The Shoe On The Wrong foot

I think that as long as a woman does not support her kind, she will be always in the shadows. How much ever we shout from the rooftops about equality, about man’s ill-treatment of women and the lack of empathy towards her, unless woman herself changes her stance there is no hope for her. We will still have a mother-in-law ill-treating her daughter-in-law, or the other way around, and will will still have lady bosses in the corporate world who pull down competition in the form of women. We would have healthier serials on the television where we are not fed vamps decorated with all the jazzy clothes and bedecked with jewelry fit for a advertising campaign for a jewellery shop, arranging for pregnant woman falling down the stairs, or having cars ramming in to the heroine. Life overall would be pleasanter!We had some people visiting us, and during the course of conversation, the talk shifted to marriage, and arranged marriages and proposals. One lady in the group remarked about how her cousin’s wedding got cancelled, just because the girl wanted the boy to shift base, instead of the other way around. The reason was something which happens naturally in every family, in Indian society; only difference being, it happens in the boy’s life! Yes. taking care of the parents. It is the accepted norm, and why, even the expected norm that the girl leaves her parents’ house to set up home with the boy, and almost in all cases, with the boy’s parents. But, today, when a woman asks the same of the boy, the society is scandalized. Well, after all who accepts change willingly? But the sad part is, that the women are scandalized! How can a girl even think of saying something like that? How can she be so presemptous so to ask the boy to shift base, leaving a lucrative job? (The girl is having an equally lucrative job , but that is besides the point!) So, though the girl is an only child, and she would like to keep an eye on her aging parents, the thought is ludicrous; so the proposal fell flat. Given the closed door attitude of our society, there are chances that the girl may remain single, just because this one condition or option of hers may not be accepted by a prospective groom. Or if she is lucky (?) she may find a boy in the same city, and they can live happily ever after!We all talk of global changes; yet deep-rooted within each of us are certain basic socially fed norms, ideas and conventions that refuse to give in. The change has to start somewhere. Why can’t it start at our generation? Why can’t we accept that the girl who wants to take care of her parents has an equal right to do so, as the boy, and be open about it? Why do we feel it is below the boy’s dignity to shift base, just to accommodate the girl’s wishes? I personally think, that if he did this one act of consideration, the basis of the marriage would be rock-solid; the girl would meet him more than half-way, simply because she would have realized that here was a man, who accepted a girl as a person in her own right, with her own set of ideas of how the world should be. He may not agree with all of her views, but there would definitely be respect and commitment which are the solid foundations of marriage.