They say that women are the nurturers and the sustainers, the epitome of patience and endurance. Sometimes women themselves tend to forget that. Or perhaps, they are so preoccupied with striving for their liberation in this society that they negate their own identity in the process. We are all puppets in the hands of the almighty, but some of us, belonging to the so-called ?weaker gender?, think that god?s own child, man, is the one who regards us as mere playthings. The point I?m trying to make here is that we, the oppressed lot, are a slave of our own thoughts.

If women did not first give in to male dominance, and then, realizing their own folly, attempt to re-establish their importance in society, we would not be having things like Women?s Day in the first place. When I was in high school, we did a play for our school?s Rabindra Jayanti celebrations. It was an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore?s short story, ?Streer Patra?. Here, the central character, Mrinal, was the oppressed housewife of a very orthodox late-19th-century household.

Married off at the age of twelve, she felt suffocated in an alien setup, where everybody, including her husband, looked upon her as a commodity to be utilized in the most profitable way, like the cattle in their backyard. Yet their combined tyranny did not diffuse her indomitable spirit, and finally, when on a pilgrimage, she realized that she was much more than just a battered woman seeking justice in a hostile world. She did not need any worldly justice to redeem her ? she was already liberated with the realization that no grief could soil the inner beauty of her soul, for she finally started believing in herself and the strength she possessed to carry on, braving all odds. This was in an era way before the bra-burners came out of their closets.

What we have today is a self-conscious pseudo-feminism built on the insecurity that men are the masters in the social hierarchy and women have to be on a par with them, if not outdo them. It is as if men have set a standard, and we have to keep up with it. If we are so bent upon acknowledging their superiority, then why contest their position? In a bid for being equal with men in all respects, we are compromising on our own identities. If in the name of protecting our rights and dignities, we resort to sloganeering and empty rhetoric, we are indeed painting a very sorry picture of ourselves, and our race.

Mrinal was seeking her true self, not as a woman, but as a human being. That was perhaps because she had the intelligence to recognize that she was first a human being, and then a woman. Many of us still sleepwalk through life, always complaining that we are never given our due. What we fail to see is that we are deliberately constricting ourselves to the structured paradigms passed on by our legacy or acquired through experience. If we are wronged by an individual we perceive it as an inherent trait in the entire community. Men like Rammohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar did not give us back our rights as women as an act of charity ? they acknowledged our identities as fellow human beings and hence, strove to hand us back our self-respect.

Why don?t we leave aside the gender issue for a while and ponder some basic questions? Why are we seeking freedom, and from what? Do we need a specific date in the calendar to celebrate our femininity? Isn?t every day a woman?s day? Lets not murder whatever is left of our humanity by indulging in such self-pity. Let us, instead, celebrate every single day as a triumph of our souls in this endless struggle called life.