A man's world?

If you are an Indian Hindu, you are aware of and sensitive to the treatment of Muslims in Hindustan. On a daily basis, you do your bit to relieve your conscience of what Muslims would have you believe - that they are an oppressed religious minority barely surviving amongst teeming millions of Hindus in this kaleidoscopic countryscape.

The Hindu head of the household may well employ a Muslim driver, the lady of the house may well hire a Muslim maid, the children of the house might even feast on Sevaiyan brought lovingly by Rani-Bibi, and the family might even make monthly donations to the maid's son's college fund. The Hindu soul is appeased. Perhaps, a tad like the white-black schism in the West. Where, as a famous black comedian once put it - "All the black people I know have several white friends; all the white people I know have only one black friend"! Do what appeases your conscience, soothes the soul and wear the "I did my bit" badge on your social sleeve. It is an assumption of mine that Bengalis treat their sons and daughters in much the same way. Simplistic, you say? Perhaps, but humor me today.

Calcutta in the 80s was a land where men were men, and women were Femina-beautiful. Most families followed traditional social norms; men were the sole breadwinners, women were homemakers, and a Bengali household would serve up rice pudding on the son's birthday, but not quite as often for the girl-child. Admittedly, we were granting more exposure to our daughters, opening them up to a world of possibilities by showering them with a "convent education", or "something your mother never had". Our sons were well, boys. Sigh. They would roll in the mud, scrape their elbows, jump off brick walls, and would simply not do their homework. You could often hear a mother (of a son or two) prosaically hold forth "I wish I had had a daughter instead". You could perhaps discern that it was even fashionable - to yearn for daughters in a day and age where airhostesses were the rage, female co-pilots were cheered, and Kiran Bedi was on TV. But, while we let our boys be boys and groomed our daughters to be sons, unwittingly we were laying the bricks for the evolution of the "modern family" as we know it today - where the man behaves less like a man, and the woman strives to be more than a woman. That still leaves us with way more testosterone than the world needs.

What has not changed since the 80s though, are our expectations of our children. The MO of the 70s-80s parent brigade was that the girl child needed to be educated to "secure her future", not that of her parents - mind you ["Aajkal-kar cheleder bhorsha nei" banal chatter pervaded the atmosphere]. Which differed greatly from the expectations of the boy child. You could retrace decades into the annals of Indian social history and find legions of sons with familial (I mean financial) chains. The girls were married off, with the expectation that they would raise families, run households, hold down jobs with equal panache. Not to worry about the folks back home. Which raises the question, who truly suffers from this "soft bigotry of low expectations"? When you arm your daughters with an education (not a degree), expect them to be opinionated - don't saddle them with the same traditional marriages of yore. Ask of them what you ask of your sons. Accept from them the helping hand you once lent them. Surely, "To whom much is given, much is expected" was not coined only with men in mind.