I cannot possibly express my delight at having read a post this forthright, politically incorrect, prescient and powerful. You are absolutely justified in everything you have said about women: in fact, I think you could have been at least five times more scathing in your assessment, and still not be guilty of hyperbole or exaggeration. Here are a few things about women that I have noticed down the years; some of it may be a repetition of what you and others have already said, and I apologize in advance if that is the case.
1) There is in women an incurable tendency to gossip, and when I say gossip, I mean it in the basest sense of the term. If and when a few girls get together, they shall, before you can say Jack Robinson, launch into mindless, petty, mean, vulgar discussions about other people. The discussions would involve, among other things, detailed commentaries about all that is wrong with the way the rest of the world eats, dresses, walks, talks and behaves; unbelievably uncouth and tasteless remarks about a person’s looks (I once heard a girl saying about another, “She is so ugly; did her mom mate with an orangutan?”); and nosing into intensely private aspects of others’ lives, such as who is whose boyfriend/girlfriend. The worst thing about this habit is that the women know perfectly well that this is an obscene thing to do, which is why they call it “bitching”, but they are convinced, nevertheless, that it is fine to indulge in such ‘bitching sessions’. Some “feminists” have even come up with slogans such as “Being a bitch is our birthright as women.” To that I say, “And keeping bitches on a leash—for leashes are meant to keep animals in control—and using the rod to discipline the bitches are mine as a man.” After all, none other than Friedrich Nietzsche advised men to always carry their whips while approaching a woman, and if women so willfully identify themselves as bitches, we men have all the more reason to follow Nietzsche’s advice.
2) When women don’t gossip, they are talking about achingly trivial things like clothes and cosmetics. During the three years which I spent at St. Xavier’s College, I actually saw women carry fashion catalogues in their bags, and peruse them with the dedication of a scholar reading a book while the professor was explaining Shakespeare or Steinbeck. And nothing forges a more lasting bond (‘lasting’ here being used in a strictly ironic sense) between women than going on a shopping spree to buy garments, jewellery, shoes, bags and other accessories which they don’t need but nevertheless “need”. All of which points, invariably, at the fact that women are obsessed with looks. Mirrors, I have always believed, were invented for women, if not also by them. If they like a film star, it is because he is “hot”; hell, if they support a football team during a tournament, that’s also because the footballers in the said team are good-looking, as a classmate of mine stated when she explained to me why she was supporting Germany in this year’s Euro Cup. Now, are there also men who are obsessed with looks? You bet, but the numbers are far higher among women. The “fair sex” may deny this all they want, but the fact remains that the fashion industry is sustained by them. Oh, of course, the feminists will now come along and say that the women are “compelled” to buy cosmetics because those evil men judge them solely by looks, and so the poor lasses have no option but to comply. But I believe the readers of this blog know better than to take feminists seriously. After all, there’s a reason why all those “How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb” jokes were invented.
[Before proceeding to the next point, let me make it clear that I have heard men speak of very trivial and stupid things too. But I have also had very stimulating and memorable conversations about a whole host of topics with them, from cinema to literature, from politics to sports. Women who can speak on these things, and speak sensibly for a notable length of time, comprise about 0.0000000001% of the female population, and that minuscule number has my deepest respect. The rest, to me, shall always be sub-humans].
3) Women are, by nature, selfish. When they need a favour from you, they will bug and cajole you until they get the job done, and once they do get it done, you will cease to exist for them. A classmate would ring me up dozens of times a day before and during the examinations in order to get some help with the texts in the syllabus, but during the rest of the year, there would not be so much as a “Hey how are you?” SMS. Ever since my final semester examinations ended, this particular girl has called me up only once. And guess what the occasion was? The results had been announced, and she was wondering if I could go to college and check out how much she has scored. Since I was in Durgapur at the time, I couldn’t oblige. So she asked a junior to check the marks—only her marks, mind you; she “forgot” to tell the junior to find out how much I had scored and to let me know. And this is just one of the numerous cases I can recount.
4) Women are, also, alas, hypocritical to the core. It’s okay, for them, to look only for the “hot” men, but when a man ditches a woman because she is not “hot” enough”, he is an animal. If a woman has a relationship with a man only for the sake of sexual pleasure because the man in question is attractive, that’s quite okay, even “fun”, to other women. But when a man enjoys a pretty bimbo for a night and then refuses to have any lasting relationship with her, that becomes, to the women, a crime at par with mass killings. Double standards such as these baffle me more than the Bermuda Triangle.
5) Finally (and this is in conjecture with the shopping mania I mentioned in the second point), crude, vicious materialism is far more common in women than in men. They take a devilish delight in splurging on expensive, useless things, and their fathers/husbands are just ATM machines who exist to supply them with the cash needed to do so. Even men of the stature of John F. Kennedy, I hear, have suffered because of this. I may even go so far as to say that had there been fewer women, there would have been lesser shopping malls. I really feel that the fathers and husbands all over the world need to take a firmer stance on this: no woman has the right to waste the men’s hard-earned money like this.
In conclusion, I can’t help but wonder if the people in ancient Greece had been spot-on in their claim that all true, long-lasting relationships—including, yeah, sexual ones—can exist only between men, and that women are necessary only for domestic duties and to continue the family line. For all my justified contempt for the females, I haven’t become that much of an extremist (if only because there are women, both among the ones I personally know and among the celebrities of the world, who are intelligent, compassionate, strong-willed, courageous, honest and knowledgeable about what really matters in life and what doesn’t). But soon, I fear, I may become one of the extremists. I certainly have enough reasons as it is.
With regards,
Abhirup Mascharak.
Attaboy, Abhirup. You have said a lot of things I'd have loved to say but couldn't... the age difference helps, I guess. All I can say is I am reminded of a poster on my schoolmate's bedroom door saying 'Animals and sisters keep out'! Someday we men - all men, including sons, husbands, fathers and brothers - will really get around to it, telling all women to keep out, and then they will find out what the world is like without men to exploit, harass, abuse, annoy and suck dry even while depending on them for virtually everything from physical protection to changing tyres...
And to all those young girls who might chance to read this post and all the above comments and yelp 'What have we done to deserve this?' I shall only condescend to say 'Prove you are different from the herd. Then we shall see.' Most of these girls know very well indeed they couldn't bloody well survive without some men to look after them.
Dear Baba,
I have spent nearly twelve years in an all-girls environment, and I could not agree more with this post and all the comments that have come in. Abhirupda has nicely summed up most of the things that I would have said. I will only add a few snippets from my personal experience.
A very common (and very hypocritical) stereotype about women is that they are more kind and compassionate and sympathetic than men. In fact,nine out of ten women are sadistic to a large extent. They enjoy watching and giving others hurt, especially other members of their own sex. I have seen your male students stay back and help a friend with his cycle in the heavy rain. I know from experience that 99% girls would run off and leave their so-called 'best-friends' wherever there is the possibility of their facing the slightest personal inconvenience. Boys will help you and make no fuss about it. When a girl does so much as lend you a book or a pen, she will make sure that you remember it and pay back many times over for many months.
Girls also seem to think that mindless giggling and screaming and cracking vulgar jokes (it is odd how only boys are blamed for making dirty jokes, and girls go blameless) is the only definition of fun. I am a loner by nature, but the few friends I have are either boys (dadas really, boys of my age are either too scared or too uninterested to be friends with me), or girls who are very non-girlie, so that we often sit and mock at our female classmates.
You are, of course, very charitable, and so you insist that the girls are not entirely to be blamed; that their upbringing is responsible to a large extent for making them the creatures that they are. That might be true, but I do think that it is strange how only the girls seem to take in all the superstitious nonsense that their mothers feed them, and boys are able to shake them off much better. If only these girls realize that they are either silly or disgusting, the girls of the next generation will hopefully be an improved version of females, not ones who make you want to either puke or run for your life. I am glad that you have decided to give up trying to treat these females as humans. I have learnt that at fifteen, and if only you had made this decision a few decades earlier, you would have been a much less sad person today.
Pupu
Pupu,
Many thanks, I needed that. As you know, quite a few females have been needling me lately, and we both know what they are worth, besides nuisance value, that is.
Notice that not one comment writer has as yet said anything about what s/he felt after visiting the two blogs I had linked in the postscript to my post! Meanwhile some females have been telling me how 'men can also be bad', showing obviously that they have neither read nor understood a single line of anything in the blogs or of the numerous comments that have come in so far... we know, don't we, both of us, that this sort of female will come to our door whenever they need any kind of help and know perfectly well that no female is going to help them out?
Dear sir,
Few days ago when it was raining very heavily around 7:15 am and most of the students were fully wet after they reached the school our principal who unfortunately is a woman passed such a vulgar comment on the girl students that I now totally belive that most of the women know nothing other than gossiping and wearing immense makeup just to look "pretty".The male teachers of our school are far better than her.Most of the women are brainless and they like o talk watever nonsense come first in their mind without giving a second thought about it.
Dear Shreshta,
I know just the type you mean. Just think of the recent incident at the Patha Bhavan girls' hostel at Shantiniketan - the woman warden forcing a little girl to lick her own urine - and you can see what I mean. It is a pity that the decent few among women (and I shall go on insisting that decent women are far, far fewer than decent men; men who act like that are perverts, women who do are 'normal'), instead of condemning the disgusting majority for bringing shame on their tribe, get angry with us men for pointing out all their disgusting shortcomings and pure badness...
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/bengal-urine-shocker-mother-denies-shock-treatment-claim/1/207892.html
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120713/jsp/bengal/story_15723506.jsp
So the vile female warden makes the girl commit the horrifying act, the sick female principal supports the female warden (how they can be sitting their without being kicked out of the house I don't know)...and then I read a news report on gender bias at Patha Bhavan! Gender bias?!!! How infinitely sickening can people get. One female commits an atrocity, another female supports the same, and some dumb and mindless journalist spouts 'gender bias'(I would tell all of them to drink their own urine; I can see better and better how repressive punishment came about in times of civilizational crisis and mindlessness). Even animals don't behave this way.
-----
I read your comment and had to look up the news.
And I can't help giving both Abhirup and Pupu a quiet round of applause for their comments. Apart from your comments for this post theirs win my vote. Abhirup for hammering hard and methodically, and Pupu for being very fine, calm and quiet...and for expressing her last bit because that's how I feel too, now when I'm middle-aged.
Though this comment is not entirely related to the topic being discussed; the fairer sex being the only link, I would like to share the same.
Due to work related travel, I frequently move between Chakradharpur and Chaibasa; two small towns in south Jharkhand. In route, amidst abundance of nature there are a few dotted tribal villages. (Birsa Munda, a legendary freedom-fighter was from this region).
Well, if one happens to move in this route in the morning, one can finds girls of all ages cycling furiously on their way to schools.
It is one sight, one can choose to neglect; but if you consider the region you are in, the scene of uniform wearing girls, with shining eyes, and tinkling laughter moving earnestly towards school is a real heartening sight! I also found that athletics /archery and other sports are quite popular amongst girls here. They are encouraged by society, which again is quite unprecedented, considering the so called 'conservative' tribal customs.
India, never seemed more diverse; where in girls of a village within 200 kms of our New Delhi are imposed all sorts of sanctions, and here in the jungles of Jharkhand, girls are studying/doing things of their choice!
Well, being of the optimist sort, I did find the enthusiasm of the girls, cycling for far distances to reach their school, really infectious. I think, their determination in braving all weather conditions to go to school, itself will foster their sound character.
I would also bring to light that this society which instills these habits in young girls is worth emulation and our adulation.
There are still beacons of hope... maybe not solely concentrated in urban India, but in the unsung & obscure villages of India.
I apologize, if the comment seems totally out of context, but couldn't stop myself writing about certain good things I observed in a very select section of our society.
Regards.
Joydeep Mukherrjee
2002 Batch
I am glad you wrote, JD, though, as you have yourself observed, the comment does not relate to my post, except very tangentially. I agree with you that we should look everywhere for every little sign of progress and hope, and yes, healthy looking girls going cheerily to school in rural areas is certainly good to see - at first glance. Alas, what do you find if you look at the same girls a few years down the line? Married and raising babies, that's all, even if they are not being seriously abused by the menfolk, and nothing more. Hell, even girls from 'good' urban families grow up to be little more than that; their so-called education gives them little more than bigger egos and a greater sense of entitlement to leisure, luxury and privilege. I often say a farmer's wife who tends to the fields and looks after her kids and housework singlehandedly contributes far more to society than the typical urban housewife, living off her husband and her maidservants, and at most doing some very trivial job at a hotel, airline, shopping mall or BPO... 'education' has hardly produced big achievers among women by the million, as it was once expected to do. I have made this observation once before. By achievers I mean not only tycoons and cabinet ministers but judges, IAS officers, real journalists (as opposed to those who write 'news' about the latest cosmetics), writers, real teachers, moviemakers, social activists and the like... some female reader has asked a friend 'But does he respect only big achievers?' to which my reply is 'Of course I do! Is respect so cheap that I must go about respecting every Tom, Dick and Harry or Mary, Jane and Elizabeth?' All you need to do is to read up a few earlier blogposts to find out about what kind of women I do respect...Kadambini Ganguly, first woman college graduate in the British Empire, had time enough to look after a flourishing medical practice and do politics and social work and fine handicrafts at home while raising eight children: I must respect her as well as all the typical college girls and fat, lazy, greedy, gossipy good-for-nothing housewives I see all around me?
The mother of a girl who is currently a pupil came over to see me this morning, weeping over how badly her daughter has been harassed, bullied, cheated and reviled for years by many of her teachers, (female-) friends and friends' mothers, branded as a bad girl, where her only fault, so far as I can see with a teacher's eye, is that she is slightly more boisterous and inattentive, slightly less cunning and manipulative than most females are instinctively from a very early age. This woman has been savagely punishing her daughter for all her real and imagined faults, until she has been driven to near madness and started feeling she is really going wrong somewhere, and maybe she is overdoing it. She has even been told that her daughter is a 'polluting influence', and needs to see a psychiatrist. I was telling my daughter - herself an unusually strong-minded, outspoken female with a very sharp sense of right and wrong - how nightmarish her childhood might have been if her parents had listened to teachers, relatives and neighbours a little more. And of course, we have been discussing, in connection with this post, just how evil women can be, even to other women (my wife and daughter say especially to other women). There was this female teacher in one of the 'elite' schools in this town who, a few years ago, had savagely beaten up a child because the boy had committed the unpardonable crime of calling her 'Ma' in class: the papers were full of it. My friend Sumitha says she has met a lot of decent women. The response of my wife and daughter was 'She and we must be living on different planets'!
At the same time, we don't need anyone's certificate to know we have our hearts in the right place. Unless some reader is seriously retarded, s/he cannot have missed the obvious fact that, despite all my ranting against the female of the species, I have all the time in the world for those who suffer, both the mother and the daughter in this instance (and I make bold to say I give them far more than most 'feminists' would: the mother said before leaving that not one female, either friend, relative, neighbour or daughter's teacher had given her a fraction of the sympathetic understanding and practical advice that she got from me today).
Sir,
Since your wife and daughter think that I must belong to a different planet/realm where women are more decent, and since it seems so implausible for most of the commentators here to think of women as capable of kind or charitable deeds, I shall cite three examples from my life. I shall leave it to the readers to decide whether these women are worthy of my respect (and others' by the virtue of the deeds they did) or not.
1. Circa April 2003, a ruthless Kerala summer when a vast majority of students in our college fell prey to the hepatitis A virus. It was bang in the middle of the exam season, and we heard everyday of some or the other student who had taken ill and was sent home. I had been feeling out of sorts since the beginning of the semester exams, and on the eve of the Electronics exam, I felt really sick...lethargic would be the right term. Even though I had heaps of revision left, I decided to take a short nap. When I didn't wake up from the nap even after an hour, my friend Sreedevi came and woke me up. I told her I couldn't care less whether I passed the exam or not, but she wouldn't leave it at that. So she asked me which portions I felt most anxious about in terms of a lack of adequate preparation, and proceeded to revise those portions right then by reading aloud from her book/explaining herself. After nearly two hours of this, I felt weak and queasy and the feeling wouldn't pass, so she stopped studying and went to the hostel kitchen, got the cook to make a home remedy of ginger and lime extract and gave it to me to help curb the nausea. The next day, the paper was thankfully and unexpectedly rather easy, so I finished it in record time and left the hall a full hour and a half before scheduled end. Sree was very anxious when she met me later on and kept asking me whether I had completed the exam and whether I had answered everything reasonably correctly. If I owe anyone the 80 odd marks I scored in that exam, it is her. Two days later when I ended up being hospitalized for jaundice, she was really sad that I would miss 2 of my exams; perhaps even more than me, because I was quite out of sorts and sick then, to honestly care about the exams.
2. Both of the ladies I shall talk about next, helped me at a time when I was totally perplexed and didn't have any idea of what to expect. I was due to deliver my first baby on Sep 23rd, 2011, but he decided to arrive 11 days earlier. My own mother passed away 3 years ago, so my mother in law had agreed to come to town to help us out in the first few weeks. However, her arrival was scheduled only on the 16th of Sep, and I went into labour on the 12th. Any woman who has been through the experience would tell you that it's harrowing and anxiety ridden to say the least. To top it all, we (myself, my husband, father, brother, sister-in-law) had absolutely no idea on what to expect and how to take care of a newborn baby. My neighbour's mother was supposed to have returned to her native place that day, but on hearing this news, she postponed her trip by a couple of days. She came to the hospital and sat with me up until the time that they wheeled me to the OT, all the while comforting me and giving me back rubs. She is not related to me, and before that day, we had exchanged niceties upon seeing each other on the road; nothing more and nothing less to our relationship. But what she did for me that day, is something I shall never forget.
Likewise, after Kenneth arrived, there cropped up the question of who would spend the night with me and baby. The hospital allowed just one person, and my husband was feeling too overwhelmed to pitch in as the sole helper. My cousin, whose second child was only 1 year and a few months old, gladly offered to do the honours. She spent the whole night awake and soothed the crying baby by carrying him around. She could have cited her toddler son as an excuse and we hadn't even thought of asking her for help, but she pitched in and did her best when we needed it the most.
comment continued:
More recently, i.e. this last weekend, I met my mom's dearest friend from our Durgapur days after a very long time, and she showered me with so much love and affection, that I felt reassured that there is a lot of hope for mankind because human beings still care for one another.
So yes, these women showed me at various stages in my life that life is much more than just I, Me, Myself and I think they deserve my respect for who they are and what they have done for me. For me, they are living examples of "A friend in need is a friend indeed."
Regards,
Sumitha
Sumitha, thanks, but this was not really a response to my last comment, only to what I had said about you!
This is getting to be a thankless exercise, so after this I shall stop repeating myself. Of course I know that decent and even admirable women exist; I have written about some in this blog itself (which you seem to be determined to ignore), and I have a mental list of a few to whom I am eternally grateful. That does not change one iota the fact that in my experience over a lifetime (buttressed by what my wife of 44 and daughter of 15 have acquired), decent men are far easier to find. As I have explained, with many specific examples in my previous comments, including the last one. So let's stop arguing over this now. I accept that you have met a LOT of nice women; please accept that I haven't, and don't see any likelihood of meeting many in the future. You will grant that I have both a right and a duty to be guided in my own life by my own remembered and reasoned experience...and writing things on the basis of that experience. I am sorry if that sounds a little off-putting, but I am beginning to grow a little tired now.
And now, to remind everybody about the title of this post, which a lot of people seem to have forgotten: it's "No women please, I am an MCP". So no more comments from girls/women except those who like me that way.
I hate to hear from people who simply refuse to listen to what I am saying, and keep repeating like a litany things I have myself said before. In this instance, that's 'men can be bad too', and 'but there are good women around too'. Everybody has a threshold of boredom; I have crossed mine.
And I hate to state the obvious, but it's my blog after all, so my rules.
Now this post has made it to the top-ten! Women - mostly women in this case, I am sure - are far more eager to see what I have said against their kind than how I have praised some of them (not one of the tributes I have written about women I admire has ever entered the 'most-read' list). The longer you live, the more certain you become about what people are really like!
Dear Sir,
I read in the newspaper today that three men died protecting their girlfriends in the recent horrifying Colorado shooting incident. Out of the twelve people killed in this ghastly massacre, these three young men died while shielding their girlfriends from gunshots. The reason I bring this up is to point out that there are still plenty of brave, decent and caring men out there. So women/girls who continuously insist on saying "all men are the same" or "all men are pigs" need to open their eyes to reality, that is only if they have not been blinded already by irrational hatred and prejudice. Also, please note that there is no news which reports a woman taking a bullet for her husband/boyfriend. Tells us something, doesn't it?
Thanks,
Joydeep
Sir,
I believe this didn't escape your notice when it happenned -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/women_shealth/8510743/These-slut-walk-women-are-simply-fighting-for-their-right-to-be-dirty.html
How little we know about the liberation of women!!
You might be surprised, Sayan, but I actually have an enormous amount of sympathy for the kind of women who were traditionally and for a very very long time condemned and sneered at with the word 'slut'. Women throughout the ages, especially among the subaltern categories, have been subjected to unspeakable deprivation and humiliation simultaneously, which makes me deeply ashamed on behalf of the male half of the species. All my ridicule and invective is targetted at the newly emergent class of highly privileged, pampered, lazy and irresponsible females from so-called good families who have always got the best out of life, given back very little in return, and constantly blame the fact of not having managed to become successful, prominent, independent achievers on what they call male-domination. As I have said before, the typical feminist today will blame everything on the men, even the weather - which is why feminism has become a joke in many circles, and high-achieving women as a rule try hard to avoid the tag now.
On the other hand, personally I have no issues with women who have nothing called taste, and would like to claim equality by doing in public the nastiest and ugliest things that men habitually do... why only limit ourselves to clothes? If men pick their noses, so shall we, why not? My only point is that such women cannot simultaneously claim that they have a 'right' to my respect, too. Their right to act like riff-raff, my right to mock at them, that's democracy. I wonder why that should make a lot of women so angry!
Suvro Sir,
Thanks for the long explanation; and thanks also for persisting with this fool...who failed to see the whole picture...
I recently dismissed a fifteen year old girl from my class. Painful, and never done in haste, but this is the sort of thing that a conscientious teacher has to do now and then.
I was going to deal with Keats' poem La Belle Dame sans Merci (look it up, please). I began with an elaborate preamble, apologizing in advance by saying that while explaining it I'll perforce have to deal with the fact that the poet has given a stern warning to sensitive and romantic young men against getting emotionally entangled with pretty young things, who can sometimes be very scheming and hard-hearted, and who enjoy making trophies out of breaking men's hearts. The poet's opinion, not mine, I added, and also said this is not a universal generalization about the badness of women; they could look up a poem by Browning in their own anthology titled Porphyria's Lover which deals with how sick some men in love can be. I even told them when earlier batches had Browning's Last Duchess in their syllabus, I had taken equal pains to point out that while some men could be that monstrous, all men should not be assumed to be guilty of the same sickness by nature. I was about to proceed with the detailed explanation of the poem in question, when this girl piped up to complain that I always spoke badly about girls/women. The whole batch got a tongue-lashing then about how important it is to listen before opening one's mouth, and afterwards I told the girl that if, despite all my efforts, she insisted on holding such an opinion of me, the best thing she could do was to quit - which, thankfully, she did.
I checked with many girls in the same batch, including some in her own school and class, and they told me that she had always been like that, a diehard 'feminist' who simply refuses to hear that there can be anything at all wrong with females.
I can tolerate fools at that age, but I draw the line with females who are twenty or thirty years older, and haven't matured one whit.
Dear Sir,
I left a comment on Pupu's blog post 'Musings and a Merry Christmas' on a similar subject and I firmly retain those opinions. Yes, most females that I have come in contact with fit the exact category that you abhor. I am looked upon as somewhat of a loner just because I prefer being alone rather than spend a minute in their company. These are the girls who instagram their own faces onto Facebook several times a week, think rarely, if ever, of anything beyond superfluous interests. The intent of most of my peers (we are all now in our mid twenties) is to "bag the next eligible bachelor who comes along", silently counting up the gold that their parents give them and spend all their money on buying just the right bag, or glasses or whatever. A small example would be how few females I actually see these days in bookstores, while the MAC counter at a big mall here is loaded to the brim whenever I pass by. Their own lives become a lot more important until they lose all sight of anything or anyone other than whom they are very directly related to. I am not saying I have not made mistakes, God knows I have made plenty, and shall probably make many more; as a girl but more as a human being who is possession of all her mental faculties, I have to admit, that what you say is the absolute truth. This is one of the main reasons that the only "girl" friends I have, I made at the age of five and I stoutly refuse to increase that paltry number (the number being three). The lack of empathy or common sense and a deep ignorance of pretty much everything that goes on around them except for Bollywood, makes most females a complete pain to be around. I am yet to find a female who is not one of the original three or my mother with whom I can hold an intelligent conversation, so go figure.
Regards,
Vaishnavi
Thank you, Vaishnavi.
Let me in this context mention two very politically incorrect things that I have noticed happening recently. One: the local Big Bazaar outlet has started sealing women's handbags before customers can enter; this is because, the securitymen explained, women (and few of them poor and needy) are the most common shoplifters, and their capacious handbags were being used too often to shove stolen knick-knacks into. Two: while stopping at a Sulabh paid toilet off a national highway recently, we noticed a 'posh' woman being scolded by the (female-) attendant for being uncouth enough to relieve herself on the floor, despite a WC being available. The same attendant, after cleaning up, grumblingly told me it's a daily nuisance. My daughter has repeatedly told me how callous her school authorities - all female - are about keeping the toilets clean.
These are big numbers of females we are talking about here: when generalizations are made (such as how women are always being ill-treated by men), such broad, highly visible and undeniable facts can only be ignored by 'feminists' who cannot see anything wrong with themselves. If women are shoplifters and toilet-soilers in large numbers, that too has got to be the fault of a 'male-dominated' society.
Oh yes Sir, I have come across many girls in school as well as college who shoplifted stuff just for the "lark" of it. I am in complete agreement with what you say Sir; somewhere along the way, our society seems to hide behind the male/female tags rather than give merit to people for what they are, irrespective of their gender. Most women I have come across keep extremely messy households and do not bother to think twixe about littering. Men also for that matter, but why do women who hold up the cry of feminism gloss over all these faults? The sad truth is is that even among sex workers there will be the stories of women accomplices who have forced them into the profession.
Regards,
Vaishnavi
It wasn't always like that, Vaishnavi. I have read many a great writer, in Bangla, English, Hindi and French, who, despite being female themselves, and even while criticizing men (quite deservingly) for myriad faults, never shied away from acknowledging that a lot of women have a lot of characteristics to be ashamed of, and would do well to reform themselves. Today's 'mod' woman, by contrast, suffers primarily from a brittle ego, and so lives in denial: only such people are good and worth listening to who bash men blindly and praise women without reserve.
If you have read the post carefully and all the comments so far, you couldn't have failed to notice three things: a) I have still insisted I shall always have the deepest sympathy for women who really suffer (at the hands of women as much as men); b) there are many women I admire (though few in my contemporary milieu, for reasons I have sought to make clear, and which have not been challenged with facts and logic), and c) my personal experience with females has been by and large very bad, despite my having tried to go out of my way to be good to them for years and years. So if today I have ended up to be a crabby woman-hater (though you know only too well how ready and eager I am to make exceptions for those who deserve it),I don't think I have any reason to be apologetic about it. In connection with the recent post titled 'Wrapped up kids' on my other blog, it remains a matter of fact till date that girls in general are pampered far more, scolded far less and never beaten in my class; and despite that, it is the boys who keep getting back. As I said before, girls must be remarkably stupid to expect to be praised more afterwards because they have given back much less! In private conversation, I can tell you about literally dozens of girls about whom my only regret today is that I ever thought of them as anything more than monthly envelopes, and I promise you you will wonder how I can still talk decently with the girls in my current classes after having been treated to so much unkindness and ingratitude for so long.
Sir
Sir,
Marissa Mayer's referral to feminists as 'drag' nicely vindicates the points that you have mentioned in this blog-spot and in the subsequent comments.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/02/27/marissa_mayer_says_she_s_not_a_feminist_in_pbs_makers_documentary.html
I didn't know much about Ms. Mayer until you sent that link, Debotosh (beyond her Google background and recently being appointed CEO of Yahoo!, that is), but I checked up the entry in wikipedia, and I liked her clear, short and simple list of priorities - 'God, family and Yahoo, in that order'. May she stick to it; she seems to be a deep and wise woman, not merely a geek (a type that I more than faintly despise, by the way, male or female).
Good to hear that she, too, doesn't have much time to spare for traditional chip-on-the-shoulder feminists. And also that, like Indira Gandhi and Agatha Christie, Cherie Blair and J.K. Rowling, she has been able to find time for a great career alongside family life and spiritual interests. I cannot ask for a better deal for my own daughter.
Another very politically incorrect observation for now: the great majority of women, like the great majority of men, simply have neither the IQ nor the energy nor the guts nor the ambition to make it big in life. They become feminists when they begin to sniff a chance of getting things made easy for them by claiming to be 'deserving' of special privileges simply because they are female. Not an accident that most feminists are pretty ugly to look at, too, besides getting old...
...and, though this is three months down the line, I cannot resist the temptation to post the following link here, it is so much in context, and so much in consonance with what I have been saying:
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130623/jsp/7days/story_17038224.jsp#.Ucgv9jujzwN
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