No feminist please, we are Indian

On social media, one encounters "No feminist please" more and more. 

Something like this ad: 

This got me thinking. What is it about trad wives that men want, and why are women not willing to be trad wives.

A good starting point, of course, was to just list what a traditional marriage looks like. 

In a traditional Indian marriage: 

What traditional Indian wives do: 

1. Cook (with help) 

2. Clean (oversee the help) 

3. Raise kids (with support from other women in the house or family) 

4. Ensure that all family celebrations are taken care of. Everyone has the gift that they deserve, all family equations are maintained. 

5. Host visiting relatives. 

6. Host friends of children. 

7. Organise children's birthday parties. 

8. Know the preferences of everyone in the family and ensure a fair balance between junk and healthy eating. 

9. Socialise with their friends or relatives after sending the kids and husband to their respective school/office. OR take a nap. 

10. Get up in the morning to ensure kids get to school, husband gets to work. 

11. Settle the house at night before going to bed. 

12. Give chai to the husband once he comes back from work. 

13. Attend all family functions and perform the work expected. Ensuring that the function goes off smoothly, assisting mother in law or the eldest daughter in law in doing the function. 

14. Teaching children all about our epics, our traditions, and performing the pooja in the family temple every day. 

15. Never drink or smoke in public. 

16. Manage the household and make the list of supplies that the husband must get every month from the ration shop. 

17. Wear only Indian clothes in the house. (nightie exempted) 

18. Touch the feet of visiting elders. 

19. On all matters of finance, defer to the husband. 

20. No work outside the house. Volunteer or something only when it doesn't interfere with family responsibilities. 

21. Learn the traditions of the marital family and perpetuate them. This includes their food habits, their religious observance, their family celebrations, and the way they communicate with each other. 

22. Bear children within 2 years of marriage. 

What traditional Indian husbands do: 

1. Be the sole breadwinner. Never taking a penny from the wife. 

2. Give their salary to the wife at the start of each month for her to manage the family's finances. 

3. Bring groceries on their way home from office. 

4. After freshening up and drinking his chai, sit with the kids to complete their homework while the wife cooks dinner for the family. 

5. Take wife along on all social events. Not being able to attend any social event without the wife. 

6. Participate in all functions on the in-laws side. 

7. During summers, when the wife visits her parents for a few weeks, go to drop her and then go to pick her up. Spending at least one night at the in-laws' place on both occasions. 

8. Take wife, parents, and kids to the doctor whenever the need arises. 

9. Perform routine repairs in the house or cause them to be done. 

10. Touch parents' feet every morning and night if they are in a joint family. 

11. Take wife and kids to an outing every Sunday, spending time with them and making memories. 

12. Take family to the kids' PTM, annual day function, school picnic etc. Drop the children and pick them up. 

13. Buy the monthly ration based on the list given by Shri mati ji. 

14. On all matters of how the house will be run, what will be bought, what gifts will be given, and how the house will be decorated, defer to the wife. 

15. Be home straight after office, no hobnobbing with male friends after work, and no working late into the night. 

16. No speaking to any bhabhiji without the wife being present. Absolutely no calls or messages from female colleagues on one's phone. 

17. With or without kids, never reaching home drunk. Ever. 

18. Gifting wife a piece of gold jewelry at all important occasions like birthday and anniversary. 

19. Making financial and investment decisions for the family's secure future. 

20. Ensuring that all family poojas are conducted by the couple jointly, as mandated by Hinduism (and most Indic religions). 

21. Have children within 2 years of marriage. 

Notice something? 

Many of the duties of a trad husband do not get done at all. 

The things on the wife's plate are more or less exactly as they were. 

Many things from the husband's plate are now on the wife's plate. 

2 lessons for me here: 

1. I understand why women are turning "feminist" 

2. When men ask for trad wives, are they also ready to be trad husbands? Because that is how that system works. 

What do you think? 

अनुरोध: एक पाती परिपाटी के नाम*

पाती: Letter 

परिपाटी: Tradition 

अनुरोध:

एक पाती

परिपाटी के नाम

 

तुम मेरे पैरों में

पायल बनना

बेड़ी नहीं

 

मेरे हाथों में

हाथफूल बनना

हथकड़ी नहीं

 

सत्य की

चेतना बनना

सती की

चिता नहीं

 

मेरी प्यारी परंपरा,  

तुमसे केवल यह अनुरोध:

  

पथ को

प्रशस्त करना

मन को

परास्त नहीं

 

A Letter to Tradition

In my feet 

be the anklet 

not the shackle 

In my hands 

be the bracelet 

Not the handcuff

Be the voice of reason 

Not the agent of oppression 

My dear Heritage,  

I only ask you this: 

Be the illuminator

of my path 

Not the dampener 

of my spirit. 

As usual, the wordplay is much better in Hindi, but I have really tried to do justice to the thought in English. 

 

 

In case you think your partner is oh so dumb.

I have seen that men find a special pleasure in making their wives feel dumb and unimportant. 

This post is for them: 

She married you. If you think only a dumb fuck would marry you, you need to work on your self-concept. Not her intelligence. 

PS: This quote also applies to women who think their husbands are so stupid. They are not. They married you. It would have taken some intelligence to choose you over the others. 

Pakistan becomes the first country to successfully deal with illegal residents

 While we were busy with other major news, Pakistan, on October 3rd, asked everyone living illegally in the country to move out voluntarily by November 1st or be arrested, and thousands of people left - on their own.

The UN tried to intervene, the Afghan government tried to influence, but the *interim* government of Pakistan kept its stand unchanged. They must leave, or they will be arrested.

This, from an interim government.

Some of these undocumented people reached Pakistan in 1979 but never documented themselves or applied for refugee/citizen status.

This makes Pakistan the first country in the world to successfully deal with illegal immigration.

PS: Is there a human cost? Sure. Is this the right thing to do? No idea. But I think it deserves to be recognised that Pakistan became the first country to issue a warning and actually get illegal residents to voluntarily leave.

Voting for the Congress solves one kind of problems

Karnataka had a hijab problem. 

Karnataka voted Congress to power. 

Karnataka does not have a hijab problem since then*. 

Now, Karnataka has a bankruptcy problem. 

#July 2024 

* No hijab rule was passed. As soon as the Congress was voted to power, all protests asking for the right to wear hijab stopped completely. 

Book Review: Khushwant Singh's Joke Book 9

It might feel strange to review a joke book. But joke books are what converted a child from a non-reader to a reader. 

Jokes are underrated. Humour is the lubrication of human interactions. 

So, joke books, in my book, are right up there.  

For my generation, Khushwant Singh is up there when it comes to joke books. 

And yet... this book disappoints spectacularly. 

The jokes are ALL old, mostly lame, and some downright incendiary. My most hated "joke" is this: 

Morning: Incense; Night: Incest 

Morning: Shivling; Night: Cunnilingus 

- the contributor of this "Joke" is Karan Thapar from Delhi. 

Give this book a complete miss. 

The Journey of my Meditation

There are very few academic decisions that my parents have forced upon me. I can remember only one. As the school topper, I had the choice of junior college (we go to a junior college for grades 11 and 12). My mother insisted that I have to join Maharishi College. So, I did. 

One of the best decisions EVER. 

Maharishi is based on the principles of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Every day, 2 twenty minute sessions of Transcendental Meditation were mandatory. 15 year olds don't want to meditate. So, I used to think about random stuff during meditation. 

During the 12th Board Exams, however, i started doing meditation to relax between the study sessions. It started small - 5 minutes after every 25 minutes of studying. 

That is where the meditation journey started - at the age of 17.  

We had a pooja room in the house and every morning, we had to pray before leaving home. Those 5 minutes of meditation became a lifelong habit. I have now meditated pretty much every day for 30 years. 

The practice itself has evolved. 

Here are the changes I have observed: 

A. Calm. I used to be a very angry soul - easily angered. Over a period of time, that changed to being the kind of person that is rarely, if ever, hassled. 

B. Thoughts in head - For 90% of things, if someone asks me, what do you think? I do not think. Not everything begets an emotional or intellectual response. Not sure if this is good or bad. It just is. 

C. I was fortunate to be in a small organisation where everyone practised Reiki. That is how I got exposed to healing through meditation. A part of my meditation has been healing and aura reading. Sometimes, it has helped people with pain relief. Sometimes, it helps to communicate with a family member who is in coma. The greatest challenge of this practice is that one knows that one should not fight with God or destiny, but there are times when I have. I do not regret it. 

D. I am very, very sensitive to who I meet and where I spend time. There are places from which I will exit immediately. People whom I meet once and am ready to be lifelong friends with. 

E. I did three sessions of past life regression to understand some of the knots I was experiencing in this birth. Recollecting those births and the karmic balance one has to restore in this birth helped my comprehension of this birth a lot. 

F. There is no concept of achievement or failure. Everything is just what it is. If one appears in lots of press articles, that is fine. If one has to shut down a business, that hurts, but that is fine too. 

G. I approach most things and people from a place of love. My default emotion is love. 

H. And this is my greatest experience - after you have climbed the steps, done the siddhis, worked the miracles, after you have done everything of that, you will experience sam bhaav - a sense of equanimity. And after you have experienced equanimity, you will experience Anand - joy for its own sake. I experience it for a very brief period, but am waiting for the time when Ananda is the default state. Ananda cannot be described. It can only be experienced. As a younger person, I did not want Ananda, i wanted to experience the Navarasas in this physical existence. :) 

Very recently, I have been started on a new meditation practice that is different from my lifelong work of healing. I am enjoying this new place and learning a lot. 

I do have a meditation name that is different from my Earth name. It was given to me very early in meditation and has over the years, proved to be very very true.  

Today's question from meditation

Today, I got asked a question in my meditation and have to think about it all day. 

Here is the question: 

यदि शिव और शक्ति एक ही हैं, तो अलग अलग क्यूँ है? उन्हें दो भिन्न स्वरूप क्यूँ दिए गए? 

If Shakti and Shiva are the same, why were they given two different names and forms? 

I thought about it for a while but could not arrive at an answer. Then, a hint was given to me: 

Why does a coin have two sides? Why not print the same thing on both sides? 

सिक्के के दो पहलू क्यूँ होते हैं? एक ही छाप दोनों ओर क्यूँ नहीं? 

All thoughts welcome. 

Edited 11 Jul 2024 (early morning) 

The coin has two distinct sides - one has the denomination and the other has the name of the kingdom / ruler. Both of these pieces of information are needed to define the coin - without either, the coin is useless. 

BUT, they denote two completely unrelated things. All kingdoms have multiple denominations and all standard denominations are issued by every single kingdom. 

How is this connected to Shiva and Shakti? 

Shiva and Shakti complete each other the way the two sides of the coin complete each other. They are absolutely vital. Without one, the other does not exist, has no meaning. 

BUT, they are two different types of energy. The Chinese call them Yin and Yang, but it doesn't matter. What matters is the nature of the two energies - one fluid, nurturing, emotional. The other, fair, just, straight. 

The side that is needed at one place is the energy that comes up in that situation. Sometimes, we need the maternal energy, sometimes, we need the paternal. Sometimes, we need the raw power of Shakti, and sometimes, we need the dhairya of Shiv. Shiv holds his power like he holds the Ganga - quietly. Shakti is the energy that makes that energy visible and obvious. 

Lessons from Meditation

I was started on a new meditation practice recently. 

While praying at someone else's house, I was given two lessons. This post is to share those. 

These ideas were rotating in my head for some time as plausible theories. On that day, they were completely clarified and explained. 

1. In physical entities, size is not always relevant to structure. Elements that have been juxtapositioned in a certain way will go on to form similar structures, irrespective of their physical size. This is true of atoms and of galaxies. 

The structure of atoms is a lot like the structure of galaxies. There are fringe electrons that rotate around the dense core. These fringe electrons are the first ones to participate in a bond, just as the fringes of galaxies are the first to merge. Likewise, all sun and planet systems, because they are juxtaposed in a certain way, will always take the structure of mostly oval orbits. This is irrespective of the size of the star and the relevant planets. 

2. All consciousness holds two levels of consciousness at all times - it is both an ecosystem and an individual entity. This is true of RBCs and the planet Earth, and everything in between. A cell is an ecosystem for all the intracellular elements. But it is a cell unto itself. Tissues are ecosystems to the cells, but also individual participants in an organ. Organs are ecosystems, but also individual organs acting as one. 

This, again, is independent of size. Even the tiniest known conscious element has sub elements. Just as we cannot aggregate the universe and say this is how big it is, we also cannot reach its smallest unit. 

Vidur ji slaying individualism a few millennia before Ayn Rand

त्यजेत् कुलार्थे पुरुषम् ग्रामस्यार्थे कुलम् त्यजेत् 
ग्रामम् जनपदस्यार्थे आत्मार्थे पृथिवीं त्यजेत् 

For the (welfare of) family, let go of a person 

For the village, let go of the family. 

For the country, let go of the village 

For the welfare of oneself, let go of the entire Earth. 

- Vidura Neeti