HRJanuary 20, 2023by pragmaadmin0Let’s Celebrate the Men this Womens Day

In my very personal account celebrating Women’s day is about recognition of gender equality and not differentiating between different genders.  And I say genders as plural as its not just about man and women but about every other gender that exists in society today.  To me its should be about celebrating everyone and that everyone has an equal role to play in society and that there are no specific stereotypes to that.  One can be just who they want to be without any inhibitions or judgements.  That’s what I would like to celebrate. If we had to dedicate a day then let’s make that about appreciating the human and the person in you.  And today after many life experiences, I have come to realise in this patriarchy dominance over centuries where the society is conditioned to think in certain ways and expect each gender to behave in certain ways. THAT’S WHERE THE ISSUE IS!  often the ones getting carried out with those ideas or behaviour is even not obvious and often they do it without realising it.  To me, equality is about breaking that barrier and letting one be the way they want to be in their natural self and not get moulded in the societal boundaries. If we truly want to celebrate women’s day (which I would like to rephrase as – Gender Equality Day) I want to celebrate the men who stand by this principle and not just the women’s achievements as we cannot achieve equality if we don’t have the men/the entire society standing behind this. And today I want to celebrate that ONE man who is behind the WOMAN I am today. My Dad! He is the one who changed this definition for me. He never taught me equality nor that he preached for such a thing to me but he just lived a life and showed me the path to follow. Actually, we never talked about equality or spent hours debating feminism. Yes, we debated on a lot of topics but not this. In fact, until a certain age in my life, the idea of inequality was rather alien to me as I never grew up knowing how that looks like and that’s probably why I am who I am today! My dad just lived his life by examples and brought me up exactly on the same terms as my brother! He just never differentiated between us.  We both were his kids and that’s that! Gender never played a part in our growing up or bringing up!  That’s what I call equality!  He always encouraged me to make a career exactly the same way he told my brother, he never even once told me I had to learn domestic stuff any differently from my brother. He only said you need to learn all skills to be independent and self-reliant not cos you had to be married off to someone. I was extremely competitive with my brother in my childhood about everything and my Dad used to say “always have a healthy competition to do better and improve but remember to recognise each other’s successes too”. He treated my mother with respect and never degraded her role of being a homemaker, rather he did the opposite. I saw them working as a team when we went to school and bringing us up.  There was never the conversation of dad taking over mom.  Only we knew that they both had separate roles to play in the family but no one was trying to compete with the other in the process. I grew up knowing that’s exactly how it should be. Never knew what gender inequality is until I grew up and saw the world! But my world was already created by him by his beliefs that were instilled in me. So, to me today let’s celebrate the men. Who bring equality to the table and only then we can truly celebrate the essence of today. Thank you, Baba (Dad), for making me!