Are you a girl?

That’s my 4-year-old daughter asking me one morning. It was not a silly question. It provoked me to think deep.

I was sweeping my front yard that day. It is usually my wife or mother who does this, while I would be reading the newspaper. It is not that I don’t know sweeping. I just choose not to do it. If I remember right, the last time I swept the front yard was when I was a kid playfully helping my grandmother. It was her daily routine then. My mother started doing and now my wife does it.

My wife fell sick and I was forced to share the workload of my ageing mother. There I started sweeping and the little one got up in the morning seeing me on the job instead of her grandma or mother. “Are you a girl?”, she asked and started smiling.

I have not seen my father or grandfather sweeping the front yard. I think I know only one person who has been sweeping for years, not letting her wife do it.

Who should sweep, that is not the subject here. We should know that we all have grown up with such gender discrimination ingrained in ourselves. Just think of the gender that comes to your mind when you imagine a driver, pilot, doctor, minister, judge, president, teacher, nurse, receptionist, maid. Our minds are conditioned to think like that. It is not a cause of concern. But we should be aware that our minds are conditioned. We should be mindful of such notions in our thinking.

When the Malayalam movie “The Great Indian Kitchen” was a talking point, I had asked a few married men and women about the film. Surprisingly, almost all from Kerala, irrespective of gender, did not find anything special in the movie. They could not see gender discrimination in the movie. Few women even felt the leading lady a bit odd, not doing what every other woman in Kerala does in their ordinary life. The world outside Kerala was celebrating the movie as a pathbreaking Indian Cinema. The movie was not any more a Malayalam movie, an Indian movie.

The other day, my colleague came back to the office after recovering from COVID. His wife, three small kids and mother all fell sick and recovered. He had tiring days taking care of the family which his wife was managing every day on top of her work. He was appreciating his wife!

A woman’s life is not easy in Kerala or India. Womaning in India, by Mahima Vashisht explores this at great length. I am reminded of a scene in the Malayalam movie “Salt n' Pepper”. The boy asks the girl why she is holding books to her chest and starts wondering why his mother did not tell him to hold books like that!

Woman makes their daily living being fully aware of their gender and its limitations, every moment. Men like me are so privileged that we do not even think of our gender.

Why do we count the number of rape victims and not the perpetrators? As a society, we need to be aware of gender discrimination deep inside our thoughts and deeds. As a male, we may attempt to make the social life of females better. Can we not lift the seat of a unisex toilet before urinating? Can we not wash our own plates? Just be mindful of women in all our deeds! All of us can make a woman’s life better.