India is going through a wave of misery. The educated group of people are happy to boast about their degrees without spending enough time reading and gaining knowledge about any topic in detail. Of course, the situations are not like what they were before Independence. The development has paved its way with time as it should have been, however, the country seems to suffer from submissive progressiveness. We claim to be progressive, however, many actions by our countrymen make India look like memes to the rest of the World.
There’s a ubiquitous trend going around among the youth on various ‘isms’. Many of them claim to talk about Marxism but they have hardly read Marx. Che Guevara hangs on their walls as a symbol of idealism, however, they are not completely aware of his principles and struggles. Idealism has found its way to Facebook memes under sick scripted two liners. And certain women take advantage of other genders left, right and centre mentioning sexism. An old man addressing a younger woman in local terminology like ‘mamoni’ gets slammed and tagged as sexist. And about Feminism? Tell me who in India is not a Feminist? You will see them grabbing attention on different rallies, gatherings and other public places including social media handles and then getting back home and hitting his/her mother, wife/husband or sister/brother sometimes father. Not that women don’t do such things, just that the ratio is comparatively high amongst men.
To add on to the misery, our Universities have introduced subjects like Gender Studies in dire hope that the youth will learn to respect each other’s ideology and carry forward the lit torch towards a better India; however, students from the Department of Gender Studies also sometimes turn out to be huge misogynists. They take advantage of their subject of study and disgrace it by various acts of misogyny intimately towards their own family members, lovers (read slaves) spouse, sisters and so on. Better, you cannot call them misogynist, they have a degree under Gender studies after all.
Half of the feminists, irrespective of their gender, fail to respect and value others. All they understand is ‘I’. For them, the World starts and ends on them being Feminists and that’s it but they know not what kind of feminists they can categorize themselves under! Every second person alive is a feminist today, mostly self-proclaimed though, and they clearly preach about how they want to smash patriarchy but, at the end of the day, it’s them who practice patriarchy behind closed doors. Needless to mention, supporting an abuser and caressing him/her in the name of love is no less crime from abusing directly.
Feminist methods which involve investigation, scientific study and psychoanalytic study of the society at a regular interval to help it progress and cut out on patriarchy or matriarchy( practiced in some places) are hardly followed up by people in large numbers. However you have to accept them as Feminists and when they deliver a statement you cannot dare to counter it because they got degree. Also! These days I see such people putting up talk shows and seminars. There are ample examples of how this country is landing nowhere and but half baked feminists are dangerous. An engineer, a doctor, an artist, a teacher, a religious leader etc.- everyone wants to be a feminist but no one knows what exactly it is like to practice feminism day in and out.
So, with a heavy heart and a victim of this epidemic called- ‘half feminism’, I end my note hoping people will either take control over their romanticism for the term feminism or pick up this habit of reading more and talking less. There’s this urgent need to pay enough attention to details of feminism and practice it religiously in every given sphere that is, politically, economically and most important of all – logically even if it’s about being a radical feminist.