Traditions... Gender.... Equality

Last week we had good discussions on gender equality and how it affects traditions and at the end I was thinking we both were talking about two different sides of the same coin. She was talking more about fighting for one's rights and I was more of romanticizing the imaginition-practices one associate himself with, and though everything is fair in love and war but that doesn't mean love and war are the same things.

She was insistent that women should be given even opportunities, and in sweden still most of the C-level and management level positions are held by men.

I was of the veiw that although women should be given equal opportunities, but their is a fine line between giving opportunities and enjoying traditions out of ones own free will. I told her about my mother's grandmother side of the tradition where women donot call their husbands by their names in the public (as a sign of respect; and i leave it to our imagination how these older generations used to call their husbands in private) and though this thing is dying and my own siblings are not following it but still alot of people romanticize about it. Their was also a tradition of calling the the wedded girl "bride" even after years and years of marriage and my mother used to laugh about the incivility of my father's family side of traditions; she got married to a punjabi family where on the second day the bride is called a "budhi" (an old one) .

courtesy:Wikipedia

On the other side the example of man kneeling on his toes when proposing to a woman may be taken as an example of gender inequality but on the other hand i being a non-westerner finding it very romanticizing of someone out of one's own free will(on men's part) bowing to love of his life giving her precedence over one's own respect of self.

I gave her another example. Their is a tradition of "Lucia" in Sweden, where a your girl having a candle throne goes from door to door in the winter mornings and imagine if a young boy is given an equal opportunity their will be a lot of people who may not be able to romanticize that with.

A Ugandan friend was telling about his tribe's tradition where they almost crawl on the land when they meet their parents, somewhat extreme form of Indian people touching their elder's feet. We have a tradition of giving our seat to a women purely as a sign of respect but when i did the same in Sweden the women felt offended.


I am thinking long after these discussions on how to put these two big concepts 'traditions' and 'gender equality' in one thought-place. I think at the end of the day as the winds of globalization is blowing more west to east, we eastern people will be coming at par with the basic levels of gender equality the west is enjoying and  which on the very basic level of existence we should have too, but at the same time we would be loosing the invisible flowers of our imagination blossoming in our minds which we identify ourselves with as a collateral damage...gender specific traditions being one of them.....

Dreams...

Aaah! the world of dreams... What a world... no body wants to come out it if inside, and no body allowed to enter once he wakes up no matter how hard he tries to stop the lights entering into the door of his eyes ....

So it is in this world where the first time i found my self talking to you, in a room ful of smoky noises and dancing shadows. I didnot remember who you were,where was I and how I happened to be talking to you...it was as if I was talking to you for ages, as if I was just born in that fixed setting for eternity... you were telling me about the yellow butterflies in garcia marquez's world and my eyes were lost dreaming those yellow butterflies in your eyes, and then you fell silent....your smile started getting gloomier second by second and then like a fast dying smell of a perfume you vanished....

We met several times after that,in dreams offcourse, like strangers, like buddies, like emotions talking to desires, like hope talking to loneliness, like a little girl talking to his father, like an age old musician talking to her instrument, like dancers whirling on the holy tunes..... each time the same face, the same gloomy smile and the dream ending abruptly ,with you vanishing like the top notes of a perfume, or smoke spreading in the vast skies..... these dreams ussually lasting few seconds but capturing most of my awaken time to the extent that i started living my real life dreaming of these dreams,awaiting just to be in it again...

And then you disapeared.. for a long time.... i tried my self to dream you, but couldn't, i tried all crazy things...sleeping with the lights open, putting alarms at unusual times,lying in bed for hours and hours until the body hurts.. but those dreams of you did not come....i was not able to dream you.... it was always street lights standing on empty streets, garbage papers flying on large parking lots, dense forests mornings with even denser silence....paper-faces talking rubish, but your face was not there... the face i was so used to off, the face i could recognize in millions....

And in this depression when I was about to loose hope in my world of dreams, when the other day, I saw you with open eyez sitting on a bus on the opposite side of the road, looking at me with the same gloomy smile and disapearing yet again with the yellow butterflies flying all around you....
I am still wondering if that was a dream or if i started dreaming with open eyes, or was it just a a personified hope playing pranks on me......