An eye for an eye. Then let's go shopping for glasses together.

Every time someone has said women are their own worst enemy, I’ve shaken my head in vehement disagreement. Every time someone’s said (usually a woman) that men are “lessy bitchy, more honest and less complicated” I’ve found arguments to counter each of those adjectives. I’ve quoted mother-daughter relationships; I’ve flaunted the example of my aunt who raised two stunningly-behaved boys with the express intention of making comfortable the lives of the women these boys would eventually choose to be with. My biggest example has been the shining picture of all those brave, hurt naked women protesting against the army in Manipur after the rape-torture-murder of Thangjam Manorama. What exemplifies better the fact that we are all sisters than mostly middle-aged, probably not very educated, women shedding clothes and any vanity to create a voice for the wrong done to one of theirs?

But over the last year, that conviction has defeated me more than a couple of times. I find the reason women need men, will always be dependent on them – apart from the usual, natural ones -- and claim to have better friendships with them is because they are willing to first blame a woman in any situation, even if there is a man involved and in a logical, non-PMSing world you can see that he is as much at fault, if not more.

I am no saint: I’ve been guilty of it myself, squarely blaming a woman in the situation rather than seeing the contributions of other people involved, generally speaking. But that was before I got my wits around things, a few years ago. Ever since, especially if there’s a man involved, I’ve found that while I see how both have contributed to the situation, I do more or less successfully condone both their behaviours; or condemn, as the case may be. (That said, I am no one to condemn or condone but I am not sure what other word I can use without diluting the sense of what I am trying to say.)

Even when it comes to kids, I find other women will first question the mother’s integrity, involvement and love when they perceive a kid is uncared for or misbehaving. I remember a woman asking my then not-yet two-year-old, because her nails were a little overgrown, “You haven’t cut your nails? Mama doesn’t cut them for you?” Maybe I am being oversensitive but I took that as a subtle dig at me. Surely, my young daughter can’t have answered that question, so perhaps it was meant for me. And typically, this is from a mother who is insanely involved in the lives of her kids, with rarely an interest outside her own offspring. Most women with other interests wouldn’t worry about slightly overgrown nails too much, I believe. Blame the guy once in a while, ladies. Remember how difficult it is for you to do everything. It’s the same for the other girl.

Or for that matter, how liberally mothers and sisters will blame the woman their son/brother is married to for any behaviour that they don’t approve of. What makes them think their boy has suddenly lost the ability to think independently? He could equally be responsible for that really ugly – perhaps, cheap? -- sari that he gifts them or crappy things that he says. Why call the woman he is married to controlling? (If you ask me, I  have so much faith in women that I think men'd do loads better to be controlled some.)

Look at situations where women are the boss. Women subordinates will bitch and moan about every aspect of her being – her fashion sense (or the lack of it), her perceived inability to run a team, probably her husband and kids too, and not to mention what they see as favouritism to a male colleague. I don’t see these women complaining when a male boss favours them over men colleagues. Neither do I see them nitpicking at his mismatched shoes and belt or his dirty fingernails. Heaven forbid the otherwise well-dressed woman boss who walks in with cracked heels or chipped nail paint.

In a complex, messy situation, involving both the sexes, the thin veil of civility and politeness will necessarily be worn when two women confront each other in front of a man. (I am talking about reasonably intelligent women who sadly believe calm words are stronger than fists. You might come across as more sophisticated with the former but a fistfight is immensely satisfying. You should try it sometime, girls.) Take the man away and it’s likely to go two ways. Either they’ll be cold and ignore each others existence. Good way to go, I think, but leaves you with no closure and an avenue to constantly bitch about yet another chick. Or they’ll call each other words, enlist their own army and cry war. This is good also. Because you aren’t repressing any of the anger or hurt that you are feeling. And a bitching gang-bang always makes you feel superior, right? Except, this approach requires you to be prepared for defeat – either by the same coin or by silence. Either way, you have a war-ravaged entity to clean up afterwards.

My sympathies will always lie with the woman. Always. It’s a promise I made to myself in my effort to create the sisterhood that I see around me. A sisterhood that I see is in the same existential pain as me.  This incessant need to retain their bodies according to an ideal of beauty, the crazy race to be a better mother, a better sister, a better girlfriend, a better everything, not just a good something. Always better in comparison to someone else.

I may not like her, I may see through her and I may tell her exactly what she is but if she’s been wronged, then that’s where my sympathies will lie.

I have tried to understand what it is that makes us so ridiculously competitive in the minutiae of our lives. Is it because the majority of us don’t play sport seriously? Yeah, I know it sounds silly, but think about it. Playing sport or following it passionately builds an attitude of resilience, partnership and appreciating someone exactly like you. It gives you that famous spirit of being a good loser. And you’ll admit most women are sore losers for most their lives. Or until they reach their 40s and have accepted themselves. Sport I believe gives you a little more than your little world to focus on.

Is it because we are, since childhood, encouraged in subtle ways to compete against everything – including the boys? For affection, attention and approval? Is it because we are taught we are “little princesses” but then we grow up and find out the princesses are common as pimples? That we have crooked teeth, bad hair and not the greatest sense of humour when we are out fraternizing with other princesses?

At risk of sounding like a violent person, which I probably am, I’d much rather sock someone’s nose in, receive a black eye, be bereft of fistfuls of hair and leave scratch marks on someone else’s pretty face than war coldly.

I, a feminist, say this sadly, in the end. Ladies: 0, Gents: 10

The art of calling my name in full.

For as long as I can remember, the only person I call by a pet name is my brother. Everyone else, however close they may be to my heart -- and I've been blessed with several good people in my life -- I call them by their given name. My best friend from school is still to get used to it, I think. And I've known her 22 years.

I like to think that a name is more than just a tag to identify a certain body. A name, as far as I am concerned, is deeply linked with who we are and how we identify ourselves. A lot like an email id actually. I notice invariably that teenagers and those who think they're still teenagers stick to pet names and email ids that have personality projections in them. I can take the pet name but the email addresses make me want to never write to them, even though I love them.

For example, my 15 year-old cousin calls herself Joanna Janet in places such as Facebook and email. Or some really odd thing like that. It fits her personality perfectly because she's growing up on High School Musical and Hannah Montana, so her exposure is very obviously Western. I'd have given her an award if she had nicknamed herself Subbulakshmi or Kartiyayani. I totally get her because she is 15.

But I recently ran into a few email addresses that made me realise that I spend far too much time thinking about things that I have no business thinking about. Mosquitoes, world peace and whether global warming is just someone's idea of a joke, for example. I should be thinking about not spending my money so fast that my kids will grow up believing education is for duds and Pink Floyd rocks. I should be thinking about more alternatives for five minutes of peace  than the empty interiors of a parked car. (I swear I did that today. My family trooped out and went home, I just lay in the back seat savouring the closed space, the quiet and the time to actually hear myself think.) I should basically be thinking about more useful things than why a grown person has an email id that says babyfacekid@ihaventgrownup.com.

Yes, yes, call me judgemental but I think after you've crossed 23, you should just have an email id that states your name and get on with life. I realise you might want to or have to throw in an underscore or a dot somewhere and I am mildly tolerant on that front. But I just cannot forgive a 34 year old whose email id is prettybabydoll@seekingattention.com.

But wow, how I've digressed.

Recently, a friend brought it up when I was referring to someone, that I could use that someone's pet name. I know I could but an anglicised little name doesn't have half the charm of a beautiful full name, in this case a Sanskrit one. And all the meaning that is held in the womb of that name is lost when I shorten it. I'd much rather be uncool than called a Pratyusha a Prat or a Ragini a Rags.

And as for me, for as long as I can remember, friends and family have called me pet names. One in particular. Anglicised, shorter and somewhat bimboesque but that's what I am for most my college and school mates, and definitely all of my family. Except my husband. Who has a totally different endearment for me. Something that I hold dear to my heart but something that also makes me laugh because it points to a couple things.
1) The age gap between him and me.
2) The very Malayalee in us.

Of course, when I am in the dog house I get called my full name (ouch) or when I am being introduced to someone. It's the strangest feeling ever. Sometimes when we are out together and he's opening doors for, showing me off and generally being the charmer he is, he tends to call me my name and I don't know then, whether to kiss him or laugh at the awkwardness of it.  Mostly because I insist I get called my beautiful, thoughtout, meaningful Sanskrit name but then feel suddenly very unloved when I get called it in full.
It leads me to think that maybe it is habit that we respond to and not our name. Inflections, tone, length of name is what we respond to. For example, a simple enough name is so different when spoken during roll call in school, at an introduction or in bed. The word is the same but the emotions they arouse in us -- from an indifferent "Present" to a thrill running up your spine.

So when Shakespeare said, "What's in a name", I honestly think he was smoking some rotten stuff and had totally lost the plot. My other theory is that he called his wife by his girlfriend's name and she gave him pure hell.

I am a feminist

A school mate of mine, who I think I'd like to be friends with now, told me on phone recently that she has been a stay-at-home mum for about four years now, since her daughter was born. This girl, as I remember her from school, was bright, sociable, dedicated, focused, had an excellent work-ethic and hovered somewhere at the top of our class. I think she had ambitions to do something in the sciences, or perhaps it was engineering, I can't be sure now.

I recently spoke to her again and was very pleasantly surprised that she chose a more evolved stream and did her BA in English Literature. Moreover, after having worked in a bank here in Oman for a bit, she married, settled down and is now a very happy mother to a four-year old. The thing that struck me in the conversation was her saying, "You know,  I am not a very career-minded person at all."

For me, that was surprising, because I know very few women of my generation who are not career minded. We were all raised on the ethic that we needed to conquer the world, we needed to stand on our own feet so that we could be who we wanted, so that we could make our parents proud, so that we could go live the life our mothers dreamed of. We were also raised on stories of women facing every kind of degradation in history.

Very often, without our realising, our self-esteem, sense of self-worth and indeed, the very idea of our Self was deeply tied together with having a career. And in second-generation working women, like me, it wasn't enough if you were in one of the "easier" fields: beauty, teaching, clothes, if you hadn't the smarts to become a doctor or an engineer. Somewhere along, we got the message that we had to go do the "tougher" things. I put easier and tougher in quotes because the jobs listed next to them, aren't my definitions of those words. I don't see what is tough about sitting in an air-conditioned office and doing a 350-word story on summer trends for glasses. You're still a journalist but not doing a tough job. Similarly, I don't see what is easy about being on your feet all day making other women beautiful; bending over to thread women's eyebrows or waxing their armpits or massaging their pedicured feet. Beauty, you will agree, is not easy.

But coming back to my point, for most my generation of women it is very clear that the option of staying home was almost not there, unless you absolutely couldn't help it. But this girl, who grew up in a single-income household, is very happy with her status. And while there's only a hint of apology when she talks to someone like me who has a career (somewhat), she's quite comfortable with the fact that her daughter, her family come first.

For a few days, I have been thinking about feminism. For some years now, I have been hearing women say, quickly and defensively, when they tend to speak up for women and their rights, that they are not feminists. And I've wondered why.

I've seen men say it derisively of a woman, that she is a feminist. I, on the other hand, proudly say I am a feminist. I speak up for myself, I speak up for my sisters, I speak up. I love being a woman, I really like men and I love my career as well as my kids. I strive hard to make my parents proud (whether they see it or think otherwise), I love finding out new things about me and just because I play other roles like daughter, wife, sister, mum, friend, and everything else, I am NO less myself. In fact, all these roles just add to my personality. So what exactly am I missing when people run away from the F word?

Thanks to the feminist movements, Men, your mothers, wives, sisters and daughters can vote, can inherit property and are considered citizens of a country. Thanks to feminism, there are laws where rape, molestation, sexual harassment at work are all punishable. Thanks to feminism, girls have a right to education just as much as boys do.

And women, exactly what makes you say, "Hey, I am no feminist but I really think women should..."? Even if you aren't a feminist in the strict sense of the word, why do you have a problem with being labelled as one? Is it because you, like me, love pretty lingerie and are not willing to give it up? Is it because you think 'feminist' automatically means you need to call men words that a sailor would blush at? Maybe these questions are simplistic, but I am just trying to understand why you don't like being called a feminist.

Because you know, us feminists, don't burn bras anymore. We even get married (to men) and have children. Why, we go as far as telling people that we love being a woman and for us many times feminism means that I get to stay at home and there's no pressure on me to earn for the family, most of the time.

Honestly, that is what feminism means to me today. One of my favourite writers (as she is with many women I know) Alice Walker has a beautiful word for it Womanism. For me, being a woman, being a feminist means now that I have most my rights in place -- voting, education, property, the right to choose my last name, the right to be safe (?) apart from others -- I have the right to choose. I have the right to choose whether I want to go to work and make a career, or I want to stay at home and revel in domesticity. Feminism, for me, means the freedom to choose the latter and not feel like I've betrayed my education and my talent by choosing  to stay at home and considering a family more important.

Feminism to me means having the choice to go to work even though I have children and coming back feeling good that I spent a productive day work while looking forward to time with the kids. It means not feeling guilty that I spent time away from them. Feminism means to be able to my buy my own car or designer handbag. It also means to have the grace to say 'thank you' if a man offered to buy either, once in a while.

Feminism means feeling comfortable to say that I asked my husband out; that I like to cook (I don't; just an example) or crochet (which I like) or sew or bake without feeling like if I say it, people will think of me as domesticated, as a "typical" girl. It means feeling comfortable to say I love cars, gadgets and women without being thought of as a tomboy, or worse, a wannabe tomboy. Feminism means not thinking it's a great thing if you own best bud is a man -- it doesn't make you any different from a woman who's best friend is a girl. In my opinion you should have one of both.

What does feminism mean to you?

Women are who men wish they could be.

I met up with the girls over the weekend. The restaurant that we sat at, I think they'll run the next time we come by. We did everything from harassing Jonathan, our waiter, to join Facebook so we could all add him to discussing seriously twisted weight loss methods.

Women are always eating, even though we complain about being fat. But how can we not be fat, habibi? We're always eating! Here's what we did. We headed to the mall just after lunch, and because one of us was surviving on a sliver of biscuit that's thinner than an ice flake, she said she needed food. We followed our noses to the food court. Way past eating up the stuff that was ordered, we were still sitting there making life really annoying for those around us because we kept guffawing, raising our hands and slipping in and out of regional Indian languages.

How does one get heard or even hear in a group of really talkative women? You cannot. At any given point, there were at least five conversations going on between three groups of women. And if you thought that was amazing then you need to know that we even commented on the other group's discussions. Super-taskers, that's us.

I was thinking, men will never find comfort in an all-girl gaggle. We desexitise everything. Case in point: We launched into a discussion on how it is possible to predict whether you're having a boy or a girl. It involves breast milk, a wall and a superstition. I will not elucidate. I, for one, didn't enjoy the process of breastfeeding and find anything remotely to do with it uncomfortable and completely tiresome. 
By the end of that conversation, women were grabbing their breasts protectively; ribald jokes had gone completely out of hand and I was on a new mission -- to find scientific fact behind this folklore. 
But I am amazed at how girly that shopping trip was. You see, usually when I get together with my lifelong girlfriends, we usually catch up on each other's lives, we discuss things in earnest seriousness, we talk about work and plans and how each of us is feeling about things. We share a lot of love, some food, some random vignettes from our life of the past three months, very Sex and the City-ish. We're left with a warm feeling of satisfaction and time well spent at the end of it.
But this Thursday, I felt like I'd been stuck into a washer-drier that had disco lights and played music from 'Grease'. The one-liners came fast and thick, the laughter was all consuming, absolutely uninhibited talk of sex, clothes and common enemies flowed. I am usually good at sensing any undercurrents and here I sensed none. ALL of these women, and I mean all, vegetarians and non-smokers even, were warm and welcoming; they seemed to have endless space in their lives for new people. I was new to this group -- I knew some of these women individually, and because Muscat is a small place all of these women were loosely part of the same crowd. Also by virtue of all of them being earthy, fun and totally themselves.  
It would be understatement to say this Thursday was the best I've had in a long time. 


Here's what I learnt.
1) I am not a prude but I can't do ribald
2) Anything to do with breasts in connection with breastmilk makes me uncomfortable. 
3) You really gotta have a bunch of girls where you are not required to think.
4) Everything is laughable when there's a bunch of girls. Your breasts, your sex life or the lack of it, your job, your religion.
5) I have now complete understanding of why women are the more attractive sex and I don't mean looks wise. It's not the breasts, it's not the butt, it's not good skin hair teeth smile whatever. It's that women are who men aspire to be. Fun, fearless (sorry Cosmo), totally sexy in their heads. Wow.
6) I also understand why women can be completely pissing off. It's not that we don't know what we want, it is that what we want changes according to our place in life. 
7) I know the reason we complain about weight. We always have food on our minds. 
8) It is possible to walk around a whole mall laden with goodies and not buy anything. And I am proof of the fact that I need to master that art. My plunder was my first piece of Versace -- glasses.  Nice Elle MacPherson intimate and a lipstick.
9) It's possible to be with 6 other very lovely-looking women and not feel like you're underdressed/overdressed, fatter, thinner, prettier, uglier, hotter, more sophisticated, less sophisticated than them. If it's possible to feel secure in  your skin with six women of completely different personalities, zodiac signs, sizes and backgrounds, then it's possible to feel that way with any woman. Except perhaps Salma Hayek.
10) I need to get out more often.