A Dream became reality for the Frederictonians

Fredericton has its own ‘cultural’ building, housing all the ethnic groups under one roof. This was the vision of a few people in my community including myself, so when it finally became a reality (yesterday), I was very emotional. I couldn’t help it!

https://www.theculturalcentre.ca/about/our-history

Who am I: Sunita's story

I met an old household helper today. She told me that I was the best boss she ever had and that she misses me very much.

This was not the first time I had heard such compliment from my former helpers. But this time I felt different.

I treat my helpers as human being, not as an object to fulfill my cleaning needs. Unlike some people I know, my eyes fills with tears when I see or hear others suffering. I can be happy when others success and sad when they fail miserably. I've been this way all my life. I've inherited these treats from my mother.

After hearing time and again, “You’re so negative, nobody wants to be around you” and “ You've lost so many opportunities because of your loudmouth”, I really needed to hear some constructive quality of mine. I needed to be appreciated and be assured that my sense of righteousness has a place in this 'me, me' world. I knew I was doing something right, among a lot of wrong, but I needed confirmation.

Hi, Sunita is my disguised name. I'm hiding my real name for my privacy shake. I've lost a lot of money-making opportunities because I can't focus on my own welfare. Nor I'm able to go along with those who think about themselves all the time.

No matter how hard I try, I can't lose my conscience and I’m too damn sensitive to my own detriment. That’s who I am!

Playing with Emotions

The hypothesis that most women stay in abusive relationships for their own economic benefits does not measure up in my opinion, b/c I know more than one way of measuring relationships.

Women stay in relationship for more than economic reason and, sometimes they cling onto the relationship they never had because of the way they brought up. Let me share a story to demonstrate how this works:

An elderly lady I knew when I was growing up had joined a group of people that she had no connection with in her entire 70 years of life. The group she joined remotely relates to her good-for-nothing husband --the husband who married her at her tender age of 16 and left her in a society where her remarrying chance  is Zero!

The lady was with her husband for about six months. Even within this period she didn’t have physical contact with him according to her recent testimony. Other than this brief period, she has been living with her parents (dead now) for all her life. How did she think she belonged to her estrange husband and his family circle?   But she strongly believes she does!

Her estrange husband is probably married and living happily somewhere, while this lady is spending a lonely life for all these years.

The news of this lady joining the group took me back! I began thinking about the logic behind this lady and others like her mind.

When I was a child, I had heard that girls are conditioned to feel certain ways about the man they would marry later on. With so much brainwashing on how a husband should be treated and how to be a wife, it’s easy to accept any man in life and pretend to fall in love.

Girls in many societies are raised in such a way that they learn to take the word “husband” in a very emotional way. The promise to take care of each other in health and in sickness  in marriage they take literally. But not the man they marry, because men are permitted by our society to remarry thousand times!

Marriage vows are developed and construed by male in our male-dominated societies. Most ladies don't consider this and believe that there is no other relationship more promising, comforting and connecting to each other than the relationships between a husband and wife. No wonder marriages are taken so seriously by many women in our societies, but not by many men..

The circumcisions of young boys and girls (happens mostly in Judaism and Islam societies), the child-bride cultures, the polygamous philosophy, the untouchable cultures in some pockets of the world, and the abuses, rapes and murders that we read and hear every day in our societies are all part of the brainwashing. Brainwashing is the most powerful strategy used systematically to justify what is already known is the only truth, everything else is false!

Many girls in our societies are systematically brainwashed at home through the dialogues between their mother and father. Then the society reinforces further to make these assertions legal. How else can we explain millions of powerful women taking slaves role and treating their husband is a master?

Every temples, churches and mosques are built to reinforce these "master and slaves" roles. Folklores are written and recited again and again to shape the girls' brain certain ways.By the time the girls reach their puberty, they are completely sold to the idea that without their husband they are nobody. Their unwavering-faith towards their husband provides them with the emotional security that they can’t imagine their life without their husband. Because of this, most men see their marriage as a through-lane, instead of the two-way traffic lanes, where the traffic rules apply to both husband and wife.

Women’s willingness to consign themselves

Women’s willingness (mostly for the economic benefits) to wear low-cut blouses and jeans has been upsetting me since these ‘trends’started many years ago. I always wondered how much money the girls (and a few women) made from those activities and whether they could have earned the same amounts doing something else?

Making money from ‘legal and ethical’ work is hard, I’ve noticed. There are plenty of women publicly announcing her temporary career as sleeping with men to earn her living. Her arguments were, “I make more money by sleeping with guys a few hours a week than working my butt off for 40 hours a week on other jobs”.

Well, she does have compelling arguments! But is her expression permissible if we, as women, demand for equal opportunity and equal pay for equal work with men? Are there some men feeling the same way as the women do?

I’m well aware of some men prostitutes (gigolos). But this is fairly a new ‘market’ for men and would not announce their new career as openly with pride as some female prostitutes do!

Women making their living through selling sex or wearing low-cut tops and bottoms (showing their private parts)for money have their 'rights' of course, but they can't claim that they are 'discriminated' if they themselves choose to be nude in the name of ‘women’s fashion’. Becoming naked out of their enslavement (happens in some cases)is one thing, but doing it with their own conscience is quite another!

Most women don’t realise that they’re selling part of themselves to the ‘marketers’ and promoting the very corporations that they’re protesting against for moving the factory-jobs to oversee and exploiting child-labour.

 One of the blogs I read wrote:

Does wearing a low-cut dress give you more confidence? Should women really have to show off their breasts to get attention? Every time I wear something low-cut, I always have the fear that I'm too exposed or that I'm going to fall out of the top and have an embarrassing moment. I'm always readjusting my shirt and bra to make sure I don't fall out of my top. (Dalingish, February 2012)

A few other sites I visited wrote:

"...Men want hotpants, miniskirts and low cut tops banned from the office because they are too distracting (Mailonline, January 2013)

"A woman's clothing is broken and the entire chest appear before the masses of people and on television," I read on YouTube and was afraid to click on it, so I don't know what came on next!

"...Is it really bad to stare at a girl’s breasts? Are there any health benefits of staring at a girl’s cleavage? Also, what do women really think when they catch you staring at their breasts?," the Lovepancy.com wrote.

The New York Times wrote:

Those jeans that are cut three inches below your natural waist, so that no matter how skinny you are, when you sit down you have company: You and a roll of fat. And what happens in the back is anyone’s guess, but you know it cannot be good. You can feel it, your traitorous jeans slipping down and there you are in the window of a restaurant in a ladder back chair. You move your hand back to assess the damage and sure enough, there’s a panel of exposed flesh, jeans sneakily sliding down threatening that 21st century nightmare: butt cleavage (13 March, 2013).

We, as women, protest on women’s oppression, against abusive situations and batterments on women and demand for equal pay for equal work, but willingly show our breast and butt cleavages! We got to stop these ‘diminishing our own kind’ activities, if we want to move on with men in an equal footage.

Want to read an academic paper on this issue?, here is a good one:

http://www.academia.edu/1476147/Is_it_ethical_to_use_women_as_a_marketing_instrument

Thanks for visiting this blog! Leave your comments if you feel like it.

Celebrating the International Women's Day

Today is the International Women’s day I heard and that reminded me of all the women I know who were (and have been) wrongfully convicted and battered over the years. Top of that list stood a lady's name: Radhika.

Radhika was not her formal name but the one given to her after she was married by her in-laws. Radhika was petite, attractive, energetic, intelligent and witty. She worked very hard. Yet, her husband put her down constantly, often in front of other people, to humiliate her!


Radhika no longer lives among us. Now that she is gone, all we can do is to learn from her mistakes. Mistakes that she made to keep peace in her household. Mistakes that she couldn’t stand in front of her bully husband and say ‘You’re hurting me with your words (verbal abuse), please stop”. Mistakes that she couldn’t protest, “You work for money and I managed it. This makes us a partner, not a slave and a master”, when her husband claimed all the property they owned belonged only to him. Those mistakes not only hunted her for life but also to her next generation, little did she know!

Her husband was a victim himself. He didn’t realise that he had a victim mentality when dealing with his juniors (wife, children, and servants). His father had died by the time he was born and he was raised elite couple (his foster parents) who had spoiled him by providing more than he really needed (and that could have been the problem, too), he grew up wondering “who he really was; was he loved enough?”

Radhika's another weakness was that she  didn't have a courage to tell her husband, “Please don’t put me down by talking about the dowry my parents couldn’t give you at the marriage; I’ve made it up to you by working 16 hours a day.”

Learning to protect herself (himself) is one of the 'most have' skills in women (men) most people are not aware of, I've noticed. I've also observed that husbands (or any other persons) go after the proud, conscience, and submissive wives (people). They know that a proud wife (person) will not disclose her (his) abuse at home in the public; a conscience wife (husband) will forgive her husband (wife) thinking that "he (she) really doesn't know what he (she) is doing"; and a submissive wife (husband) will simply accept anything thrown at her (him) because she (he) has no courage to stand up to her (his) bully husband (wife).

When a husband asks dowry from his in-laws or orders his wife to work for money, there is a reason to be alerted. When a husband says, “I can feed you; quit your job”, he doesn’t mean it. He is just saying “Just because you earn some money, you can’t stop me from abusing you”.

Most parents love to give whatever they can afford to their children, as dowry or any other form. Nobody has to pressure them to give. Similarly, every wife would willingly look for a paid job outside of her home without her husband’s pressures when she realises that her family faces financial difficulties.

There will be always something a woman would do wrong in the eyes of her abusive husband. On the other hand, a loving husband would always find a way to appreciate his wife’s efforts even when her efforts go unintentionally wrong sometimes. Being aware of the abusive behaviours is our duty as a woman. Standing 'straight' up to the bully is something all mothers should teach to their daughters. Since economic dependency seems to be one of the major reasons for our girls to be abused, it is time we pay especial attention to our daughter's economic wellbeing.

Celebrating "women's day" once in a year is just the opposite of raking our daughters financially self-dependent all year around. It may not fit in many women's view but I think we need to stop celebrating this day since we don't celebrate "men's day". If we want men and women to be treated equally as partners. Either we start celebrating men's day or quit celebrating women's day.This is just my view, of course!

Waking up the lion within women

This morning I woke up with a nagging question of why do women most always need a ‘reason’ to bring out their courage (lion) that had been with them for all their life. I have noticed, while most men exhort their power to get what they want, most women hide theirs (not just their strengths, even their wisdoms they hide) to keep peace in their household.

Why keeping peace is women's job in most households?
 

Most women are acutely aware of their men’s vulnerabilities with regards to their egos -- if disturbed men can hunt their women down to their graves and the people (men as well as the women) around would just watch them suffer. Why does this happen? Well, that’s just what most people do!

 

It seems that most women are as capable as most men to carry out the missions they believe are worth pursuing. But most women don’t take advantage of their capabilities until they are put in the ‘fight or flight’ position. Even after this, most women choose to flight, rather than fight, because that’s what they have learned from their grandmother, mother, sisters and girlfriends.

 

My above thought sprang out of the most amazing story I read yesterday about a woman in Pakistan. Her name is Zahida Kazmi. Zahida had the courage to change her fate by taking a path that not only the women of developing countries but also the men of progressive world had thought impossible.  However the 'lion' inside of her did not wake up until her innocent little children needed her help. To read these incredible stories, please follow the links below:

 

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/01/08/the-only-female-taxi-driver/

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12680075

How we are conditioned slowly and surely

Yesterday I found two slugs in my bunch of watercress that was bought from a local farmer. I hate slugs! With all the warms and insects, I hate slugs (snails) the must. Come to think of it, I don’t like any of the earthly friends – can’t stand the caterpillars or earthworms, either. I love gardening, though. But not a good gardener since I can’t work around my garden friends.

I didn’t know what to do with my watercress. “Should I throw away the whole thing, slugs and the vegetable, or just the slugs”, I debated in my mind. I thought hard. I recalled some of the books I had read about pesticides, animals and the environment. Pesticides and animals do not go together; I determined. I reasoned: if these slugs are still attached to the watercress, this is a good news! This means the watercress is not sprayed and there are no poisonous chemicals. I knew one thing that what is good for pest (slugs) is good for us (human) also, so I felt happy for a brief moment. But my positive thoughts didn’t last very long.

With my dubious mind I washed the watercress three times in a sinkful of water and cooked the vegetable little longer than I usually do. While cooking the watercress, I kept repeating in my mind, “this is pure, without the pesticides vegetable” “It’ll do good for me…” But it didn’t! I kept thinking about the slugs all day long and I felt sick to my stomach.

Living in the supermarket-grown vegetables for years, I had forgotten how the ‘real’ vegetables grow in a farm without a pesticide.

These slugs reminded me of the groundhogs we’ve in Canada.  Beyond our rock garden there live at least half a dozen groundhogs, I think. They often invade my garden in the spring and summer and I’ve been chasing them ever since I established the garden. Sometimes I stone them. Other times I throw whatever I find close by. I’ve targeted them with my shoe, placemate, spoons, quarterplates – anything when I saw them from inside of the house. Still they visit my garden just the same! They’re not afraid of me anymore. In my desperate attempt, I asked one of my neighbours to buy me a slang-shot and/or a trap. But my family threatened me that they would report my case to a police. “Mom, you invaded their habitat. It’s not their fault that they eat your garden (my favorite plants); your garden is where their home used to be”.

One of them died in our driveway, one of our daughters drove right over it one summer. The poor thing must have been resting under our daughter’s car; she didn’t know. She was so sorry when she found it out!

We’re conditioned to do certain things and behave certain ways without our knowledge. We feel ‘normal’ to do the things we’re accustomed to. We forget that normalcy is the condition we bring to ourselves, slowly and surely.

This piece of blog is the tribute to my favorite environmentalist, Rachel Carson. For those of you who do not know about Rachel and want to know about her contributions, here is a link to follow:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/how-silent-spring-ignited-the-environmental-movement.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0