The last couple of days has been pleasantly peaceful - the weather that is. After successive long hot sunny sweaty days, it has been exceptionally cloudy and drizzling, exceptional for the month of the year it is. I am guessing its cooler now that women’s day is done and gone. I guess everything is cool if the women folk of the world are cool. :)
Happy Women's day girls. I hope you have had a blast!
Talking of women, and women having a day and all to celebrate and all that jazz, I would like to take this opportunity to narrate an incident that happened in my life recently. I happened to take a bus a couple of days ago to get to work. Having heard stories about busses in Bangalore and the crowd involved, I was fully prepared, with knee and elbow braces and all. But surprisingly, the bus I got into (which would take me from Baneerghatta road to St.Patriks church on brigade road, was very empty and for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel claustrophobic in the Bangalore traffic.
So as I sat in one of the many empty seats and bought my ticket, a lady hopped into the bus. I have very limited knowledge about the "how to travel in a BMTC bus effectively without being pick picketed or molested" but then what followed next was something I could not concur with.
To explain the scene, let me give you details about the setting. Like I said, the bus was almost empty, in the sense that there were around 10 people in it, most of them had taken all the window seats available on the left side (non sunny side). Man 1 was sitting in one of the front left window seats (marked "ladies"). Man 2 was sitting with his friend on the right side. I was sitting behind all this on one of the back aisle seats from where I could get a clear view of the scene that followed. Woman enters the bus. She looks here and there and approaches Man 1.
Woman: Could you get off the seat?
Man 1: (taking off his earphones) sorry?
Woman: Get off that seat. I want to sit there.
Man 1: There are so many vacant seats. Sit in any of them.
Woman: No this seat is marked ladies. Could you please get off the seat?
Man 1: Come on, so many seats are empty. Sit somewhere else please.
Woman: Get off!
Man 1 ignores her and puts his ear phones back on.
Woman: (At conductor with a "what the fuck" look) Excuse me
Conductor: Sit somewhere else madam. The whole bus is empty.
Woman: (Ignoring the conductor, gets back to her man, trying to jab him on his shoulder to attract his attention from his ear phones)
Man 2: interrupts: Excuse me madam, why are you doing this? There are so many seats. It doesn’t make sense to wake him up. Sit somewhere else
Woman: What do you mean? You guys don’t respect women at all
Man 2: Respect? Excuse me! What respect are you talking about? It requires common sense to find yourself a seat in an almost empty bus.
Woman: Common sense? I want to sit there. That is a ladies seat.
Man 2: (pointing at another empty seat, on the right side) That is a woman's seat too. Sit there.
Woman: NO! I want to sit here only. And who are you to talk to me like this? I am not even talking to you. Mind your business
Man 2: Do what you want! (sigh! s and swears to himself. I distinctly heard him say Bitch. But he wasn’t talking to her anyway ;) right?)
Man 1 (cant take it anymore and gets into action)
Man 1: Why do you want to sit in this seat only?
Woman: There is shade there. I want to sit there only. And it’s a ladies seat. So get up.
Man 1: If you want shade, you should take an auto. You can’t come to a public bus and behave like a child.
Woman: What child? Driver stop the bus! Take me to the police.
(By now, everyone in the bus including me has stopped giving attention to the bitch. The driver moved on and the conductor went behind in the pretext of selling his tickets. The woman's ears have turned red. She is about to blow up. I could not wait for the action to begin. Unfortunately that’s my stop. I get off the bus and walk off, trying to kick start my day)
Now, clearly anyone with a sound mind on that bus would believe that the woman was a bitch! Swear it. I respect women a lot to abuse them, but this one was a total bitch.
But why am I abusing a woman on a blog which is titled "Happy woman's day"? I somehow feel that this whole women's rights and women are equal to men is over played. Way too over played. And I personally believe the women of today have taken full advantage of these two levels, women's rights and the school of thought of women being equal to men. That is, when the situation is better for them to be the weaker sex, they are but when it comes to certain other things, they want to be treated equal. This makes survival of the men folk much more complex that it already was. If handling a normal woman wasn’t tough enough!
Think about it. If you are going in a car and the car has a flat, YOU have fix it cos touching the tyre would dirty her hand. Or if the attic has to be cleaned, its you who have to climb up and get all the shit on your face. But when it comes to things like say, going to a pub, or for that matter cooking in the kitchen, the modern young women take a different stance. Women are no less than men these days. These days women work and earn as much as men and hence need equal rights and equal priviledges. Its not that I am against women going to a pub. Its just that if woman goes to a pub only to prove to the men that even she can be like him, that’s where she becomes a looser.
If its equal privileges you require, why in the name of the devil do you have to pick up the phone and call the man in your life (father, husband, boyfriend, brother, best friend, rakhi brother, random guy from orkut etc) when your radiator blows up? Equal privileges is all you want right? Get it fixed. Fix it yourself. Hitch a ride. Do something instead of the call?
It’s not just about the car where double standards are maintained. Over all, this world is living on the double standards of the modern women. This is what education does I feel! Ruineth you!
I think its very simple. Women, with just the gift of giving birth to another human should make them much higher than men. Why don’t you look at it that way? Why do you want to come down to our level? We are all bastards in one way or the other right? Why do you want to be EQUAL to us?
It’s time we accept that we are different species and take it from there.
Happy womens day either ways!
Cheers