What you saying, woman????

“I think the purdah system should be abolished”!!!. Oh dear! There goes the dodo.

I wasn’t really too excited by the prospect of Pratibha Patil being made first citizen of my country because of some instincts which were inexplicable to me then. She just had to open her mouth and make some noise for me to dawn upon the realization that my instincts had already unobtrusively comprehended the irrepressible truth- that there were no brains behind all the big talk.

Her first public utterance after being chosen by the U-Pratibha-Alliance as the nominee for the post of the president was audaciously characteristic of self flattery- one that seemed to hail the decision of the ruling party coalition of having chosen her. What cheek! And then you go as far as asking age old traditional customs to be abolished in a night’s hours.

I confess that I have a proclivity of siding with the conservatives generally. Disregarding that too, in the pure spirit of enquiry, I wish to ask what essentially is wrong with the purdah system? In countries like England and America, it has, of course, come to be identified with a suspiciously-eyed, even hated, community- the Islamists. So much is the attention even the Sikhs attract, as much as does every brown man or a black man. I, for one, trust human ingenuity enough to believe that it can identify a south asian or an east asian, for example, rather comfortably, even without a burkha or a pagdi or a kimono. We are different races of people all over the globe and all races have physical charachteristics typical of them. Thereby, even as the question of the burkha or the pagdi being prospectively banned in England sounds perverse to me; the suggestion of my probable president, Pratibha ji is something I simply I cannot digest.

The purdah is a tradition that has not harmed any woman till date. I fail to see what this lady is trying to arrive at.

She calls her nomination a big step for the women in the country. I am not too sure too many women think so. I, for one, don’t.

Let's play

The guardian quick crossword, appearing 6 days a week in the Hindu, has been one of my favourite spaces in the newspaper. Unlike the Sunday crossword, I do not end up developing a ‘I – know- nothing’ complex after solving the crossword. Quite often I end up filling in all the white boxes (albeit many a time wrongly) and what follows is a sense of complete elation at having beat the crossword at its own game.

The crossword is after all one impish gamer.It dodges you and you chase it. And when you think the chase is almost over and there's just one clue left to decode, it throws at you a googly. Try which way, you can solve that clue only by stepping into the shoes of the troublemaker. Take for example, the clue that reads: ‘old sphinx (6)’. You have just one letter of the word from a cross word (s_ _ _ _ _). You break you head, search up all your neurons, still finding nothing you decide to make use of technology (yes! After long moments of debating whether or not to give the final credit of solving the crossword puzzle to the artificial world, you decide in its favour) and wiki arrives! But alas, wiki doesn’t give you any synonym for the sphinx.

You google and you arrive at no results either. What in the world was the sphinx called earlier and why in the world does wiki not know that, and If wiki doesn’t know it, and nor does google, then how in the world do they expect someone to decrypt the clue? A mania of sorts grips you and an obsession to outbeat the crossword. And that’s just where it ends. The crossword has won.

The next day you inquisitively pick up the paper and turn first to the second page of metroplus ( and without first having a look at calvin and hobbes), frantically look for the answer that dodged you all of the previous day. ‘sphinx’. You read and you re-read aghast. You are angry. And then suddenly you are amused. Of course! The old sphinx was never called anything else. It was always the sphinx. Wiki knew the answer after all. And so did you all this while. But the crossword won because it played while you competed. There’s a fine line between the two but what makes all the difference is which side you choose.