Traditions… Gender…. Equality

Last week we had good discussions on gender equality and how it affects traditions and at the end I was thinking we both were talking about two different sides of the same coin. She was talking more about fighting for one’s rights and I was more of romanticizing the imaginition-practices one associate himself with, and though everything is fair in love and war but that doesn’t mean love and war are the same things.

She was insistent that women should be given even opportunities, and in sweden still most of the C-level and management level positions are held by men.

I was of the veiw that although women should be given equal opportunities, but their is a fine line between giving opportunities and enjoying traditions out of ones own free will. I told her about my mother’s grandmother side of the tradition where women donot call their husbands by their names in the public (as a sign of respect; and i leave it to our imagination how these older generations used to call their husbands in private) and though this thing is dying and my own siblings are not following it but still alot of people romanticize about it. Their was also a tradition of calling the the wedded girl “bride” even after years and years of marriage and my mother used to laugh about the incivility of my father’s family side of traditions; she got married to a punjabi family where on the second day the bride is called a “budhi” (an old one) .

courtesy:Wikipedia

On the other side the example of man kneeling on his toes when proposing to a woman may be taken as an example of gender inequality but on the other hand i being a non-westerner finding it very romanticizing of someone out of one’s own free will(on men’s part) bowing to love of his life giving her precedence over one’s own respect of self.

I gave her another example. Their is a tradition of “Lucia” in Sweden, where a your girl having a candle throne goes from door to door in the winter mornings and imagine if a young boy is given an equal opportunity their will be a lot of people who may not be able to romanticize that with.

A Ugandan friend was telling about his tribe’s tradition where they almost crawl on the land when they meet their parents, somewhat extreme form of Indian people touching their elder’s feet. We have a tradition of giving our seat to a women purely as a sign of respect but when i did the same in Sweden the women felt offended.

I am thinking long after these discussions on how to put these two big concepts ‘traditions’ and ‘gender equality’ in one thought-place. I think at the end of the day as the winds of globalization is blowing more west to east, we eastern people will be coming at par with the basic levels of gender equality the west is enjoying and  which on the very basic level of existence we should have too, but at the same time we would be loosing the invisible flowers of our imagination blossoming in our minds which we identify ourselves with as a collateral damage…gender specific traditions being one of them…..