Not just women’s problem

I'm writing this on Women's day, but when you read it on March 16th, I shall be in Delhi catching up with old friends

Not just women's problem

I'm writing this on Women's day, but when you read it on March 16th, I shall be in Delhi catching up with old friends. And Delhi brings to my mind memories of some of the problems that women are facing today when they are wearing jeans.

In the early '90s, some drunken guy in Kotla Mubarakpur in Delhi said something nasty to one of the girls studying with my group. Now, one of the things that I have admired about Delhi is the chivalrous attitude and as one we barged out and had an argument with the drunkard. Fortunately for us, one of our gang was a Haryanvi with eyes that could reflect a firing squad when he was angry and he had an accent to match. After my Jat friend uttered a few words, the drunkard became a lot more sober and decided that it was not very safe to continue the argument.

The matter should have ended there, but a few days later, when I passed through the area to buy some tobacco for my pipe, I was confronted by one of the shop keepers who pointed a knife at me and innocently asked me if I liked it. Now, I was alone and quite scared I am no coward, but then again, a studious study of many Alistair MacLean books has taught me the difference between courage and suicide but fortunately I knew a bit of Hindi and could speak with a Jat accent.

I told him that if anything happened to me, my friends would avenge me and pointed out that I had contacts with people from a rather notorious college (just for the record, and to show that I hold no secrets from my readers, the college is 'Dyal Sangh' and how you pronounce the name makes all the difference) who would do nasty things to him and to Kotla that I cannot mention in an edit, the guy backed off.

When I meet women who have a feeling of helplessness when confronting certain types of uncouth men who preach culture without themselves having any, I empathise with them after all, in my own case, as a man, I needed to have some serious muscle power behind me to escape harm.

Some stories that my sister told me concerning some of her friends acted as an eye-opener for me. One of my sister's friends lives in the US and before her delivery, the doctors told her that she would have a girl and could she give the name for the girl child even before the delivery, please? This was because in the county in which that hospital was located they had a rule that the child's name had to be filled within one day. Something like this is illegal in India, which has so many girl-child-related abortions.

Now cut to Mumbai where my sister lives. One of her neighbours was unhappy because she had a baby girl twice in a row and just for the record, my brother-in-law is a director with a large international company, so his neighbourhood is definitely upmarket and wished she had a son.

Tell me, when so-called upper-middle-class people have such disdain for the girl child, can we blame a boorish drunk in Delhi for the way he treats women?