The Tales Pensieve

All of my growing up years the first sounds that I heard everyday had been my mother urging me to get my sorry back (or stomach, depending on whichever side I slept on) out of the bed and the first sight unchangeably over the years as I would walk into the kitchen had been her back, bending over the gas stove getting breakfast ready, to feed the family where she would again have to endure the tantrums over breakfast choices of her drama loving creations. Most of the days invariably, we siblings would be stepping out into the school bus with her now patented dialogue playing in the background, “If I had to do this much work else where with this devotion, they would atleast be paying me a good salary with a handsome Diwali bonus too.”

Looks like the salary part has been heard and is being taken seriously by The Ministry of Women and Child Development in India.Union Women and Child Development minister, Krishna Tirath has come up with the idea that husbands should be paying a part of their salaries to their wives as salary for the housekeeping drudgery that they go through everyday without a weekend, a weekly off or any kind of festival offs. While the idea strongly smells of women empowerment and is in-line with what feminists have been demanding for decades, it also reeks of dual sidedness and impracticality.

It will be a very liberating move to 74% of women in the country who are not officially part of the workforce of the country (Info:datapult.info). These women get into a full-fledged housekeeping role after their marriage, if not before, and continue well into the last days of their life. The irony is that these women cook, wash, clean, do the dishes, raise the kids, tend to the elders in the house and every other miscellaneous work associated with running the household eventually falls on them but the financial equation is completely skewed. The money in the household only passes through their hands for domestic usages ranging from grocery to medicines, children’s tuition fees to the milkman’s charges but it is never for their use. A sari or a piece of jewellery comes to them when requested for or sometimes, if they are lucky, as surprises or gifts. Many of these women are also tormented by the fact that 14 million men in the country are chronic ‘dependent drinkers’ (Info: lancet.com) and they end up spending their earnings on their addiction rather then dispensing their responsibilities as the bread earner of the house. A move such as this one will help these women atleast run the house decently alongside giving them some financial power and stability. This can especially be a very favorable step for those amongst these women who have estranged husbands, are widows or have been isolated by their children in their old age, after all ‘It always helps to have your hand under your own pillow’, that one is yet another gem from my mother’s dialogue collection.

While it may sound all bright and sunny as minister Krishna Tirath wants to empower women by implementation of this bill, the very empowerment is missing in the move. What the government plans to do is evaluate the worth of all the chores that a homemaker performs in the house against the market value of those chores i.e. how much will the husband have to shell out if he gets someone (read: a maid/ servant) to do those jobs in his house. This very equating is derogatory and in the very least ‘empowering’. The woman of the house is being equated to the bai of the house. You can’t really expect the status or standing of women to rise on the affirmative with that and we are not even considering what the violent streaked, manic husband types would go up to. After all they are paying for it; it will be a freeway. And also coming along would a social change in the mother-offspring relationships. I can imagine the changed conversations of the neighbour and her brat:

‘Why do I have to eat this salad? I don’t want it.’

‘Eat because I tell you to, I am your mother and I made it for you. Eat.’

‘No I won’t, anyways you were paid for it no, Mama? Why crib that you made it for ME.’

Can image Manu prajapati, the mythological first man on earth who set our social rules and customs, cringing somewhere out there.

There is a third angle to this too. The continuously growing breed of working women, currently poised at 26% of the total population (Info: datapult.info), what about them? The proposed policy remains ominously mum on them. An Indian women may bring in all the moolah she wants, sometimes even more than the male in the family but when she is back home, she cannot plop herself on the couch in front of the TV cribbing about work stress and a paining back. Even if a maid does come in to help (who is again becoming a pain to find and even painful to retain) the woman of the house has to cook, wash, clean, raise the kids (apart from bearing them) before and after office hours. It’s the viscous circle all over again, a double one for the working folk. Will a workingwoman get part of her husband’s package for keeping his (and her) house running?

Now while we are on it, not to be unfair to my male counterparts, there is also a fourth angle, if you will. What about the husbands who take time off their cricket and/or football matches and help in the household chores and also the growing breed of househusbands (apparently Indian men stay at home quite willingly [Info: sitagita.com])? Changing social needs are parenting new patterns and ‘policies’, no issues there, but shouldn’t the government cater considering the changes in all the ‘angles’ of the dynamics?

What do you have to say on Minister Krishna Tirath’s this reform measure? Share your stand with me; waiting for a new angle too, if you have one or a couple more.