Women and their day!

Yes you are right. I am talking about Women's day! Well, you see International women's day came and went; not that it altered anything in my life, but the day, the associated events did give rise to enough thoughts in my mind to feel compelled to come back to my blog :)

My friends (and foes) often call me a 'feminist'; sometimes as a rebuke, sometimes as a criticism and rarely as a compliment. Earlier, I used to oppose vehemently to this, as generally I am opposed to this idea of getting tagged with any particular "ism", but these days I let it be. I know whatever I say or do wont really change their thoughts or their interpretation(as if anybody is interested to interpret) of my thoughts. So I am sure nobody will be surprised by my blog topic! :-)

Well coming to the point, I am hugely averse to the idea of "women's day". It makes me feel I belong to a "endangered species" to say the least. I mean, if we are almost(if not completely) same as our men folk, then why we need to celebrate specially my gender? Well, they don’t have a 'men's day" for that matter and they don’t seem to mind that very much either! Or is it some way of rubbing it in that the rest 364 days are actually men's days? The answer eludes me, but if you get the answer, do share!

Now my critics tell me that we also celebrate mother's day, father's day and so on and so forth, then what is wrong in a woman's day. But is celebrating a relationship, an emotion same as celebrating one's gender? I leave the question open ended here. There is also another argument that this day signifies the struggles of the 'less privileged' women! I thought even less privileged men face the similar struggles! Then a "less privileged day" would make better sense, wont it?



May be its only fair to give a chance to the companies selling women's products to get a fair chance to push-off their products in the garb of "women's day special sale", but then why pretend of other altruistic philosophies of "celebration for women's economic, political and social achievements"! well..I did not know that achievements can be so generic! Or is it so rare to get a woman achevier that it is something out of the world!

Well, whatever the reason behind it, we do celebrate the International Women's Day. And how we do it! For those of us who work, we were pink sarees (or some other colour for that matter) on that day,(dress up exactly the way men want us to be- the typical baby doll!), cut a cake, play games during office hours and in general make a fool of ourselves? Why? What are we celebrating like this? the generaic status of belonging to the female sex? Reportedly some of the companies even have "fashion shows" and " best dressed woman" contest on that day? Are these activities linked to economic, political and social achievements in any way??? Escapes my sense of logic but yes let me agree that I am may be bit "illogical".

The very fact that we have a woman's day, where I am made to sit through completely unimportant people giving incoherent,irrelevant and chauvinistic speech is a reminder for me that yes, may be still today we are kind of endangered, may be we are not really human, but belong to a separate species! How I dread the woman's day or may be the corporate way of celebrating woman's day every year, which atleast for me brings back the similar routine lunacy almost everytime!