Month: October 2021

Is Patriarchy sustained by matriarchs?

I am aware that  I might ruffle a few feathers with this idea , may touch a raw nerve somewhere; but I ramble on hoping that nobody takes offence. As always , I assert my right to be wrong. After all, I am the sole Mark  Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey of this blog space. I can modify  or delete the post or any comments… ha ha.

 Most families, even if not living as the traditional joint families , have somebody calling the shots on shastra sampradaya. Shastra is a set of rules wherein at most the interpretation can be different while the rules are by and large fixed. Sampradaya refers to traditions that  can be bent ,  broken or twisted beyond recognition..after there is no appeal to “aise hi hota hai hamare ghar men”. This is where the grand ma scores .

In Tamil country , you will have a paatti in command and you can’t imagine a Punjabi family without a beeji. So is it in every other part of the country .

What’s the grand pa doing ? After all he is the one logically supposed to be  imposing  ‘Patriarchy’.

Most likely , post retirement, men become a kind of manpower (pun intended) surplus to the establishment, as we say in the army. The manpower is there without any power; that leaves the man.

He is generally occupied with activities like golf(in the army) or reading newspapers , walks etc. He does make some noise now and then to show his presence, but mostly it’s when he misplaces his reading glasses or when he finds someone sitting on his favourite chair . He has neither the inclination nor the energy to impose his will on the family leave alone the extended family.

It’s the biji or paatti who constantly keep evaluating the pecking order. She decides which are the ‘must attend’ functions and which one can be given a pass. Along with this one has to decide on the price range of gifts and so on. If the function is hosted by the family , then the scope of work becomes too complex. You need to cover who all should be invited. Then comes the subtle divisions in hierarchy wherein  invitees are classified…just send invitation, invitation followed by phone call, personal visit and personal visit with appropriate gifts.

It is not just restricted to social and religious functions but pervades through every activity in a joint family.

With all these subtle and some not so subtle maneuvers, one ensures that the classic values of a patriarchal society are propagated and sustained.

Ok, then shouldn’t it be called matriarchy? Here’s the catch; all decisions are taken for the benefit of her sons and grandsons, directly or indirectly. It is also  ensured that daughters in law and sometimes even daughters don’t overstep their briefs.

What about male domination at the work place? It is there , but it is just male domination , not patriarchy , right ? Even if it resembles so, it just goes to prove that the seeds of male domination anywhere, is sowed at home, yes.., by the matriarchs!

I rest my case.

Is it wrong to say that so far, it is the family matriarchs who have been sustaining patriarchy.

That’s the story so far.

Where do we go from here ?

Women of my generation , ie senagers   (senior citizens who want to live like teenagers, or shall we say ,cool seniors) are the first lot to have had a full career and are financially well placed to lead an independent life.

Rightly or wrongly they do not have many children and grand children to boss over. They have enough interests outside family issues to keep them occupied.

It remains to be seen whether they will still  like to wield power over their shrinking brood , however small or tiny, and if so, will sons continue to get preferential treatment.

I don’t think it is likely. There ends patriarchy.. feminism or no feminism.

Today I saw a full page advt on TOI. Normally I flip over these pages to get to the main news / editorials. Something caught my eyes in the advt. It was about festival of lights and it showed a lady with lots of gold on but the all important bindi missing.

When we grew up almost everything was expected to be done as per some shastra. There was a right way and wrong way to do anything.

A bath meant you start pouring water from head to toe rather than start with feet; washing upper part of the body using the right hand and lower part with the left. Eating meant , your left hand not touching any food or the plate. When you leave the house you say ” I’ll come’ rather than “I’ll go”.

No doubt we questioned everything; nobody stopped us from questioning. When appa used to go to the barber’s , he used to take either my brother or me; not both  . I started pestering him “why not both ” . For some days he avoided the question and one day he had to blurt out” both of you don’t get a haircut on the same day as it is done only when your father dies”. I never asked again.

At the kitchen , whether it is grinding for dosai or pouring oil around dosai on the tawa, it was always done clockwise and never the other way round. On deepawali you make 2 or 4 bakshanams and for shrardh you make three of everything , vegetables, sweetmeats etc; never never the other way round.

Why ?

Everything was clearly divided into mangalam and amangalam. (Auspicious and inauspicious) or shubh and ashubh.

I have hardly seen my sisters or mother with hair open except when they had to oil and re-plait their hair. (Only when there was a tragedy at home , hair was left un-plaited)

Let’s not gloat that today’s youngsters are liberated; may be they are free from the traditional shastras; but they have got caught in a nastier trap.

They do everything as per cool-shastra , written probably by some Swami Chillananda! Just like the binaries of earlier times, today we divide everything into cool and not so cool.

Details may vary from place to place..but there are clear divisions. Shower is cool , bucket bath is not. Open hair is cool, plaited hair or coiffures are not. Makeup is cool but bindi is not. Dating is cool, arranged marriage is not. Festivities are cool but rituals are not. In weddings, Mehndi and sangeet are cool but havan is not. Panchakacham and madisaar are cool as a fashion statement but not cool when done to follow traditions.

Sounds like an old man rambling on about the good old days when Sun was Sun and Moon was Moon.

I don’t suggest going back in time, after all, most of these rules affect the personal life of women and girls most and men are less affected and even traditional rituals by and large suit them.

Sure, we need to look ahead.

What I find disturbing is that even on a day like deepawali or wedding in the family , a basic feature indicating shubh , like a bindi is frowned upon.

Why call it deepawali at all when you find diya not cool.

Why call it a hindu wedding when a havan (and the accompanying smoke) is frowned upon. Why put the parents through events like sangeet and mehendi when the core part of the rituals “kanyadaan” is a strict no-go.

Let there be some basic decorum as one follows in the corporate world.

This is just one aspect of the issue ; who decides what is cool and what is not. Is it really the individual’s choice ? I mean the young and some not so young cool kids. (and those who say age is just a number; don’t ask their knees, knees don’t lie) . I doubt. Mostly they are dancing to the tunes set by the people who  influence social behaviour.

Social influencers do decide how you live. Apart from others, advertising world influences social behaviour the most. Commercials in turn or influenced by social behaviour. One feeds on the other and supports the other moving about like two drunk sailors who don’t know who is supporting whom.

On the  issue of bindi , I recall a story from a noted marketing guru Ambi Parameshwaran’s book For God’s sake. He had made a commercial featuring a girl in a health club. Before releasing it,  he is apprehensive if the idea would go well with the target audience as the girl was sporting a tiny bindi. Was it cool ? Do modern women (then modern) who frequent health clubs consider it cool? Those days , video editing software apps were not so advanced to edit it out. Finally he let it go as it was and it worked.

Today it may not. Our opinions are just the output of the thousands of visuals  we are bombarded with on SM , TV and now even print media. (text is passe; scope of TLDR is getting narrower and narrower) Today even a math text book is colorful and full of graphics!

 So what do we do ?

The least we can do is to stop insulting festivals and cultural, religious events by referring to them by the traditional names. We may have to coin some new words, like gold festival; like the chocolate day etc . Youngsters are quite imaginative if not well informed. As Deepawali becomes some thing celebrated with no bindi, open hair, sans diya , sans fireworks it might as well be called something else. With the kind of makeups and attires becoming cool, what comes to mind is ‘Halloween’ !

 

Medicos are fond of acronyms and mnemonics. This starts in their college days in an effort to remember the names of myriad nerves and blood vessels and carries on through their medical practice.

One popular mnemonic to remember the 12 cranial nerves ..
Ooh, Ooh, Ooh, to touch and feel very good velvet. Such heaven!
There are more explicit versions for this. I didn’t make them up. Ask Google!

The term DABDA was coined by Dr Elizabeth Kubler Ross to study how people cope up with approaching death.

She divided the process into five distinct stages , Denial , Anger, Bargain, Depression and Acceptance.

Later, psychologists have found that these stages apply to almost any problem faced by a human being. The trigger could be a bank statement showing low balance or your child’s mark-sheet showing poor performance. Or it could be lab report showing high sugar-levels. I can’t count the number of times I have blamed my (blood pressure)BP instrument for showing high BP. This attitude only resulted in the BP shooting further up.

The first reaction is invariably denial. Some people would rush to the banker or the teacher that there was something wrong with the report ; some serious error in arithmetic, may be.

Once it is seen that there is nothing wrong with the calculations, the next stage starts. There is anger ; anger at anybody who could be blamed. If it is about the child’s report card, the parents may blame each other, the teacher, the noisy neighborhood or even Mark Zuckerberg for the effect of Instagram on children.

The third stage is bargain. One is prepared to negotiate with rewards and punishments.

The fourth stage is depression. When it dawns on the person that the problem was there and one has to confront it.

The final stage is acceptance , one that brings calmness. Then one does what can be done to alleviate the problem and accepts that which cannot be altered.

Over the years , I have seen this process playing out  in myself and in others over many issues.

Here’s a recent happening that made me recall DABDA .

Observing an overflow of a sewage tank onto the road, I brought it to the notice of the concerned housing society.

The first reaction was that it was just rain water and was not sewage water at all.

Subsequently, everyone was blamed for various acts of commissions and omissions that resulted in damage to their well laid out overflow pipe line. If it was just rain water flowing on the street, why bring in the issue of damage to overflow pipe?

These stages often overlap. Even while hovering between denial and anger the third stage also kicked in. We’ll pump out the water but you make your drains. This was followed by some ugly veiled threats that the road itself could be blocked .

Why do I analyse? The problem does not go away by mere analysis, but understanding helps calm the mind.

Whatever be, the first step to solving any problem is acceptance that there was a problem and that noone else but you could solve it.

Thathasthu.